Media influence varies accoring to ethnicity

An article in theMarch issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine indicates that white teenagers are more likely than black adolescents to start smoking after high exposure to R-rated movies and minimal restrictions on television viewing.

I wonder how the effects of youtube and myspace also affect the issue as well.

Researchers suggest that since the majority of actors are white, the behavioral impact does not transport to black adolescents because they do not identify with the characters.

Past research has suggested that all U.S. adolescents, regardless of race, have a higher risk of initiating smoking as their exposure to smoking in the media increases. In 2002, smoking was portrayed in 90 percent of PG- and PG-13–rated movies, and in 100 percent of R-rated movies, according to background information provided by the authors.

The article goes on to say that about 20 percent of episodes of popular, non-educational prime-time television programs depict tobacco use, and pro-smoking portrayals outnumber anti-smoking portrayals by a ratio of 10 to 1.

Christine Jackson, Ph.D., from Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, Chapel Hill, N.C., and colleagues interviewed 735 12- to 14-year-old adolescents from 14 public middle schools in the southeastern United States.

About equal proportions of the students were black and white, male and female, and none smoked at the beginning of the study. In the fall of 2001, the students were asked which of 93 popular films shown in theaters from 2001 to 2002 they had seen, how often they watched television, and whether their parents had rules about the types of television shows they watched.

At a follow-up interview in 2004, they were asked about their smoking behavior.
White adolescents with high exposure to R-rated movies were nearly seven times more likely to start smoking compared with those who had low exposure. Even after adjusting for other risk factors such as having a friend who smokes, lack of parental involvement and poor academic performance, those who watched more R-rated movies were still three times more likely to start smoking. White adolescents who had access to unsupervised television viewing were also more likely to start smoking.

However, in black adolescents, there was no association between risky media-watching habits and smoking initiation; those with higher exposure to R-rated movies and a private television were just as likely to start smoking as those with lower exposure.

The reasons for an association between media exposure to smoking and smoking behavior present in white adolescents but not black adolescents are not known. The researchers suggest the “transportation theory” as one possible explanation.

This theory speculates that the impact of a media type on an audience depends on that audience’s involvement in that media type. It has been shown that black adolescents identify better with black rather than white characters in the media. The researchers note that it may be the case that television and movies, in which the majority of actors are white, are less influential on their smoking behavior compared to white adolescents.