Kensington Research Institute

The Cartoons Project

Funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 1993 and officially entitled The Portrayal of Alcohol Use and Abuse in Children's Cartoons, this study–referred to colloquially by the staff members associated with the study as The Cartoons Project–was a research undertaking designed to determine what kinds of messages animated cartoons provide their viewers regarding alcoholic beverages and their use/abuse. In reality, The Cartoons Project was considerably more broad-based than that, examining the types of messages that cartoons present about a variety of social groups and social behaviors. Included among the study’s main focal points were gender portrayals, depictions of various racial groups, age group portrayals, messages pertaining to body weight, violent and aggressive content, prosocial content, messages about alcoholic beverages and drinking, and content pertaining to the use of other legal and illegal drugs.

Unlike virtually all previous content-related research before it, The Cartoons Project research was based on a scientific sample rather than utilizing a convenience sampling approach. This entailed drawing a stratified (by decade of production) random sample of all animated cartoons with a running time of less than 20 minutes, produced between 1930 and 1996. The historical period covered by this study enabled the researchers to focus not only upon overall messages provided about each of the topic areas under study, but also upon how these messages changed over the years. Content analysis was the methodological approach used in this study. In all, this research provided highly-detailed information about more than 1,200 cartoons studied, more than 4,200 major characters appearing in these cartoons, nearly 700 specific instances in which alcohol or another drug was used, and more than 13,000 violent, aggressive, or prosocial acts performed by the cartoons’ major characters.

Kensington Research Institute’s Dr. Hugh Klein was the principal investigator of The Cartoons Project and he was responsible for all aspects of the project, including the research design, development of the coding sheets used for data collection, training and supervising the work done by the research assistants, viewing and coding some of the cartoons (i.e., performing some of the data collection duties), managing the database, and conducting the statistical analysis of the data.

Papers based on The Cartoons Project research have been presented at a number of professional conferences, including:

the 1995 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (topic:  alcohol-related content of animated cartoons)

	the 1996 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (topic:  the prevalence of violence and characteristics associated with perpetrating violence in cartoons)
	the 1997 American Public Health Association conference  (topic:  substance use-related content of animated cartoons)
	the 1997 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association  (topic:  animated cartoons' messages about race and racism)

Among the many interesting findings derived from this study are the following:

	Approximately 1 cartoon in 3 contained at least some content relating to alcoholic beverages, other legal drugs, or illegal drugs.  This percentage declined significantly over time, but increased sharply during the 1990s.
	Racial minority groups are underrepresented in animated cartoons, and all but African Americans tend to be presented negatively.  Overt acts of racism were shown relatively infrequently in the animated cartoons under study, and their frequency of appearance decreased sharply over the years.
	Overweight characters tend to be portrayed in a negative way, particularly when compared to those that are "average" in weight.  Although not to the same extent as overweight characters, underweight characters tend to be portrayed negatively.  Cartoons emphasize the importance of being "normal" or "average" rather than being thinner or heavier than "normal"/"average."
	The prevalence of prosocial content rose sharply and steadily from the 1930s to the 1990s.  During that same time period, the prevalence of acts of violence decreased significantly.  In many cartoons, though, reductions in violence coincided with increases in aggression, suggesting that animators were trying to comply with legal restrictions imposed upon their storylines' content rather than actually trying to reduce cartoons' overall amount of antisocial content.

Interested in learning more about some of the findings obtained by The Cartoons Project? If so, click here.