Teenagers whose parents don't restrict their access to R-rated movies are more likely to experiment with alcohol and drugs, according to a study released last month by the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center that has raised some old controversies about the role movies play in harmful behavior.
Controlling for other factors, teens whose parents never allowed them to watch R-rated movies were just one-quarter as likely to report having tried cigarettes compared with those whose movie watching was unrestricted. When parents restricted movie-viewing somewhat, teens were about three-quarters as likely to have experimented with cigarettes.
The study results are significant because they imply that strictly restricting children's access to R-rated movies may decrease the likelihood they will try smoking or drinking, editors of the journal that published the study wrote.
Only about one in six students were completely restricted from watching R-rated movies. Of these, only two percent had tried smoking.
How parents restricted students viewing movies also changed the likelihood the students would consume alcohol.
The study looked at over 4,500 students in 15 middle schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. It asked them which of 600 randomly sampled popular movies of various ratings they had seen and to evaluate what restrictions their parents placed on their movie watching.
Overall, eighteen percent of students surveyed had tried cigarettes and 23 percent had tried alcohol.
Dartmouth Medical School professor Mike Beach, one of the co-authors of the study, emphasized that although parents' restrictions was a significant factor in whether students tried smoking, it was not the primary factor.
Whether friends had also tried smoking was a very significant factor in student experimentation. But the results of the study were conclusive even when controlling for these other factors in parental behavior.
In an editorial that accompanied the publication of the study, Dr. Stephen Glantz called for movie ratings to take into to account depiction of the use of cigarettes and alcohol.
A comprehensive study of the over 600 movies sampled for the study found that R-rated movies generally depict more alcohol and cigarette use then other films, according to Beach.
The Motion Picture Association of America, the organization that rates films in the United States, already takes into account abuse of drugs in making its ratings, according to the MPAA's website, although Glantz wrote that they do not take in to account cigarette use.
MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor declined to comment on the study. The MPAA also declined to publish an accompanying editorial with Glantz's after an initial period of interest, according to Effective Clinical Practice, the journal that published the study.
The idea of including smoking as part of movie ratings has already generated controversy in Los Angeles.
The American Lung Association hosted a panel on the issue at the American Film Institute after releasing a documentary, "Smoke and Mirrors: A History of Denial," on the history of tobacco's denial of charges cigarettes were unsafe, according to AFI Director of Public Relations Rachel Peller Heffron.
Such controversy is foreign to neither the tobacco industry nor the movie industry.
"I've found things as early as 1911 where people are outraged about what movies have done to cause someone to do something," said Patricia Hanson, a film historian and executive editor of the AFI catalog of feature films.
She gave one example from the 1910s in which a man accused of arson said he had burned down buildings because he saw someone do the same thing in a movie.
Hanson pointed out that people have always complained about the ways arts and entertainment influenced people's behavior.
Motion pictures began receiving criticism in the 1930s, "when people started paying to go to these things and you could spend a lot of time doing it," Hanson said. Because movies were cheap, they were popular despite the depression.
Smoking in movies has always been popular. "It does seem like a lot of the big stars smoke in movies," said Hanson. "I think it adds a certain characterization to a scene, gives the actors a bit of business to do."
The article is part of a series of studies by Beach and fellow DMS professor Madeline Dalton. Previous studies had identified a rise in certain appearances of specific brands even after cigarette companies had implemented a voluntary ban on advertising.
The next study will examine how teenagers' behavior is affected by parental movie restrictions over a longer period of time, Beach said.
