The Connection Between School Shootings and Media Coverage of Violence

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The Connection Between School Shootings and Media Coverage of Violence

Table of Contents

Introduction
Discussion
Research Questions
Methods
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in media coverage of violent crimes and events all over the world. At the same time, the number of school shootings grew, which raised questions about whether the reporting of violent crimes may have pushed teenagers to commit them in real life. The possible connection between school shootings and media coverage of violence was the main topic of this research paper.

Discussion

As the urge to cover brutalities in the media grew, the projected findings of this research were expected to show a proportional increase in the number of school shootings. The evidence to support or refute this stance was gathered from a survey conducted among parents of teenagers aged 14-18 who studied at school since this age group is mostly involved in school shootings. The scope of the research covered 60 parents who agreed to take part in the survey. Coding was used to define certain trends and determine whether they served to support or oppose the project hypothesis. In this research, violence was defined as actions that were specifically committed to cause harm to a person or group of people with the aim of securing control or power. Despite the fact that there were a number of significant social media sites to take into consideration, I mostly concentrated on video news programs that provided a detailed description of the events and created a powerful visual impact. Therefore, the research was built on parents analysis of their childrens perception of news that contained elements of violence and served to find out whether the content they saw had a negative impact on their psyche.

Research Questions

After watching reporting on violent crimes in the news, do teenagers feel more troubled?
Is there a correlation between the increased exposure of teenagers to violent news and their propensity to violence?
Does emotional coverage of a criminals hard life or childhood in the news make teenagers sympathize with him or her?
Does extensive coverage of school shootings make some teenagers regard the perpetrators of these crimes as role models whom they want to copy in real life?

Methods

Coding was a key technique in this research. With code, I was able to rewrite lengthy portions into shorter, more manageable content so that links in my qualitative study were more clearly and effectively made. I anticipated detecting certain trends in my primary analysis such as violence, stress, distress, heroization of violence, resemblance, and a way out. Coding assisted me in making a clearer visual representation of the data gathered for this project. The broad sets of data served as codes, and my later-defined observations about those codes served as categories of codes. To measure my results, I looked at how many codes fitted in each category and thus could make a conclusion bout which category was a predominant one. Another method I used was conducting a survey. My survey comprised several questions that aimed to establish a link between the violence in TV news and the violence in life, and, more narrowly, in the school environment. Since the target group was parents of school children, the survey was conducted as an anonymous poll at school premises with the permission of school authorities. Moreover, I had to form my questions in such a way as not to make respondents deny any fascination with violence their children may have had. Since parents, as a rule, want to depict their children better than they are, the questions had no obvious answers that looked good or bad, but, rather, provided neutral answer options that did not cause any negative connotations. Such structure of a questionnaire allowed me to overcome any bias the parents may have had in answering questions about their childrens possible propensity to violence.

Conclusion

The research design was a quantitative study aimed to define how many teenagers parents who took part in the survey gave preference to this or that code category. From this, I was able to make conclusions on how much violence in the news influenced teenagerss perceptions and to what extent it served to form their attitudes toward aggressive behavior.

References

Muschert, G. W. (2019). Afterword: The Columbine effect on culture, policy, and me. Journal of contemporary criminal justice, 35(3), 357-372. Web.

Schildkraut, J. (2019). A call to the media to change reporting practices for the coverage of mass shootings. Wash. UJL & Poly, 60, 273. Web.

Silva, J. R., & Greene-Colozzi, E. A. (2019). Fame-seeking mass shooters in America: Severity, characteristics, and media coverage. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 48, 24-35. Web.

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