Messages against violence are making their way onto television in the form of public-service announcements (PSAs). But do they work?

According to Jane Brown, professor of journalism and mass communication, these well-intended spots are drowning in a sea of violent messages. Brown, along with Journalism Professor Frank Biocca, and several graduate students and colleagues from other departments, recently finished the first year’s work on the National Television Violence Study, initiated by the National Cable Television Association. The three-year study involves research teams from the Universities of California, Texas, and Wisconsin as well as North Carolina. The four teams are each looking at a different aspect of the way violence is portrayed in the media.

The study was born of the same political pressure that recently created a television ratings system and put the V-chip, an electronic device installed in a television set that blocks out selected programming, into play.

“We have these two taps,” Biocca says. “Imagine that you want to get a mix, and one way is to increase the number of anti-violence messages. The other way is to decrease the number of violent messages.”

The glamorization of violence that has come under fire lately, Biocca says, is peculiar to American popular culture.

The UNC researchers concentrated on the effect of anti-violence PSAs and educational programming on adolescents and young adultsa group of junior high school students, college students, and teenage boys in a state-run training school for young men adjudicated for felonies. What they found was that anti-violence PSAs, when run in the midst of violent program ming, behaved like “a drop of blue dye in a sea of red,” Brown says. The anti-violence messages the PSAs were sending were often vague, and they didn’t appear enough to overcome the influence of the programming into which they were interspersed.

Celebrity endorsements of anti-violence themes worked only if the celebrities were known for their anti-violent behavior and teachings; otherwise, Brown and Biocca say, adolescents viewed the celebrities as hypocritical.

“If the celebrity had participated in violence,” Brown says, “even as an actor, or as a sports figure, or who sang about it in their songs, typically, the kids thought that was not fair and didn’t believe the message.” The celebrity spokesperson who made the biggest positive impact was Chuck D, a rap musician who regularly endorses nonviolence in his music.

Brown and Biocca say many of the PSAs endorsed a violence-is-bad viewpoint that most audience members agreed with already without offering specific examples of nonviolent, alternative behaviors. The most effective PSAs were those which showed young people in a violent situation and then “rewound,” to replay the skit demonstrating a nonviolent way to handle the conflict.

Ultimately, Brown says, the PSAs should deglamorize violence by awarding status to the non-violent participant in the conflict. But in the PSAs they saw in the study, Brown says, the nonviolent characters came off looking weaker than the violent characters.

Researchers will continue the study for the next two years, working with a UNC-CH video production class to develop prototypes of more-effective PSAs.

Crafting the Message

Students, teachers, and professionals team up to do PSAs that speak to kids.

Findings from Carolina research in the National Television Violence Study have already made their way into the class room and into the hot lights of a student video production team.

The research group teamed up with students from an undergraduate video production course to finance work on model public service announcements (PSAs) to be used in the second year of the National Television Violence Study. The project branches wide, encompassing student actors from Chapel Hill High School, graduate students to assist the crew, professional videographers to supervise the shooting, and top-of-the-line cameras loaned from pharmaceutical company Glaxo Wellcome.

A student who knew of the class happened to mention it to Brown, who was looking for a way to slightly change existing PSAs for future testing. At the beginning of the spring semester Brown approached Richard Simpson, professor of journalism and mass communication, who teaches a course called “Corporate Video,” and requested the help of his students in creating a new video instead.

The course, team-taught by Simpson and Bruce Curran, professional videographer and a public information manager at Glaxo Wellcome, challenges students to create PSAs for “real” clients who finance the production and expect a finished, professional-looking product.

The students take the PSA from the beginning to the end of production, leaving only the final polish to a professional production house. “They come into class at the beginning of the semester saying, ‘Oh, a thirty-second PSA, we’ll whip that out in two weeks,’” Simpson says. “Then they start seeing how involved it gets.”

The anti-violence PSA project, manned by undergraduates Kristi Daughtridge, Jennifer Barber, Matt Kryder, and Amy Reavis, proved more complicated than other classmates’ projects. In addition to the shooting-day complications of noisy chain saws and sudden downpours, the students had to create several versions of the same PSA.

“We wanted to show four principal outcomes,” says graduate student Greg Makris, a member of the research team who helped the crew on shooting days. “Death of the victim, death or injury to the perpetrator, death of an innocent bystander, and a peaceful solution, where the perpetrator walks away.” With several different endings, he says, the team can test audience reactions to several different content elements in the PSA.

The finished product will be used by the research team in the second year of the study. Since current findings show that attitudes toward violence tend to have solidified by the late teens, this year’s test audiences will be slightly younger than those used in the first-year study, the average age being eleven or twelve. Audience members will fill out a questionnaire describing their own exposure to violence and may be grouped for testing according to their answers.

Brown says she is pleased with the way the project involved different branches of the University community. Reavis, one of the four undergraduate crew members, agrees. “Everybody had different kinds of experience,” she says, “I’d never been involved with the whole process.” She discovered, during this project, just how much work goes into a piece before the cameras roll.