Abstract
Introduction: Films continue to be a popular form of entertainment amongst children and adolescents. The objective of this study was to determine the most common themes depicted in a select number of rated-R films released 2012-2017.Methods: A total of 25 films were independently viewed and analyzed by five reviewers.Results: The most common positive themes were “encouragement”, “helping others”, “teamwork”, “compassion”, and “honesty” (2.3, 1.7, 1.7, 1.6, 1.4 mean events per hour, respectively). The most common negative themes were “use of inappropriate language”, “use of a lethal weapon”, “physical fighting”, “dishonesty”, and “demonstrating excessive anger” (8.9, 4.4, 3.4, 2.3, 2.2 mean events per hour, respectively).Conclusion: The most common positive themes in our sample were associated with service, collaboration, and honesty/humility, and the most common negative themes were associated with violence. We encourage co-viewing and active mediation, focusing on the themes found in films, as a method to guide children through their development process.
Highlights
Films continue to be a popular form of entertainment amongst children and adolescents
We examined the positive and negative themes depicted in a select number of rated-R films released between 2012 and 2017
Based on our sample of rated-R films released between 2012 and 2017, we demonstrate that there were twice as many negative themes than positive themes depicted
Summary
Films continue to be a popular form of entertainment amongst children and adolescents. Films represent a popular form of entertainment amongst children and adolescents. Over the last several years, there has been a significant rise in media consumption in the pediatric population, in the realm of television and film. Given the considerable amount of time children dedicate to media consumption, there are strong opinions that television and film play a pivotal role in a child’s psychosocial development, both positively and negatively. Published studies have shown that the content of visual media may promote positive thoughts and behaviors, such as sharing, improved social interactions, racial attitudes, cooperation and empathy [3]. Several studies show that media violence exposure may lead to the development of deleterious behaviors such as aggression, bullying, antisocial attitudes and other forms of violence [4,5,6]
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