Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy analyzes the first and most comprehensive investigation of the influence of movies on American youth, the Payne Fund Studies. First published in 1933, these studies are important for their insights and conclusions regarding the effects of movies on behavior.

They are, moreover, a landmark of modern social science research, demonstrating the rapid evolution of this discipline in American academic institutions over the first three decades of the century. Based on newly discovered primary sources, whose contents are published here for the first time, this volume also reproduces a long-missing Payne Fund study.