Movies & Conduct

This piece by Herbert Blumer "Movies & Conduct" details the statistical information based on the Payne Fund. The Payne Fund was a fund that conducted studies to see how children were affected by viewing movies in the early 1930's. It was apparent to the American society in the late 1930's that children were indeed affected by the viewing of movies. From these studies that were conducted it was concluded that sleep patterns and school performance were affected negatively as a result to children viewing movies. "He estimates that of the 100000000 weekly admissions to the movies in 1930, 28000000 of this audience is composed of minors . with 29500000 minors enrolled in schools" (Herbet pg 1). according to the information above we see that many children were attending movies. on average a child was viewing a movie once a week. which means that a child was seeing on average 52 movies per year. i can agree with this study. in my opinion it is safe to conclude that children were influenced by these movies. as soon as the inventions of the nickelodeons appeared, patterns in the behavior of adolescents began to change for the worse. i think that this was because of the material that was being presented to them on the big screen. Movies influenced children heavily in the past.