Examining the Association between Exposure to Violent Media and Aggressive Political Opinions in the Israeli Context

Abstract

Recent evidence demonstrates that exposure to violent TV has an influence on youngsters’ Aggressive Political Opinions (APO; Eyal, Metzger, Lingsweiler, Mahood, & Yao, 2006). While these findings point to an important influence of violent media on politics, the only study so far in this domain was limited to the USA context. The present study provides a replication in a significantly different cultural context: Israel. Most importantly, Israeli culture is more militaristic than most Western cultures, and a substantial portion of Israelis serve in the military. Findings indicate that exposure to violent TV is associated with APO among young Israelis.

Keywords:

• Aggressive Political Opinions
• Televised Violence

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Keren Eyal for her comments as thesis reviewer.

Notes

Note. Table entries are unstandardized regression coefficients (numbers in parentheses are standard errors).

^# p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Note. *Reverse coded items.

For any respondent with missing values in one or more of the APO items, the APO score was computed as the mean of valid answers on the other items.

For any respondent with missing values in one or more of the aggressiveness items, the aggressiveness score was computed as the mean of valid answers on the other items.

While the use of single item measures was heavily criticized by some (Loo, 2002), recent research points out that their validity is not necessarily inferior to that of multiple–items measures (Bergkvist & Rossiter, 2007). To calculate single-item reliability for the political leaning item, we used the recommendation of Wanous and Hudy (2001) and used the communality of the item with two items related to the right-left political axis in Israel (“It is OK to bomb terrorist bases outside Israel even if civilians in the area may be hurt” and “all residents of the villages that serve as base for terrorist activities should be expelled”).