4
Analyses by Greenberg (1980) and by Potter and Vaughan (1997) span almost
two decades, use similar methods, and provide further support for the stable presence of
violence on television over time. These analyses also reveal that the inclusion of verbal
aggression, defined as diminishing or hurtful statements, in the study of television content
consistently more than doubles the rate of occurrence. When physical and verbal
aggression are measured, the amount of violence in most types of programs is quite
similar, including situation comedies.
Recent data have been gathered in the late 1990s to study violence in cable and
broadcast programming via the National Television Violence Study, led by a team of
researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara (National Television
Violence Study, 1996, 1997,1998). The definition of violence they employed was “any
overt depiction of a credible threat of physical force or the actual use of such force
intended to physically harm an animated being or group of beings” (National Television
Violence Study, 1998, p. 20). The researchers recorded over 10,000 hours of
programming, examining the frequency of violent incidents (those that included a
perpetrator, act, and target) per scene (defined as connected incidents) and per program.
They applied the social scientific research findings concerning the effects of viewing
violence on television to determine which characteristics of violent depictions to record.
They found that television content contains a substantial number of portrayals of violence
that might encourage negative outcomes. These include violence with infrequent or
unrealistic consequences, justification for violence, the presence of rewards, appealing
characters (e.g., “good guys”) as perpetrators, humor that makes light of violence, and the
use of weapons. They also found that cable, particularly the movie channels, contains
Convention