Lawson, Andrea, and Gregory Fouts. "Mental illness in Disney animated films." Canadian journal of psychiatry 49.5 (2004): 310-314. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.
In this research paper, Lawson and Gregory illustrate their study on the prevalent verbalizations of mental disabilities in Disney moves. Their main claim is that these verbalizations lead to children’s negative attitudes toward disabled people in reality. Based on the result of their research, they proposes sub-claims. Their first sub-claim is that, children are more likely to be exposed to mental disabilities in Disney movies than in reality. The evidence is that 21 percent of principal characters in Disney animated movies have mental disabilities, which is much greater than the rate of people …show more content…
Child psychology is one of his main research focuses, and he has published many papers on this topic. The research is based on all the animated movies produced by TWDN from 1937 to 2001 and excludes the ones that are inconsistent or educational. They use a coding manual to analyze the verbalizations in the contents of those films, and they exclude the situations when the verbalizations are used as comments or negations to ensure accuracy. And they have trained a second coder with the primary coder to control the inter-coder reliability by controlling the correlating scores between them. So the result of the research is obtained at a relatively accurate level. Their purpose for conducting this research is to find out the potential effects of Disney movies that might shape children’s perceptions of people with disabilities. Their intended audience are the parents and educators who are concerned with the entertainment for children and want to be aware of the negative side of Disney movies in order to better educate children. However, as Founts and Lawson point out themselves, the research also has limitations since they only take the frequencies of the reference of mental disabilities without considering the duration of each reference. Another limitation is that their study only focuses on intellectual disabilities and neglects the verbalizations used to refer to physical
In this research paper, Lawson and Gregory illustrate their study on the prevalent verbalizations of mental disabilities in Disney moves. Their main claim is that these verbalizations lead to children’s negative attitudes toward disabled people in reality. Based on the result of their research, they proposes sub-claims. Their first sub-claim is that, children are more likely to be exposed to mental disabilities in Disney movies than in reality. The evidence is that 21 percent of principal characters in Disney animated movies have mental disabilities, which is much greater than the rate of people …show more content…
Child psychology is one of his main research focuses, and he has published many papers on this topic. The research is based on all the animated movies produced by TWDN from 1937 to 2001 and excludes the ones that are inconsistent or educational. They use a coding manual to analyze the verbalizations in the contents of those films, and they exclude the situations when the verbalizations are used as comments or negations to ensure accuracy. And they have trained a second coder with the primary coder to control the inter-coder reliability by controlling the correlating scores between them. So the result of the research is obtained at a relatively accurate level. Their purpose for conducting this research is to find out the potential effects of Disney movies that might shape children’s perceptions of people with disabilities. Their intended audience are the parents and educators who are concerned with the entertainment for children and want to be aware of the negative side of Disney movies in order to better educate children. However, as Founts and Lawson point out themselves, the research also has limitations since they only take the frequencies of the reference of mental disabilities without considering the duration of each reference. Another limitation is that their study only focuses on intellectual disabilities and neglects the verbalizations used to refer to physical