I'm supposed to be getting on with some proper work - a commissioned study of the research evidence about impacts of media education - but took time out today to go to an RSA lunchtime lecture by Richard Layard, co-author of the report A Good Childhood (see my previous two blogs, and yes, I know this makes me look obsessed, but it is leading somewhere, I think). There's a weird disparity in this report between its good sense about poverty and school league tables, and its seemingly wilful irresponsibility in selecting dubious evidence to support its virulent attacks on the media - mainly TV, which is a quaintly old-fashioned target these days but there you go, it's a quaintly old-fashioned report in some ways (not all of them bad ways, either).
I forked out my £9.99 contribution to the coffers of the C of E and bought the report (as instructed by the Children's Society's Supporter Action Officer, one Raymond Williams (no! not that one!) with whom I have been corresponding recently, and for whom I am apparently designated a Supporter, though on what grounds I know not). An inspection of the index quickly revealed TV as the most-mentioned medium in the report, with references to advertising, materialism and, ownership (that means kids with TVs in their bedrooms, not global institutions, do try to keep up), 'reality television', time spent watching, and violence. You get the picture. Despite Raymond's protests that the report "is in no way denouncing all media for children" it's hard not to get the impression that TV comes off pretty badly - and apart from three references to video games, there are no other references to ANY media for children: no books, no theatre, no music, no art, no films - it would seem that none of these have a part to play in "a good childhood".
But what really fascinated me was the extensive space given to Juliet Schor's "major study" of the effects of consumerism (although the notes do not say so, I assume this means Born to Buy, Scribner 2004) which apparently states that "a child who moves up one percentile point in the ladder of media use will move up 0.12 points in the ladder of mental ill health". Imagine the kind of research that must have been done to prove that! I must hurry up and read it before my position on the ladder of media use tips me over into paranoid schizophrenia - or maybe I'm already there? Hmm, scary stuff!
Lord Layard admitted under questioning that maybe this research was not entirely reliable (and he's an economist, so must know a thing or two himself about consumerism and mental health) but he was at least able to assure me that the case is now closed on the effects research about TV and violence. There is now absolutely no doubt at all, he says, that "exposure to violent images encourages aggressive behaviour". He admits that all the research they looked at on this came from the US, but airily dismissed my protest that this meant it came from a country with a very different TV culture, not to mention rather different laws on gun control and a far higher level of violence than the UK - saying that "all countries are the same really". He must have been to different bits of Asia and Latin America than me, then. But there's an even more peculiar comment in the notes to this allegation, which first cite Andrea Millwood Hargarve's and Sonia Livingstone's review of the evidence on Harm and Offence (Intellect Press 2006), the Lancet paper from 2005 and his own book on Happiness (Penguin 2005) and then add: "all methods have their problems but the cumulative evidence is clear".
Well that's a relief then! We needn't worry about research which is consistently at fault methodologically, and which despite enormous expenditure over many years has always failed to come up with convincing causal links between violent TV and violent behaviour (and indeed to explain why the rest of us TV watchers are not also out there killing people) because the sheer cumulative "lesson" of all that effort means the "violent TV makes you violent" thesis must have been right all along really. No wonder economists are not having a very good press these days if that's the kind of scientific enquiry they feel able to accept!
Now I'm not even a scientist or even a proper academic researcher, so call me naive if you must, but if I was faced with a load of research that kept turning up inconclusve evidence, I'd be tempted to wonder whether it might be asking the wrong sort of questions. I'd wonder whether "violence" mightn't be a rather fuzzy and subjective category to try and single out as a source of causal effects. Given that this is all about violence in the context of narratives, I'd be interested (if I really did want to study media effects) in looking at people's responses to the different functions of violence within narratives: for example, does the story present it as the problem, or as the solution to the problem? I started to try and suggest this to the noble Lord, but I could see his eyes glaze over and a polite but rigid smile start to be deployed, so I slipped quietly away. After all, I'm not an economist, nor a developmental psychologist like his co-author Judy Dunn, so what do I know?
Pondering on all this later, I thought I could see parallels with some of the research I'm reviewing at the moment. Looking for evidence about learning outcomes in relation to moving image media, I've found quite a lot of interesting and suggestive fragments buried in the vast tonnage of research that's going on in relation to ICT and "digital technologies". Many good folk are looking for evidence about how digital technologies are affecting children's learning. Some of it's perfectly sensible and interesting stuff, but every now and then you get references to "digital video" that wonderingly note the remarkable effectiveness of this particular technology in securing learner interest and motivation, and speculate wildly about why this might be. Here I tend to put my old git hat on and say "well, kids do like watching films, and making them too". But the digital technology researchers are paid to research digital technology, not the texts that digital technologies can carry or help you to create. So they have to find a technological answer, not a cultural or textual one. Like the tv violence effects researchers, they'll go on banging their heads against the wall, behind which lies real life, and its histories.
The really interesting questions though (and about time too, I hear you cry) are: whose interests are served by continuing to fund futile research? Why does Lord Layard so passionately want to believe that the TV violence effects debate is settled and done with? Why does so much more money go into research on children and technologies, and so little into children's cultural experiences?
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