Many social psychologist have studied the effects of our media on juvenile delinquency. Today most of the research looks at violent video games and rap music. However, in the 1950's the evil medium was comic books. Psychologist,Fredric Wertham's, 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent claimed the violent imagery was harmful to young people who read them. This prompted the U.S. Congress to pressure comic book companies into establishing a self regulatory organization called the comic code. Recently there has been a review of Wertham's data from his case studies of comics. The following was originally posted over at the blog site Teaching High School Psychology:
Posted: 13 Feb 2013 11:57 AM PST
Librarians Assemble! Carol Tilley, media literacy professor at the University of Illinois, looked at the archival data from a study done by Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, and figured out that his own data didn't support the conclusions he presented to the U.S. Senate!
This was back in the ol' days when comic books didn't have a great reputation Wertham told the Senate that comics might contribute to increases in violence, drug use, and "sexual deviancy" (as he defined it).
Enter our hero: Carol Tilley swoops in and uses her super-archivist powers to look at Wetham's original case study notes and finds that he often didn't have much if any data to support his dramatic conclusions. POW! Take that, bad science!
Psychology teachers could use this as a compelling example of the importance of responsible data use by psychologists, and that research should be re-examined and continually peer-reviewed, especially when dealing with case study and other qualitative research that might be easily misrepresented.
Look! Up in the sky! It's a lirbarian! It's a critical thinker! It's super-heroine Carol Tilley!
image credit: http://news.illinois.edu/news/13/0211comics_CarolTilley.html
posted by Rob McEntarffer
