Problem: Demonstrate your understanding of how to identify and evaluate arguments
Study Links Homicide with TV Use
5 Seattle (AP)-Television viewing "is a factor" in about half of the 20,000 homicides and many other violent crimes that occur each year in the United States, according to a psychiatrist who studied statistical links between homicides and the rise in television ownership. The study, published Tuesday in the April issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, is billed by the University of Washington as the first study ever to look at the statistical relationships between exposure to television and acts of violence for the entire country. The study by Dr. Brandon Centerwall, a member of the psychiatry faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine, also indicates that as many as half of other violent crimes-including rapes and assaultsare related to exposure to television. "Television is a factor in approximately 10,000 homicides each year in the United States," Centerwall told a news conference Tuesday. "While television clearly is not the sole cause of violence in our society, and there are many other contributing factors, hypothetically if television did not exist there would be 10,000 fewer homicides a year." To arrive at this conclusion, Centerwall studied the white population of South Africa, where television was not introduced until 1975. Using statistics from 1945 to 1974, he compared homicide rates among South African whites to the rates among U.S. whites and the entire Canadian population. He found that homicides remained roughly flat in South Africa before television was introduced. In the United States and Canada, however, homicide rates doubled within 20 years after the widespread introduction of television, Centerwall said. It took Centerwall seven years to complete his study. Centerwall said he hypothesized that if television ownership is followed by an increase in violence, then those populations that had television earlier should have had an earlier increase in violence. He tested his theory by comparing the change in homicide rates among white and minority populations in the United States. According to Centerwall, televisions were widespread in American white households about five years before they appeared in minority homes. Accordingly, homicide rates among minorities rose four years after the rates went up among whites, he said. Centerwall said regions of the United States that had widespread television before the rest of the country also saw earlier increases in homicide rates. "There is a strong relationship between when a region acquired television and when its homicide rates went up," he said. According to Centerwall, the homicide rates among South African whites in 1983-the last year for which statistics were available-were 56 percent higher than in 1974-the year before the introduction of 10. Five Ways in Which Causal Reasoning Might Fail 251 television, indicating a trend similar to what occurred in the United States after the introduction of television. In addition to the fact that South Africa did not introduce television until as late as the mid-1970s, it was an appropriate country to choose for the study because it is a prosperous, industrialized Western country similar in many respects to the United States, Centerwall said. He limited his study to South African whites because South African blacks and other minorities live under very different conditions. Centerwall said he found there was a lag of 10 to 15 years between the time television was introduced in the United States and the rapid increase in homicide rates. He explained that other studies have determined that children are most likely to be strongly influenced by television. Homicide, however, is generally an adult crime, so the initial "television generation" would have had to age 10 to 15 years before it would have been old enough to affect the homicide rate, he said.