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Does Television Have a Negative Effect on Children? We live in a society where there are many diverse ideas about the social world. People hold very different opinions about the factors influencing the ways we think and behave. Since the 1950’s, the quest to discover ‘ what makes children violent’ has motivated over 7000 separate studies examining the relationship between representations of violence committed in society. There are two different traditions of audience research that could relate to children, yet there is a very low possibility that there is someone who does not fit into both uses and gratifications and the effects model. Effects Model. In the 1940’s the main view of audiences was that they were ‘passive’. In other words, they were easily influenced by what they saw and heard in the media. Most of the research that took place in the 1950’s and 1960’s was driven by the need to find evidence to support the theory that audiences are susceptible to the messages they receive in the media. This is often referred to as the ‘effects tradition’. Uses and gratifications. The same time as effects theory was being tested, other research was underway to test the theory that audiences used the media in dif