JEMTEC

Research on the amount of violence in media consumed by children and teenagers is woefully out of date and incomplete. The presence of violent images in advertising seen by children has barely been studied, comprehensive research on TV violence is nearly two decades old, video game research hasn’t kept pace with current modes of gaming or tracked the content most consumed by youth, and studies of online exposure are nearly nonexistent. The research that has been done tends to use widely varying standards for counting “violence,” ranging from studies limited to physical acts of aggression to those that include verbal threats, insults, and even accidental violence. Studies documenting media content are expensive and time consuming to conduct, and for some media are difficult to design (for example, interactive games and online content). A lack of funding prevents much progress in filling the gaps in this research. Yet children and teens are consuming many hours of media content: an avera...