You Don't Have to Get Hit to Get Hurt: Social Aggression on Television and Its Relationship to Children's Aggression in the Classroom
Martins, Nicole
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/87543
Description
Title
You Don't Have to Get Hit to Get Hurt: Social Aggression on Television and Its Relationship to Children's Aggression in the Classroom
Author(s)
Martins, Nicole
Issue Date
2008
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Wilson, Barbara J.
Department of Study
Speech Communication
Discipline
Speech Communication
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Education, Sociology of
Language
eng
Abstract
The purpose of the present dissertation was to examine the amount and nature of social aggression in programs popular with children and to assess whether exposure to socially aggressive content was related to similar behaviors in children. Two studies were conducted to comprehensively explore this phenomenon. The first study consisted of a systematic content analysis of the 50 most popular programs among 2- to 11-year-old children. The results revealed that a full 92% of the programs in the sample contained some social aggression. The findings also suggest that some of the ways in which social aggression is contextualized make these depictions particularly problematic for young viewers. The second study consisted of a survey with over 500 children that investigated whether exposure to socially aggressive content was related to children's use of social aggression. The results of the survey revealed a significant relationship between exposure to televised social aggression and increased social aggression in school, but only for girls and not for boys. Although this relationship was dependent on the sex of the child, the study is the first to provide evidence that viewing social aggression on television is related to an increased tendency for elementary school children to perpetrate such behaviors in the classroom. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
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