Original article
The Public Health Risks of Media Violence: A Meta-Analytic Review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2008.11.033Get rights and content

Objective

To conduct a meta-analytic review of studies that examine the impact of violent media on aggressive behavior and to determine whether this effect could be explained through methodological problems inherent in this research field.

Study design

A detailed literature search identified peer-reviewed articles addressing media violence effects. Effect sizes were calculated for all studies. Effect sizes were adjusted for observed publication bias.

Results

Publication bias was a problem for studies of aggressive behavior, and methodological problems such as the use of poor aggression measures inflated effect size. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of media violence effects provided little support for the hypothesis that media violence is associated with higher aggression. The corrected overall effect size for all studies was r = .08.

Conclusions

Results from the current analysis do not support the conclusion that media violence leads to aggressive behavior. It cannot be concluded at this time that media violence presents a significant public health risk.

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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  • Cited by (0)

    The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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