Citation
Nazari, Mohammad Reza
(2013)
Relationship between exposure, preferred genre and pacing of television program with primary school students' aggressive behavior in Iran.
Doctoral thesis, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Abstract
Children are among the population most at risk for experiencing violence. Children
also spend a great deal of their free time engaged in media consumption, much of
which includes increasingly violent content. Media violence has been a topic of both
public and scientific concern for over 50 years. There are literally hundreds of
studies that provide evidence that exposure to television violence leads to subsequent
physical aggression in viewers. However, the effects of television violence would
depend on the type of content viewed and the pace of programs viewed. In the past
few decades, a subset of research has focused on how the structural features of media
alter viewers' cognitive and emotional processes. Research has shown that how
message sensation value influences emotional responses and how the speed of pacing
in some children's programs has detrimental effects on their aggressive behavior;
therefore, pacing has been most actively investigated in related literature. In this
study, pacing is measured based on six essential criteria as suggested by the literature. In relation to this study, relatively little attention has been paid to
television program pacing on aggressive behavior among elementary students in Iran.
The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between television program
pacing and aggressive behavior in primary school students. Two phases were
conducted in this study to comprehensively explore this phenomenon. The first phase
consisted of a survey with 424 primary school students (aged 7-12 years) in the five
provinces of Iran which were selected through a multi-stage random sampling from
different geographical areas comprising of North, South, West, East and Central area
of Iran. This survey investigated whether exposure to television program was related
to children's use of media that explored using Buss - Perry standard questionnaire.
The results of the survey revealed a significant relationship between amount of
exposure to television program and aggressive behaviors among primary school
students (p<0.05). In addition, the students' aggression was positively associated
with watching movies with action adventure genre (p<0.05). According to the
findings obtained from the first phase of the study, a total of 22 programs were
selected as the most favorite children's TV programs which were assigned to a
technical content analysis known ,as pacing. The second phase of the present study
included a pacing index derived from the following criteria: (a) frequency of camera
cuts, (b) frequency of related scene changes, (c) frequency of unrelated scene
changes, (d) frequency of auditory changes, (e) percentage of active motion, (f)
percentage of active talking, and (g) percentage of active music. The findings of the
study showed that the highest pacing index was attributed to Pokemon (67.08), while
Fetileh ranked as the lowest pacing index program (23.86). The results also revealed
that TV program pacing scores were significantly and positively associated with
aggression level of primary school children (p<0.05). The results of this study suggested the need for further attention on children's television program production
to protect them from antisocial behaviors and interventions for violence-exposed
children in order to reduce negative outcomes. Finally, more research is needed to
focus on the relationships of pacing with dependent measures, such as violent
behaviors, learning process, social interaction, and problem solving.
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