TELEVISION VIEWING DURATION AND STUDENTS’ UNREST IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN KENYA

Abstract

Technological advancement has widened television forum through digital television network
with its offer of burgeoned television stations worldwide. This exposure has seen teenagers who
continue to value television contrary to the expectation that social media would sway them away.
Both local and western television stations air loads of violent programs featuring drugs and
substance abuse adverts. This situation cultivates violence in the young and developing minds
whose growth is characterized by the belief that the violent virtual world is the ideal reality as
violence is portrayed to solve conflicts faster. Therefore, television watching becomes a trap for
a teenager which turns to an addiction of its kind. Many surveys have shown that children who
spend a lot of time watching television tend to get lower grades and also engage in acts of
violence in schools leading to unrest; a deplorable state of affairs given the fact that education
forms the backbone of every society and civilization. Cultivation theory was used to explain how
continued television viewing inculcates model behavior, specifically violent content. The study
took a longitudinal approach in a span of 6 months to investigate how prolonged viewing of
violent television programs would cultivate violence amongst teenagers and consequently turn to
unrest in schools as a means of addressing their discontentment with school administration. The
study sampled 398 students from Kiambu County in different school clusters: Single gender and
mixed schools for the quantitative data and 7 school administrators for qualitative data from the
different schools picked for the study.