Study: Less TV Makes Kids Less Aggressive

C H I C A G O, Jan. 14, 2001 -- A school-based program that discourages

television and video game use makes grade-school children less

aggressive, a Stanford University study suggests.

While previous research has linked exposure to media violencewith increased aggression, few potential solutions have beenevaluated, the authors said.

Their findings indicate "that the effects of televised violencein kids are really reversible," said Dr. Thomas Robinson, the leadauthor and an assistant professor of pediatrics.

The study, published in the January edition of the Archives ofPediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, involved third- andfourth-grade children at two comparable public elementary schoolsin San Jose, Calif.

At one school, 120 participants received no intervention andserved as a control group. At the other, 105 children received 18lessons, 30 to 50 minutes long, over six months on reducing the useof television, videotapes and video games. Researchers trainedregular classroom teachers, who led the program.

Challenged to Abstain from TV

Children initially reported the amount of TV, videos and videogames they watched. They were challenged to abstain for 10 days,and then to watch no more than seven hours a week.

The households involved had their televisions hooked up to a devicethat could prevent the set from being turned on if the childexceeded a limit that parents were encouraged to establish.

At the outset, the youngsters reported an average of about 15½hours of television viewing weekly — five hours of viewingvideotapes and three hours of playing video games.

That fell by about one-third by the end of the program, to anaverage of about nine hours of television viewing, 3½ hours ofvideotapes and more than and hour of video games. Content of the programs andgames kids watched was not assessed, though the authors assumedsome were violent.

Children were asked to rate their classmates' aggressiveness atthe beginning of the study, in September 1996, and at the end, thefollowing April, identifying such things as who started fights oroften said "give me that!"

Less Violence Reported

Peer reports of aggression were similar at the two schools atthe outset. By the study's end, there were about 25 percent fewersuch reports among participants at the intervention school comparedwith the control group, Robinson said.

Researchers also measured changes in verbal and physicalaggression by regularly observing the playground behavior ofsubgroups of about 50 participants at each school. At the end ofthe study, there were fewer observed incidents in the interventiongroup compared with the control group, he said.

The authors acknowledge limitations of their study, includingthat they only looked at two schools and didn't assess whetherthere was any violence in what kids watched.

But Dr. Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, a children's violenceexpert not involved in the study, said the findings are in linewith research suggesting overexposure to even nonviolent media canmake kids more aggressive.

That theory is plausible because children who watch lots of TVor video games may spend less time interacting with others and maythus have fewer social skills, said Christoffel, a professor ofpediatrics and preventive medicine at Northwestern University.

She praised the study for bolstering "the notion that there isa relationship between media exposure and childhood behavior andthat it is modifiable."

However, she questioned whether the decreases noted in the studyare lasting.

Robinson said he's testing the program's effects in a longer andlarger study, of about 900 students at 12 schools, that may answerwhether it results in long-term reductions in aggression.