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Abstract
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VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The purpose of this article by Baron and Reiss was to argue that imitation effects attributed to mass media events were statistical artifacts of the mortality data, the timing of media events, and the methods employed in past research.
METHODOLOGY:
This study was itself a quasi-experimental analysis of aggregate data from other quasi-experimental investigations purporting to show that mass media coverage of violent events caused imitative responses among the public. The authors utilized Phillips's (1983) investigation linking boxing to U.S. suicides, and Bollen and Phillips's (1982) work linking publicized news stories about prominent suicides to total U.S. suicides. Those earlier studies relied almost exclusively on time-series regression methods to explore linkage between media coverage of violent events and real-world respondent behavior. The authors noted that the researchers lacked a theory specifying how many days would transpire prior to media depicted violence inducing real-world violence, and this was accordingly prone to induce Type I errors (falsely rejecting the null hypothesis.) Thus, the authors have deduced that the use of more cautious and appropriate testing procedures would have yielded significantly less definitive conclusions about the effects of prize fights on homicides and would almost certainly have led to a rejection of the claim that television suicide stories cause suicides. To test their conclusions, the authors replicated the previous studies' data by enlarging and extending the set of eliciting stories examined in order to reassess the earlier findings. The authors applied stringent statistical manipulation of Phillips's data on relationships to prize fights and suicides, and concluded that the lacking overall replicability and generality criterion indicated a misspecification argument showing the earlier study was flawed due to a mistaken cause-effect relationship specification theory. The authors also noted that other researchers had extended Bollen and Phillips's analyses of imitative suicide by enlarging or extending the set of eliciting stories examined. However, those studies could not replicate the imitative effects. The authors themselves undertook new analyses aimed at generalizing the imitative hypothesis to a larger set of media events and they too conformed to the authors misspecification hypothesis.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
The authors found statistically significant evidence indicating that the imitative effects purported by Phillips lacked replicability and generality. Adopting the same specification as Phillips, none of the lag coefficients denoting imitative responses to prize fights were statistically significant. The authors concluded that the previous research examined issues that primarily reflected theoretical underdevelopment and was lacking in a comprehensive or credible account of how, where, when, and why mass media violence affects real-world imitation activity. The authors concluded that current formulations emphasizing imitation or suggestion provided little basis for identifying the aspects of media stimuli that affected behavior, the specific forms of behavior affected, or the social and psychological mechanisms by which imitation occurred.
AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS:
The authors reiterated that no credible theory of media-induced imitative violence exists. Thus, quasi-experimental studies of aggregate data invite ex-post reinterpretations of what such a theory might really expound. The authors noted their single intent of trying to show that researchers may have prematurely rejected the null hypothesis of no media effects. The authors concluded with a wholehearted concurrence with Bollen and Phillips that future research might focus on micro studies rather than macro analyses.
(CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
KW - Violence Causes
KW - Media Violence Effects
KW - Media Coverage
KW - Media Portrayal
KW - Sports Viewing-Related Violence
KW - Television News
KW - Television Violence
KW - Television Viewing
KW - Televised Sports
KW - Adult Violence |