Don't Blame Pop Culture For Teen Misbehavior

By Karen Sternheimer, AlterNet. Posted December 27, 2008.

Recently, researchers reported that most published studies find the media are "crucial" contributors to "negative health results for children." The study, not incidentally, was funded by Common Sense Media, a lobbying group whose mission statement declares that "media and entertainment profoundly impact the social, emotional, and physical development of our nation's children." Its researchers produced favorable results by downplaying a key fact: journal editors and reviewers notoriously favor studies that find significant results and rarely publish studies that find no effects.

A 2007 review in Aggression and Violent Behavior found that studies reporting negative effects from playing video games were far more likely to be published than equally good studies that didn't. Recognizing this problem, the New England Journal of Medicine is now seeking previously unpublished studies that failed to find significant effects. Even when published, studies that demonstrate no identifiable link between the media and problem youth behavior garner little media attention.

Even taken at face value, studies typically find only tiny percentages of teenagers are affected by media influences. For example, only a few dozen of the 1,500 teens surveyed in a widely publicized study watched the most sexually explicit TV shows and experienced a pregnancy. Just 30 of the 1,600 teens surveyed in another study reported both visiting violent websites and committing a seriously violent act. These tiny numbers -- around 2% of the teens studied -- form the basis of sweeping expert claims and alarming news headlines that internet sites, video games, and TV are instigating mass teenage misbehaviors.

Popular culture may often offend sensibilities, but in truth, it's not the central cause of social ills. It's time for science journal editors to implement more rigorous standards to rein in the flood of questionable survey studies whose sensational "findings" are diverting attention from truly significant problems. Poverty and family abuses, not steamy TV and violent rap music, are the best predictors of violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and unplanned pregnancy among youths.

Even as the recession and rising medical costs price health care out of reach for poorer and middle-class Americans, health researchers and medical journals publish more and more headline-grabbing "studies" blaming kids' media consumption for health crises.

President-elect Barack Obama's platform of change offers a tremendous opportunity for innovative health and crime policies focusing on real causes, rather than the easy politics of blaming teenagers and popular culture demons for the nation's social problems. "Turn off the TV," "put away the video games," and similar attacks on fictional entertainment images play well on the campaign stump, but real conditions like poverty, deficient health care, and family instability require our undivided attention if real change is the goal.

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Karen Sternheimer, Ph.D., is a sociologist at the University of Southern California and author of Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions about Today's Youth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and It's Not the Media: The Truth about Pop Culture's Influence on Children (Westview Press, 2003). She blogs at www.everydaysociologyblog.com.

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