This is an excerpt from an interview with a male teenager from East Harlem, New York City, taken in a famous Payne Fund Study, the "Motion Picture Study" (MPS). The MPS was undertaken from 1929 to 1934 by sociologists from New York University in the… [more]

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together 19 social scientists and resulted in 11 published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young… [more]