Essay on Does Sex and Violence on Television Have a Negative Effect on Children?

Words: 2400
Pages: 10

Does sex and violence on television have negative effects on children?

The issue that I am addressing is the effect of sex and violence in the media on children. As long as there has been television, there has been an association made between media and violence – children who repeated what they saw on cartoons leading to their death, teenagers injured while emulating a popular movie, and mass killings blamed on video games. Primarily this relationship has been assumed to be causal with television being the assumed central cause in violent or risky behavior. Once you begin delving into the roots of violent and risky behavior, however, the association between modeled violence and expressed violence becomes less and less obvious.
Violence
…show more content…
Summary of a Research Study
The research study that I am summarizing is “Can public campaigns effectively change psychological determinants of safer sex? An evaluation of three Dutch campaigns” by M. C. Yzer, F. W. Siero, and B. P. Buunk.
The research was designed to establish the effectiveness of Dutch safe sex campaigns that were run between 1994 and 1996. There were several metrics being measured, “improved attitudes, perceived social norms, self-efficacy and intentions regarding safer sex (Yzer, Siero & Buunk, 1999)

The methodology of the study was to use a representative sample of the Dutch population and then ask them to answer electronic questionnaires where you could not advance through to the next question without answering previous questions in order to minimize missing data. Each participant was issued a unique PIN number in order to further identify the participants. There were also five waves of questionnaires, and an individual participant could be eligible for more than one of these waves, however, they could only participate in one wave. The PIN numbers were also used to ensure that there were no duplicate participants from wave to wave. These methods were also employed to exclude testing effects, history effects, cultural changes and sample differences as alternative explanations for the data collected. (Yzer, Siero &