| Gerbner's cultivation hypothesis predicts that television viewing fosters a 'mean world view." Implicit in this hypothesis is the notion that the specific content of television programs is not as important as the underlying ideological message contained in most, if not 4 television programming. In the past, tests of the relationship between television and perceptions of crime have utilized measures of either total television viewing or amount of viewing in a particular genre of television, such as crime drama or crime news. The present study will explore an alternative hypothesis -- that specific content of programming is related to public perceptions of crime. We do this by analyzing the relationship between watching particular programs and several dependent variables, including fear of crime, crime risk and perception of the crime problem. Telephone surveys of 1,460 randomly chosen respondents in a state capital are used to assess the view habits of individuals and their perceptions about crime during the fall of 1995. Models of fear, risk and perceptions of the crime problem, controlling for age, gender, race, income and other control variables, are used to isolate the effects of program viewing. |
Updated 05/20/2006