This study was a conceptual replication of Drabman and Thomas (1974), in which third- and fourth-grade children who viewed an aggressive film took longer to seek adult help when preschool children they were watching became increasingly hostile towards each other than did children in a no-film condition. Whereas the Drabman and Thomas studies used only an informed experimenter, this attempted replication used an experimenter blind to the subjects' treatment condition to record latency measures to fetch the experimenter. In addition to latency measures, television viewing for one week, parental discipline practices, and teacher and peer ratings of subjects' aggression were obtained for 112 third, fourth, and fifth graders from a university laboratory school. None of these measures nor the aggressive versus nonaggressive film manipulation were reliably related to latency. The 18-minute aggressive film condition used in this study may not have been a strong enough treatment manipulation to replicate the Drabman and Thomas findings of thirteen years previously, because of an increase in the typical child's exposure to extreme violence in movies and television programming that is prevalent in today's culture. Consistent with the literature supporting a causal relationship between aggression and viewing of mass media violence, this study found significant relationships between aggression and television viewing habits. A positive relationship between teachers' ratings of children's hitting other children and hours viewing television in one week was found for females. A negative relationship for females was found for both teachers' ratings of assertiveness and teachers' ratings of verbal aggressiveness ('insults others') with television viewing habits, including total hours watched in one week and amount of violence viewed. For males, increased frequency of implementation of discipline by parents was significantly related to teachers' ratings of aggression. Implications of these findings were discussed / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_25005 |
| Date | January 1987 |
| Contributors | Woodfield, Deborah L (Author), O'Neal, Edgar C (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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