Original articleThe Public Health Risks of Media Violence: A Meta-Analytic Review
Section snippets
Study Selection and Categorization
PsycINFO was searched for all articles published between the years of 1998 and early 2008 that included the following search terms: (video* or computer or arcade or televise* or media or comic* or movie or music) and (attack or fight* or aggress* or violen*). The authors of one of the most recent meta-analysis of general media violence effects9 provided a reference to their included studies by personal communication, and this was examined for further studies. We also examined the reference
Descriptive Study Results
Of the independent observations included in this analysis, 12 (44%) were correlational in nature, 10 (37%) were experimental, and 5 (19%) were longitudinal. For age range, 16 studies (59%) were conducted with children, and the remaining 11 studies (41%) were conducted with adults.
For the type of medium examined, 15 studies (55%) looked at the effects of video games, whereas 7 studies (26%) examined television specifically, and the remaining 5 studies (19%) examined either movies alone or mixed
Discussion
This work calls into question the significance of media violence exposure as a public health concern. By the most liberal estimates available (r2 = .02 compared with r2 = .16 for smoking/lung cancer), the effects seen for smoking and lung cancer at are least 8-times stronger than for media violence exposure. By using the more conservative figures of r = .9 for smoking and lung cancer and r = .08 for media violence exposure, that number is closer to 135-times stronger. To put this in context for
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The authors declare no conflicts of interest.