Summary of Recommendations

Report of the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission, May 1992
Andrea Martinez
Republished with permission

In the fifteen years since the CRTC's Symposium on Television Violence, research findings have continued to accumulate which contradict, supplement and invalidate previous studies. The profusion of scientific articles, conferences, government and other reports, and the recommendations of various committees is in sharp contrast with the lack of a consensus about the results.

The controversy centres on the definition of television violence and the theories surrounding it, particularly their political and scientific incidences. Three constraints, or "grey areas", with respect to research into television violence have fueled the debate:

• methodological problems associated with the instruments used in measuring violence
  
  
• different interpretations of the results, centring on the nature and intensity of the link between television violence and aggressive or antisocial behaviour (is it associative, correlative, causal or is there no connection?) and the significance of the connection (if, in fact, television violence has negative consequences, are they short- or long-term and what is the impact on the individual and on society?)
  
  
• the process or factors that explain the effects of symbolic violence: instinctive/ genetic/ physiological/ cognitive/ emotional/ individual.

This report examines the status of scientific knowledge about television violence by taking into account each of these constraints. The findings have been grouped as (1) research about the perceptions, uses and gratifications associated with television violence and (2) research about aggressiveness and violent behaviour. 

View full report (PDF)

View full report (PDF)