The DOI matches its Crossref record; 6 of the 6 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Effects of News Media Messages About Mass Shootings on Attitudes Toward Persons With Serious Mental Illness and Public Support for Gun Control Policies
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: In recent years, mass shootings by persons with serious mental illness have received extensive news media coverage. The authors test the effects of news stories about mass shootings on public attitudes toward persons with serious mental illness and support for gun control policies. They also examine whether news coverage of proposals to prevent persons with serious mental illness from having guns exacerbates the public's negative attitudes toward this group. METHOD: The authors conducted a survey-embedded randomized experiment using a national sample (N=1,797) from an online panel. Respondents were randomly assigned to groups instructed to read one of three news stories or to a no-exposure control group. The news stories described, respectively, a mass shooting by a person with serious mental illness, the same mass shooting and a proposal for gun restrictions for persons with serious mental illness, and the same mass shooting and a proposal to ban large-capacity magazines. Outcome measures included attitudes toward working with or living near a person with serious mental illness, perceived dangerousness of persons with serious mental illness, and support for gun restrictions for persons with serious mental illness and for a ban on large-capacity magazines. RESULTS: Compared with the control group, the story about a mass shooting heightened respondents' negative attitudes toward persons with serious mental illness and raised support for gun restrictions for this group and for a ban on large-capacity magazines. Including information about the gun restriction policy in a story about a mass shooting did not heighten negative attitudes toward persons with serious mental illness or raise support for the restrictions. CONCLUSIONS: The aftermath of mass shootings is often viewed as a window of opportunity to garner support for gun control policies, but it also exacerbates negative attitudes toward persons with serious mental illness.
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Pescosolido, B. A., Martin, J. K., Long, J. S., Medina, T. R., Phelan, J. C., & Link, B. G. (2010) · American Journal of Psychiatry · doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2010.09121743 · Cited by 1,262
Elbogen, E. B., & Johnson, S. C. (2009) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2008.537 · Cited by 868
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Population-Based Survey Experiments
Mutz, D. C. (2011) · doi:10.1515/9781400840489 · Cited by 674
Mental health treatment seeking among older adults with depression: The impact of stigma and race
Conner, K. O., Copeland, V. C., Grote, N. K., Koeske, G., Rosen, D., Reynolds, C. F., & Brown, C. (2010) · The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry · doi:10.1097/jgp.0b013e3181cc0366 · Cited by 568
Americans' Attitudes Toward Mental Health Treatment Seeking: 1990–2003
Mojtabai, R. (2007) · Psychiatric Services · doi:10.1176/ps.2007.58.5.642 · Cited by 282
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Coppock, A. (2019) · Political Science Research and Methods · doi:10.1017/psrm.2018.10 · Cited by 515
Generalizability of heterogeneous treatment effect estimates across samples
Coppock, A., Leeper, T. J., & Mullinix, K. J. (2018) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1808083115 · Cited by 445
Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. C. (2013) · Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research · doi:10.1007/978-94-007-4276-5_25 · Cited by 269
Ross, A. M., Morgan, A. J., Jorm, A. F., & Reavley, N. J. (2019) · Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology · doi:10.1007/s00127-018-1608-9 · Cited by 146
Reavley, N. J., Jorm, A. F., & Morgan, A. J. (2016) · Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology · doi:10.1007/s00127-016-1215-6 · Cited by 71
Metadata
- Authors
- McGinty, E. E., Webster, D. W., & Barry, C. L.
- Venue
- American Journal of Psychiatry
- Published
- 2013-05
- Volume
- 170
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 494-501
- ISSN
- 0002-953X (ISSN-L)
- 1535-7228
- OpenAlex
- W2159208799
- Cited by
- 289
- References
- 6
- FWCI
- 26.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- McGinty, E. E., Webster, D. W., & Barry, C. L. (2013). Effects of News Media Messages About Mass Shootings on Attitudes Toward Persons With Serious Mental Illness and Public Support for Gun Control Policies. American Journal of Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2013.13010014
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
