WATCHING TV IN MAINE: A CULTIVATION ANALYSIS OF CRIME ESTIMATES AND FEAR

Cultivation analysis assumes that television has the ability to influence its viewers’ social perceptions depending upon the time spent watching television. Cultivation scholars focus on the consequences of long term exposure to television, arguing that people are exposed to repetitive patterns of messages over a long period of time. One dominant message commonly studied in cultivation analysis is violence, because scholars argue that violence leads us to become fearful. The present study was designed to test the cultivation hypothesis along with the variables of participant reported sex and crime rate (hometown place of residence) within Maine. The State of Maine was chosen, because it has the lowest reported crime rate in the nation. Data were collected from three samples (N=206; in-person, n= 53; in-class, n= 89; online, n=65) of Maine residents.
The present study shows that participant sex is an influence on expressed fear, but not on crime estimates. The crime rate area of the participants’ place or residence by itself has no significant influence on participant expressed fear of victimization or crime prevalence estimates. Maine is a relatively safe state, and data collected from residents provide empirical evidence that television increases fear of victimization. Interestingly, this study also provides evidence that the more television people watch who live in lower crime rate areas in Maine, the more accurate their estimates may become. However, this finding is dependent upon the overall context in which a participant live, such as their hometown and state. Further, results suggest that the difference between a participant’s estimates to the actual reported crime statistic may become more similar with an increase in television viewing. The overall findings of this study indicate the importance of context in cultivation research data collection implying that context influences participants’ responses. The results further suggest that the hometown place of residence influences crime rate estimates as well as television watching but in complex ways.