June 1985
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2 Reads
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16 Citations
American Sociological Review
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Publications (2)
June 1985
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33 Reads
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92 Citations
American Sociological Review
In recent years, there have been numerous quasi-experimental studies of aggregate mortality data. These studies conclude that mass media portrayals of violence cause imitative responses among the public. This paper examines the logic of this research, arguing that it does not meet the special burdens of proof associated with quasi-experimental studies that use aggregate data to make inferences about individual behavior. We present detailed evidence suggesting that imitation effects attributed to mass media events (prize fights and television news stories about suicides) are statistical artifacts of the mortality data, the timing of media events, and the methods employed in past research. The concluding section discusses some implications of our analysis for future studies of imitative violence and for other areas of research.
Citations (2)
... One strategy has been to assess the impact of all suicide stories aggregated together on the suicide rate in the real world. This strategy has generally supported imitation theory (e.g., Diekstra et al. [1989]; see Stack [in press, 1989] or PhiUips [1989] for reviews; see Baron andReiss [1985a, 1985b] for a critique). A second stream of work has restricted suicide stories to subgroups of stories thought to be the most likely to promote identification among members of the audience and, therefore, imitative suicides (e.g., Wasserman, 1984;Stack, 1987). ...
- Citing Article
June 1985
American Sociological Review
... In a seminal paper, Bollen and Phillips (1982) combine U.S. daily suicide statistics and the Vanderbilt dataset of television news stories on ABC, CBS, and NBC to code all stories under the heading "suicide" broadcast between 1972 and 1976 and find evidence of a significant increase in suicides occurring on the first two days and on days 6 and 7 following broadcast. Baron and Reiss (1985) show that the evidence in Bollen and Phillips (1982) and related studies is not reliable because these lack a clean identification strategy (DellaVigna and La Ferrara, 2015). ...
- Citing Article
June 1985
American Sociological Review