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Violence, Meta-Analyses of
Generations of communication researchers have investigated the impact of violence portrayed by the mass media on media users' aggression, especially with regard to entertainment products. A vast number of empirical studies have been reported in communication, social and developmental psychology, and medical research. For decades, this research addressed the effects of television violence. As video games became extremely popular among children and adolescents, the focus shifted to include interactive entertainment. Because video games present graphic violence with high frequency, realism, and, most important, the opportunity for the users to participate in violent scenes, they have been examined as a potentially powerful facilitator of aggressive behavior in young people.
Overall, thousands of individual experiments, surveys, longitudinal studies, and other investigations address issues of media violence and its impact on aggression. It is virtually impossible to draw integrative conclusions from this overwhelming mass of findings. Therefore, experts in the field have presented meta-research that attempts to summarize the results of many single studies to draw the big picture. One approach is a literature review that discusses findings of different studies to draw conclusions about what the findings show. However, in the domain of video game violence, the available reviews disagree on the general impact of violent games. An alternative approach is meta-analysis, which is a computation procedure that calculates comparable statistical parameters reported from individual studies into average indicators of connections between variables. Metaanalysis is a powerful and extremely important tool to assess the impact of media violence on aggression.
The Technique of Meta-Analysis
In meta-analysis of media violence effects, information is collected from as many individual studies as possible; the analysis pays special attention to effect sizes, that is, statistical values that indicate the influence of media violence on aggression as found in a given study. Effect sizes can be computed in standardized ways and allow (within certain limitations) for comparability across different studies on the same topic. Technically, the statistical fusion of effect size data from different studies creates one huge data set in which all participants from the individual studies are combined. The meta-analytic procedure then reinvestigates the effect of media violence on aggression based on a virtual sample, typically comprising several thousand participants. Consequently, the results of the meta-analysis are much more substantial and valid than any individual study because the latter is limited to one specific (usually small) group of participants and one specific operationalization of media violence and of aggression.
Meta-Analytic Findings on the Effects of Television Violence
One of the most widely cited meta-analyses on the impact of television violence has been published by Paik and Comstock (1994). They included data from 217 relevant studies, both experimental and nonexperimental, conducted between 1957 and 1990. This analysis found a clear and robust effect of the consumption of violent TV programs on antisocial and aggressive behavior, with the effect magnitude depending on methodological aspects but not reaching zero in any subanalysis. Anderson and Bushman (2002) summarized their meta-analytic findings from 284 studies with more than 51,000 participants similarly: Regardless of the method applied and the empirical procedures of individual studies, correlations between TV violence consumption and aggression ranged between .10 and .30, with extremely low statistical probabilities of zero-correlations. These findings clearly indicate the causal connection between TV violence and aggression, and they suggest a considerable magnitude of effect, which definitely deserves a debate on political and educational countermeasures.
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- Contraceptive Advertising
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- Electronic Games, Gender and
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- Internet Use, Gender and
- Magazines, Adolescent Boys'
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- Schemas/Scripts, Gender
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- Sex, Internet Solicitation of
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- Sexual Information, Teen Magazines and
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- Media Education
- Adult Mediation Strategies
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- Educational Television, History of
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- Electronic Games, Positive Uses of
- Entertainment-Education in the United States
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- Language Learning, Television and
- Media Education Foundation
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- Body Image in Boys and Young Men
- Body Image in Children
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- Divided Attention, Parallel Processing and
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- Imagination, Effects of Television on
- Interactive Media
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- Mean World Syndrome
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- Media Effects
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- Media, Meanings of
- Natural Experiments, Impact on Community Activities
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- Obesity
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- Peer Groups, Impact of Media on
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- Bedrooms, Media Use in
- Child-Centered vs. Media-Centered Perspectives
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- Cognitive Development, Media and
- Depression, Media Use and
- Developmental Differences, Media and
- Divided Attention, Parallel Processing and
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- Gender, Media Use and
- Globalization, Media and
- Immigrants, Media Use by
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- Indigenous Media
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- Information Processing, Active vs. Passive Models of
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- Latin America, Media Use in
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- Media Effects
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- Parasocial Interaction
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- Physiological Arousal
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- Regulation, Radio
- Regulation, Television
- Relationship Marketing
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- Telecommunications Act of 1996
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- Violence, Experimental Studies of
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- Violence, Meta-Analyses of
- Violence, Natural Experiments and
- Television
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- Cigarette Use in Television and Movies
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- Language Learning, Television and
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- National Television Violence Study
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- Notel, Unitel, Multitel Study
- Profanity, Trends in
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- Reality TV
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- Sesame Workshop
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- Sex in Television, Incidence and Themes
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- Sitcoms
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- Sports Television
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- Talk Shows, Children and Adolescents
- Television morality and Identification with characters on
- Television Rating Systems
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- Television Violence
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- Television, Addiction to
- Television, Attention and
- Television, History of Children's Programs on
- Television, International Viewing Patterns and
- Television, moral messages on
- Television, Motivations for Viewing of
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- Television, Prosocial Content and
- Television, Viewer Age and
- TV-Turnoff Week
- V-Chip (Violence Chip)
- World Summits on Children and Television
- Theories
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- Child-Centered vs. Media-Centered Perspectives
- Cognitive Script Theory
- Cuing and Priming
- Cultivation Theory
- Desensitization Effects
- Displacement Effect
- Excitation-Transfer Theory
- Externalizing Behavior
- Forbidden Fruit Hypothesis
- Formal Features
- General Aggression Model (GAM)
- Information Processing, Active vs. Passive Models of
- Interactivity
- Intertextuality
- Mean World Syndrome
- Media Practice Model
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- Physiological Arousal
- Priming Theory
- Schema Theory
- Schemas/Scripts, Aggressive
- Schemas/Scripts, Gender
- Schemas/Scripts, Sexual
- Selective Exposure
- Selectivity
- Social Class
- Social Learning Theory/Social Cognitive Theory
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- Super-Peer Theory
- Third-Person Effect
- Uses and Gratifications Theory
- Violence and Aggression
- Adult Mediation of Violence Effects
- Aggression, Advertising and
- Aggression, Electronic Games and
- Aggression, Movies and
- Aggression, Music and
- Aggression, Music Videos and
- Aggression, Television and
- Cartoons, Violence in
- Desensitization Effects
- Electronic Games, Violence in
- Fear Reactions
- General Aggression Model (GAM)
- Hip Hop, Violence in
- Movies, Violence in
- Music, Impact of Violence in
- Schemas/Scripts, Aggressive
- Sexualized Violence
- Television Violence
- Television Violence, Susceptibility to
- UNESCO Violence Study
- V-Chip (Violence Chip)
- Violence, Desensitization Toward
- Violence, Effects of
- Violence, Experimental Studies of
- Violence, Extent of and Responses to
- Violence, Historical Trends and
- Violence, Industry Stance on
- Violence, Longitudinal Studies of
- Violence, Marketing and
- Violence, Meta-Analyses of
- Violence, Natural Experiments and
- World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)
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