| | TV, violence study gets second viewing | Isabel Teotonio
Life Writer | Do children turn violent because they watch a lot of TV? Or are the kids who watch a lot of TV already prone to violence because of other factors in their lives?Experts on statistics and psychology say there's more than meets the eye to a study published last month that suggested teenagers who watch more than an hour of TV a day are more violent later in life. News reports suggested TV was to blame for the violent behaviour. "It has nothing to do with TV — it has to do with lifestyle," University of Toronto psychologist Jonathan Freedman told the Washington Post when the study came out. "People who watch more than three hours of TV (a day) are different than those who watch less than an hour."The numbers that made headlines showed the risk of aggressive behaviour increasing five-fold for 14-year-olds who watched three hours or more of TV a day, compared with those who watched less than an hour.Among those teens, just 5.7 per cent were involved in aggressive acts — threats, assaults, fights, robbery, using weapons to commit crimes — by the ages of 16 to 22. For those who watched one to three hours daily, the rate jumped to 22.5 per cent; it leaped to 28.8 per cent for those watching three hours or more.But experts say that after factoring in other variables — things like childhood neglect, family income, neighbourhood violence, parental education and psychiatric disorder — what you see isn't what you get.Nancy Reid, chair of the department of statistics at the University of Toronto, argues it's not statistically correct to blame TV for the 28.8 per cent of violent acts by those who watched three hours or more a day."What they found was that one-quarter of their 14-year-olds who watched a lot of TV had been in a fight," said Reid. "But you couldn't say it was because they were watching TV that they'd been in a fight. Not at all. That's just one of a whole bunch of explanations."Once you adjust the odds ratio and factor in other variables, the five-fold increase in violence reported gets smaller, Reid said. "I hate to use the statistician's cop-out, but I think it needs a lot more study."The authors of the report in the journal Science included a disclaimer, cautioning that "a strong inference of causality cannot be made without conducting a controlled experiment" and that they couldn't rule out the possibility that other factors were responsible for the association between violence and TV viewing.The disclaimer tended to get left out of the media coverage, however.The study showed a correlation, not a cause, said Andrew Grenville, senior vice-president of Ipsos-Reid. But the media "ran off with something that's more fantastic than what's actually reported in the article.""There does appear to be some relationship" between TV watching and violence, he said, "but as they caution, this relationship may not be the real issue and there may be other factors they didn't include in their model which are really behind it."
`We'd like to explain why people are aggressive and the real reasons, which have to do with innate personality, bad upbringing, poverty and racial discrimination, are very hard to deal with'
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The study involved 707 people in upstate New York who were interviewed periodically over a 17-year period about TV habits, violence and aggression. The first interviews with the subjects and their parents took place in 1983, when the children's average age was 14. They were interviewed again at 16, 22 and 30, and researchers also looked at state and FBI records to see if any of the now adult subjects had been arrested or charged with a crime.Patricia Cohen, the principal researcher and a professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at Columbia University, said it's impossible to figure out why TV can adversely affect some and not others. "It's like asking why isn't everybody who's poor sick or why doesn't everybody who's obese have diabetes."I think the key message is that it may well be dangerous to our society to have unlimited access to TV."But Irwin Silverman, professor of psychology emeritus at York University, says that's a cop-out. "It's a popular viewpoint, but it solves nothing. It's like looking for your keys under the tree because there's more light there even though they didn't land there," he said."Everybody's very science oriented and everybody's keen on behavioural sciences because they seem to be making breakthroughs, so people will believe what they read and they'll just read the headline. It's not fair to science and it's not fair to the society.... "Parents who tend to take these studies seriously usually have good instincts about their kids and should trust their intuition over alarmist hype, he said.Freedman, the U of T psychologist, says the notion that television, no matter what you watch, is going to make you aggressive "logically makes no sense."It's the case of a failed society desperately seeking a scapegoat instead of dealing with social ills, he said."We'd like to explain why people are aggressive and the real reasons, which have to do with innate personality, bad upbringing, poverty and racial discrimination, are very hard to deal with. So the media's a good whipping boy or scapegoat."It is alarming that too many children are parked in front of the idiot box, he said, but he's convinced TV won't turn good kids bad.Freedman, who's given testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Task Force on Youth Violence, notesthere's been a deluge of violent imagery in TV, movies, video games and music over the last decade, but levels of violent crime have dropped to pre-television levels. That's cold comfort to Arlette Lefebvre, however. In her 27 years as a child psychiatrist at the Hospital for Sick Children, she says she's seen the level of violence in children grow at an alarming rate, and she says the media is partly to blame.There were angry youth long before TV transmissions, but the evolution of violent imagery in programs and its desensitizing effect on young viewers has been crippling, she argues."All I'm saying is parents need to watch with their kids," said Lefebvre. "I see so many parents who will spend hours dissecting cereals and the nutritional components of snacks, but when you think of the video image diet that kids are watching, parents are much less aware."
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