Charlton et al. (2000) Children’s Playground Behaviour Across Five Years of Broadcast Television: A Naturalistic Study in a Remote Community

Topic 6—Criminal Psychology

Charlton et al. (2000) Children’s Playground Behaviour Across Five Years of Broadcast Television: A Naturalistic Study in a Remote Community

Aims:

• To investigate the effects of television on children’s behaviour.
• The researchers were particularly interested to see whether television would cause the children to become more aggressive.

Procedure:

• The study was a natural experiment because the researchers did not directly manipulate the independent variable—the introduction of television.
• The dependent variable was the behaviour of the children before & after television was introduced.
• This was measured in terms of prosocial & antisocial acts that were displayed in the playground.
• The researchers went to the island in 1994 & recorded the behaviour of children 4 months before satellite television was introduced.
• They set up video cameras in two primary schools to observe the playground behaviour of the children, aged between 3 & 8 years old, over a 2 week period.
• The researcher recorded 256 minutes of children’s free play & used the Playground Behaviour Observation Schedule (PBOS) to code prosocial & antisocial acts.
• 5 years after television was introduced, the researchers returned to the island & they filmed similar-aged children at the primary schools once more.
• Over a 2-week period, the researchers gathered 344 minutes of footage that they coded using the same PBOS.
• The researchers also noted whether the act was displayed by a single girl/boy, pairs of girls/boys, groups of more than 3 girls/boys or mixed groupings.
• The researchers analysed the recordings using the PBOS & made a tally of the acts displayed by the children in 60 second intervals.
• They then averaged the…