Music Videos Foster Youths' Aggression

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Dec, 1998

Portrayals of violence in popular music videos could distort adolescents' expectations about conflict resolution, race, and male-female relationships, according to a study by researchers at Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass. They trained adolescents and young adult students of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds to view and analyze 518 music videos from the four most popular national music video networks. The students watched them over a four-week period, at selected times of high adolescent viewership. Seventy-six of the videos (more than 15%) contained portrayals of individuals engaging in overt interpersonal violence, with a mean of about six violent acts per violence-containing video. An attractive role model, usually the video's main character, was depicted as the aggressor in more than 80% of the violent acts.

The study's authors examined the differences in the sexes and races portrayed as aggressors and victims in acts of violence. Males and females were shown as victims with equivalent frequency, but males were more than three times as likely to be aggressors. White females most frequently were victims. Compared with their representation in the U.S. population, blacks were overrepresented as both aggressors and victims in the videos that contained violence.

The researchers concluded that music videos may be reinforcing and perpetuating stereotypes of aggressive black males and victimized white females, raising concern for the effect of these videos on adolescents' expectations about relationships, conflict resolution, violence, and the race and sex of its perpetrators and victims. "While the entertainment media have the constitutional right to portray whatever they choose, we as a society have an obligation to decide which approaches to human relationships and life choices we want to teach our children," maintains Michael Rich, the principal author of the study.