Patricia Edgar & Don Edgar

Children and Screen Violence.  Queensland University press 1977

Reviewed in The media and Communications in Australia, edited by Stuart Cunningham and Graeme Turner, Allen and Unwin 2006

In Theoretical traditions Chapter 1, John Sinclair writes:

“Edgar offered the first ever post graduate course in media and communication in an Australian University at Latrobe in Melbourne.  Her research combined orthodox field- survey methodology from sociology with personality scales from psychology in a study of adolescent responses to screen violence.  She notes the relative absence of Australian studies, but in her literature review brings together a wide range of both British and US perspectives.  These go far beyond conventional US behaviourism.  In particular she critically evaluates the social or psychological approach then fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic, uses and gratifications, and seeks to fuse social science analysis with the social construction of reality philosophy put forward by Berger and Luckmann - two European theorists living in America.  She even takes into account British political economy and Marxist ideological critique.  In her actual conduct of the research she combined the quantitative data with the qualitative interview data reporting the adolescent responses to particular films and programs as texts.

All this may sound eclectic - that is borrowing freely from here and there - but Edgar's selection of approaches is purposefully focused on her research question and her treatment of the various influences is critical not at all derivative.  For these reasons Children and Screen Violence is an early example of how Australian media and communication researchers were able to inform themselves about relevant perspectives from elsewhere, reflect critically upon them, then adapt and fuse them together so as to research issues in our own and environment.” 

Reviewed Journal of Sociology 1978 14[3] Anne Raynor, Book reviews