Media Audiences by Sue Turnbull

Author:Sue Turnbull [Turnbull, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781137405111
Google: t8fgDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Red Globe Press
Published: 2020-05-01T04:23:13+00:00

A question of morality

For the moral campaigners of the 1920s who initiated the series of research projects known as the Payne Fund Studies, the representation of sexuality was a major concern, not to mention the potential dangers of congregation in the dark. Given the popularity of the movie theatres amongst young people, it was imagined that these images would also be having a profound effect on young people. As noted in Chapter 2, this inspired all kinds of inventive research methods to try and capture these potential effects, from psychogalvanic skin measures, to the collection of hundreds of individual biographies (Jowett et al., 1996, p. 81). While the Payne Fund Studies were by and large concerned with sexual matters, the other moral concern that would preoccupy media audience research from the 1960s onwards was the depiction of violence. Although this anxiety began with a concern about screen violence in film, it subsequently extended to television and video and thence to the home computer and the playing of video games. Echoing the use of psychogalvanic skin measures employed in the Payne Fund Studies, elaborate experiments were conducted by social psychologists in laboratory-type situations, often involving their own students, to test the kinds of effects that these games might produce. However, in a review of the audience research on ‘violent video games’ (conducted in 2010 for the Attorney General’s Department in Australia), the authors argue that many of these studies were problematic because they included ‘contested definitions and measures’ both of what is understood by the term ‘aggression’ as well as the category ‘violent video game’. For example, are sports games more or less violent and aggressive than games which feature fictional or real wars?

Another problem with this laboratory-type research was the fact that it often failed to consider in any depth other variables, including race, ethnicity, gender and other contextual factors. Indeed, as has been observed by many, there was a consistent bias in that the participants were often university students, who may not be typical of the game-playing population as a whole. Another issue had to do with the ways in which increased aggression may be measured using what are described as ‘proxies’ for aggressive behaviours – such as ‘noise blasts’, which are hardly indicative of how people might respond to frustrating incidents in real-life situations. The authors of this comprehensive survey therefore end with the kind of non-conclusive paragraph that is typical of attempts to review the literature on media effects:

Significant harmful effects from Violent Video Games (VVG) have not been persuasively proven or disproven. There is some consensus that VVGs may be harmful to certain populations, such as people with aggressive and psychotic personality traits. Overall most studies have consistently shown a small statistical effect of VVG exposure on aggressive behaviour, but there are problems with these findings that reduce their policy relevance. Overall, as illustrated in this review, research into the effects of VVGs on aggression is contested and inconclusive.

(Attorney General’s Department, 2010, p. 42)

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