The School of Public Health - Essay Example

Other studies also corroborate this finding. Psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann, PhD, Jessica Moise-Titus, PhD, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, M.A., and Leonard D. Eron, PhD, of the University of Michigan, undertook a 15-year longitudinal study that concluded that childhood exposure to media violence prompts aggressive behaviour later in life. The investigation was launched as a follow-up of a 1977 longitudinal study of 557 children aged between 6-10 in the Chicago area. The study was published in Developmental Psychology, the American Psychological Association (APA) journal.

In that study, the children had listed the violent shows they watched most and were questioned whether they identified with the aggressive characters portrayed in those shows. Fifteen years later, 329 respondents were asked about the television programs they watched as adults. Some of their close associates were also requested to cite any instances of aggressive behaviour displayed by the respondents. Conclusions were reached by computing any traffic violation citations or criminal records the respondents had accrued over the years.

The results showed that men and women exposed to very violent television programs at a young age were involved in more incidents of domestic violence and physical abuse than others. The study offers suggestions to help reduce and control children's violence on television. {Huesmann, Moise-Titus, Podolski, and Eron}Poor school performance study conducted by the School of Public Health, which appeared in the journal Ambulatory Pediatrics a few years ago, found that children with easy access to a television spent more than three hours each day viewing it or playing games on it.

The study focused on more than 1000 sixth and seventh graders from Boston schools. Of the respondents, 54 per cent had television sets in their rooms, while the parents of 42 per cent did not curtail their television-watching time. Meanwhile, they spent less than 90 minutes on homework or other school-related reading. {Wiecha, Sobol, Peterson, Gortmaker}Another project conducted by Barbara A. Dennison, M.D. of the Research Institute, Bassett Healthcare, Cooperstown, N.Y., along with her colleagues, sought to reduce television/video watching by preschool children.

The program suggested reading and family interaction as alternatives to watching children. An article about this study states, "before the intervention, the intervention and control groups watched 11.9 and 14.0 hours of television/videos per week, respectively. Afterwards, children in the intervention program reduced their television/video viewing by 3.1 hours per week, and children in the control group increased their viewing by 1.6 hours per week. The percentage of children watching television/videos more than two hours per day decreased from 33 per cent to 18 per cent in the intervention group compared with an increase of 41 per cent to 47 per cent in the control group" {Bassett Healthcare}.

Television viewing has been proposed to cause weight gain through three main effects: by displacing physical activity, by depressing metabolic rate while watching television, or by adverse effects on diet quality, either while watching tv or at other times, primarily due to food advertisements. In an article on obesity in children caused by watching television, David Ludwig and Steven Gortmaker place the blame not only on the sedentary lifestyle encouraged by television viewing but also on the various advertisements targeting children constantly bombarded at them when watching their favourite programs. They talk about a study in which about 1000 individuals in New Zealand were observed for 26 years, beginning at birth. The study concluded that television viewing during childhood was independently associated with lower levels of fitness, high cholesterol levels and more risk of obesity. {Ludwig, Gortmaker} These various studies give credibility to the theory that excessive television viewing by adolescents causes different long-term problems.