Media and Risky Behaviors

From the journal The Future of Children, a collaboration of The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and The Brookings Institution, this article investigates the relationship between the fact that United States (US) youth are spending increasing amounts of time using electronic media and that they are engaging in five types of adolescent health risk behaviours identified by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) - obesity, smoking, drinking, sexual risk taking, and violence.

"[The authors] present and evaluate research findings on the influence of electronic media on these five risk behaviors among adolescents. Researchers, they say, have found modest evidence that media consumption contributes to the problem of obesity, modest to strong evidence that it contributes to drinking and smoking, and strong evidence that it contributes to violence." The document reviews studies of both television and film violence, which showed that both boys and girls who viewed television violence committed more aggression (physical, verbal, and indirect) during young adulthood, and video game violence, which is "less extensive than that on TV and film violence, but the findings are essentially the same. "Research has been insufficient to find links between heavy media exposure and early sexual initiation." The document concludes that media powerfully influence adolescent health-related behaviour.