living, thinking and writing
|
|
| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
|
|
Sunday, March 09, 2003 No-surprising research Finally, I could have something substantial , except Bobo doll and mean world symdrone to tell my COM242 (media effects) students in the summer. We've spent so much time talking about so much about how bad the TV violence has impact on children, but all of them are more than less just assumptions and hypothesis. Even the researchers of this study on Children-TV Violence Link claimed that the results are not surprising. That's the sadness about social science: the researchers spent 20 years to prove some self-evident proposition. Do we know that violent vision affects our moods and behavior? obviously. Do we know that kids ara imitating whatever they learn from TV? Of course. Do we know we learn about our values and beliefs from mass media? I guess. But the researchers still need 20 years to follow hundreds of viewers from their childhood to adulthood to reach this conclusion. Without the painstaking emperical research on human subjects, all common place can only be assumption of hypothesis, so there has to be some one to do this kind of none-surpricing research. The real question is what is going to change when the hypothesis is supported by emperical data? Does it make difference on the society then? If we are lucky, the policy maker will be more convinced to engaged on some grounded social change, but again, the mission skips from social science researchers. Maybe my conclusion is that social science researchers should be happy if they can point out or identify the social problem, and feeling lucky if someone pays attention to you. But even the pebble does not cause any ripple, don't take it personal-because most of them are not supposed to. posted by lmeimei @8:40 PM| permanent link| | |
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
