ABSTRACT
Disregarding for the moment the specifics and the details of these studies, what these and similar MPP results convincingly show is that media use has effects and consequences for children which may stretch over years, probably decades. We also see how such effects and consequences come about in spiralling uses-and-effects chains of interaction between individual characteristics (aggressiveness, restlessness, etc.) and media use (media preferences, amount of viewing, type of content viewed), in a way which is in agreement with a number of other studies in the area, and especially, perhaps, with the so-called reciprocal cognitive models summarized, for instance, in Linz and Donnerstein (1989) and implemented, for instance, in a large, relatively recent international comparative study (see Eron and Huesmann 1987; Huesmann and Eron 1986). They are not in agreement, however, with results arrived at within the same comparative study as interpreted by Wiegman et al. (1992). Nor are they in agreement with a recent meta analysis of gender differences in the effects of television violence (Paik 1992), which surprisingly found no or only small gender differences. There will always be deviant results, of course. Sometimes such results will result in new and unexpected insights, sometimes they may be explained in terms of specific circumstances (as cleverly done, for instance, by Turner et al. (1986) with respect to the otherwise deviant results presented by Milawsky et al. (1982)).
