Aim

1. St Helena is a remote island with a population of 5644, and it had no broadcast television until 1994.
2. The aim was to find out what effect introducing broadcast television has on young children's social behaviour.

Procedure

1. Sample: a random sample drawn from a school population of roughly 160 children aged 3 to 8.
2. The arrival of television was not arranged by the researchers, so the independent variable varied naturally and the design is a natural experiment.
3. The behaviour itself was gathered by naturalistic observation of free play in the school playgrounds, coded by independent observers using 8 items taken from a 26-item playground behaviour schedule.
4. Free play was filmed in two windows, one four months before television arrived in 1994 and one in 2000, which was 5.3 years later.
5. That gave 256 minutes of recording in 1994 and 344 minutes in 2000.

Results

1. The 1994 and 2000 recordings were set against each other in 64 comparisons, and only 9 of those were significant.
2. Of those 9, two showed decreased anti-social behaviour, five showed decreased pro-social behaviour and two showed increased pro-social behaviour.
3. No measure showed an increase in anti-social behaviour after television arrived.
4. Boys committed nearly four times as many anti-social acts as girls.

Conclusion

1. There was little change in the children's behaviour following the arrival of television.
2. The close-knit and highly supervised nature of the community may explain why behaviour stayed so stable.
3. The study therefore challenges strong social learning claims about the effects of media violence on children.

Strengths

1. A strength is that this is a genuine natural experiment, so the change in television access was real rather than something arranged for the study.
2. A second strength is that behaviour was recorded by camera in the children's own playground and coded against a fixed schedule, which gives high ecological validity and an objective measure at the same time.

Weaknesses

1. A weakness is that St Helena is a unique, tiny and highly supervised island community, so the findings may not describe children in larger or less closely supervised societies.
2. A second weakness is that individual viewing was never measured, so no link can be drawn between how much television any one child watched and how that child behaved.

Turning this into marks

1. Quote the numbers, because 64 comparisons with only 9 of them significant is the result that earns credit.
2. Name the design, so say it was a natural experiment with playground behaviour coded against a fixed schedule.
3. The mark most often lost is the judgement, so say what the study shows about media effects instead of listing the procedure.