Researching Media

New research indicates that many parents believe media ratings help them make decisions about what type of content they allow their children to be exposed to, but improvements in media rating systems are needed.

The research, involving the opinions of more than 2,300 adults, also indicates that there is sometimes disagreement on matters involving age appropriateness for various kinds of content. What some might deem appropriate for one specific childhood age group might be considered inappropriate by other adults. Many parents believe that current rating systems are inaccurate and need to be improved.

A majority of parents surveyed felt there should be a universal rating system for all media, including web sites, music CDs, and games played on handheld devices.

Current rating systems vary widely among movies, television, and video games and can be confusing, according to analysis of three surveys.

The researchers also mention ratings creep, meaning that ratings over time tend to become more lenient. They cite another previous study of 2,000 films and found that one that was rated PG-13 in 2003 included about the same amount of violence, nudity, and offensive language as one rated R a decade earlier.

Parents were asked views on the age appropriateness of allowing kids to see such things as romantic kissing, partial nudity, implied sexual situations, depictions of drug and alcohol use, and to hear offensive language or insults about body parts.

They also were asked about when kids of various ages should be allowed to be exposed to situations of sexual innuendo and suggestive sexual dialogue. Opinions varied widely. The largest percentage of parents indicated age 17 and older might be appropriate for media involving sexual situations, explicit sex, explicit dialogue, partial nudity, and commercials with sexual content.

Researchers reached a number of key conclusions. For example:

• Parents want detailed content ratings along with age-based ratings.
• Ratings only are effective if they can help parents make decisions, but current systems vary and can be confusing
• Different demographics variables, such as church attendance and personal values, may be related to perceptions of age appropriateness for different kinds of content.
•  It would be impossible to have age-based ratings that would be deemed suitable by all demographic groups; content-based ratings may be preferable to age-based ratings.

Clearly defined and available content descriptors provide the most information and they allow parents to make their own decisions about age appropriateness, the researchers write.

The research is published in the July issue of Pediatrics.

Researchers claim that the main protagonists of Hollywood movies often undermine accident prevention advice given to children.

Half the scenes examined in movies aimed at children showed unsafe practices including not wearing seat belts, breaking the green cross code and failing to wear helmets on bikes.

The mistakes could give children a false sense of safety they claim which could lead to bad habits and encourage dangerous activity.

Dr Jon Eric Tongren, the lead researcher at America's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the industry was improving but had a long way to go: The entertainment industry has improved the depiction of selected safety practices and PG-rated movies. However, approximately one half of scenes depict unsafe practices and the consequences of these behaviours are rarely shown.

Dr Tongren picked out two examples to highlight the problem.

In the 2003 Christmas movie Elf, the main character played by actor Will Ferrell gets knocked down by a New York City taxi while crossing the street. He bounces back up without a scratch – which Dr Tongren said gave a false view of what happens.

And in the 2005 comedy Yours, Mine and Ours, about a family with 18 kids, the children are wearing life jackets during a boat trip — but not the parents played by Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo.

The two films were among 67 popular movies from 2003 to 2007 examined in the study including Harry Potter. From those movies, the researchers found 958 scenes involving potential injury-prevention practices. 55% of the scenes involved children. Twenty-two scenes involved either a fall or a crash, but just three of those scenes resulted in an injury

The study, published in the journal, Paediatrics, found 44% of people in motor vehicles failed to wear seat belts; 65% of pedestrians did not cross at zebra crossings, 75% of cyclists failed to wear a helmet and 25% of boaters failed to wear life vests.

According to a new study published in the November journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, sex does not sell mainstream cinema.

Crunching data from 914 films released between 2001 and 2005, researchers Dean Keith Simonton from the University of California, Davis, and independent Vancouver-based researcher Anemone Cerridwen discovered sex and nudity have a negligible impact on the box office.

If anything, too much hard-core action could actually hurt a film's performance. On average, the less sex and nudity, the higher the gross. The more sex and nudity, the lower the gross — by approximately 31%.

All in all, it appears that sex may neither sell nor impress. This null effect might suggest most cinematic sex is in fact gratuitous, write the authors.

It is manifest that anyone who argues that sex sells or impresses must be put on notice. At present, no filmmaker should introduce such content under the assumption that it guarantees a big box office, earns critical acclaim, or wins movie awards. On the contrary, other forms of strong film content appear far more potent, either commercially or aesthetically.

Using box-office, critical response and MPAA ratings as core data, the researchers concluded that current assumptions about the marketing power of nudity and physical objectification are not only impossible to back up empirically, they may also suggest an inherent sexism in the film industry that needs to be addressed.

Initially, I assumed that more sex would equal higher box office, since everyone said 'sex sells' and I believed them, says Cerridwen, who first started her investigation a decade ago after taking acting classes.

When I first saw the averages, I was really surprised, and mad, too. I felt like I'd been had. Things came up in most of the classes that made me feel very uncomfortable (unwanted touching, sexualized content). Then I looked at the kinds of roles available for women, and that made me even more uncomfortable. So basically, I couldn't act, even if I could, because of the roles I would be expected to play, she says.

From there, Cerridwen started crunching numbers, and the initial results seemed counter-intuitive. While we might remember films with strong sexual content, especially if they did well financially, most films with ample sexual content perform worse than films with little or no sexual content. The results were even worse for films containing sexualized violence.

Citing Ang Lee's Lust, Caution — the Oscar winner's 2007 feature about a psychologically and sexually sadistic affair during the Second World War — the authors suggest Lee could have cut several minutes of graphic sexual content to earn a more commercial Restricted, or MPAA rating, instead of the audience-limiting NC-17 designation.

Having analyzed the data and lived with it for the past decade, Cerridwen wonders why sex remains such an important part of most scripts. It makes you wonder why it's there at all, she says: I think it reflects and reinforces sexism in society, in general. Even if the performer genuinely doesn't mind having to do this stuff as a condition of employment, it creates a hostile environment for the rest of us: other women on camera, behind the camera, in acting classes, plus women, in general.

This article is published in Roger Dickinson, Ramaswani Harindranath & Olga Linné's, Approaches to Audiences – A Reader, published by Arnold (1998)

The article provides an overview and restatement of what I was trying to say in Moving Experiences. The book examines all of the studies in detail, and generally concludes that the research has failed to show that the media has any kind of direct or predictable effects on people.

This essay takes a slightly different approach, setting out ten reasons why 'effects research' as we have seen it so far seems to be fundamentally flawed and is often surprisingly poor.

This leads to a slightly different (implicit) conclusion, that media influences are something that we still know very little about, because the research hasn't been very good or imaginative... and so, therefore, it's still an open question.

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