By Brian Carnell

Monday, April 1, 2002

Researcher Jeffrey Johnson created a stir after his study claiming to show a link between adolescent television watching and aggressive behavior later in life was published in Science.

Johnson followed 700 children for 14 years and found that of children who watched less than an hour of television per day, only 5.7 percent later committed aggressive acts. MEanwhile 22.5 % of those who watched 1-3 hours of television committed aggressive acts later in life, and 28.5% of those who watched more than three hours of television a day later committed aggressive acts.

According to Johnson,

Our findings suggest that, at least during early adolescence, responsible parents should avoid permitting their children watch more than one hour of television a day.

Unfortunately, the result of his study are hardly that straightforward. A major problem with the study is that so few of the children in his study watched less than one hour of television each day. In fact, out of the 700 children in Johnson's study, only 88 watched television for less than one our each day.

As Guy Cumberbatch of the Communications Research Group told The BBC,

How many families do you know where children watch this amount or less? These are highly unusual families -- the kind who are more likely to be taking their children to art galleries and museums. And there are so few of them compared to the rest of the children studied. This is a case of torturing the data to make it fit a theory.

Chris Boyatzis, associate professor of psychology at Bucknell Universtiy, echoed this noting that it may be that parents of children who watch little television are more educated and spend more time interacting with their children than the parents of children who watch a lot of television.

Sources:

TV violence link disputed. The BBC, March 29, 2002.

Researchers split over TV, violence ties. CBC News, March 29, 2002.

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