Communication Theory and Methodology 1997 Abstracts
Communication Theory and Methodology Division
Finding Common Ground: Quantitative and Qualitative Mass Communications Research Methods and Feminist Epistemology • Linda Aldoory, Syracuse University • There has been an ongoing debate over quantitative versus qualitative research methods for mass communications and feminist scholarship. A gulf exists between the two, with qualitative research considered more appropriate for feminist work. This paper first outlines some prevailing characteristics considered relevant for feminist research in mass communications. It then uses these characteristics as guides for examining common quantitative and qualitative methods in mass communications research. Finally, some alternative epistemological approaches are suggested.
Learning From Television: Parasocial Interaction and Affective Learning • Michael Antecol, University of Missouri • No Abstract available.
Long-Term Television Effects: Beginning a New Paradigm Based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion • Michael Antecol, University of Missouri • No Abstract available.
The Roles of Media Use and Media Content Evaluations in the Development of Political Disaffection • Erica Weintraub Austin and Bruce E. Pinkleton, Washington State University • A random-digit-dialing survey of (592) Washington state voters during the month prior to the 1996 presidential election assessed registered voters’ levels of media use, involvement, confidence in the media representations of reality, and political disaffection. Perceptions of incompleteness tended to amplify feelings of anger/cynicism and depress newspaper and television use, but content perceptions had no effects on use of radio. Perceptions of oversimplification associated with increased involvement. Use of newspapers decreased cynicism/anger and use of radio talk shows associated with decreased negativism. Use of television had no relationship to political disaffection as measured in this study. The results suggest that media use and media perceptions may affect cynicism but not negativism, that media with more interactivity and more depth of content have larger effects, and that perceptions of oversimplification in the news is more damaging than unrepresentativeness.
Invisible Defamation Plaintiffs: A Methodological Critique of Gender and the Legal Research Process • Diane L. Borden, George Mason University • This paper offers a feminist critique of the legal research process, based on a historical study of gender and defamation, that body of law that concerns itself with reputational harm. The paper suggests that new methods of analysis, when used in conjunction with traditional methods, such as empiricism, description and explanation, can reveal powerful insights into both the system of law and the culture with which it is entwined.
Extra! Extra! Read All About It: Attention and Memory for Deviant and Imagistic Headlines • Jennifer Borse, Prabu David, David Dent, Annie Lang, Rob Potter, Paul Bolls, Shuhua Zhou, Nancy Schwartz and Gail Trout, Indiana University • This study examines subjects’ attention to, and memory for news headlines presented on a computer screen. Four types of messages were selected from among the following combinations; high deviance/low imagery, high deviance/high imagery, low deviance/low imagery, and low deviance/high imagery as defined by David ( 1996). Heart rate was measured in order to determine whether or not subjects had orienting responses to the stimuli that were presented, and a recognition test was used to determine subjects’ memory for stimuli. Results from this study indicate that people do not have orienting responses to news headlines presented in this manner. However, results did replicate previous research findings which showed that there is better memory for deviant and imagistic headlines than for non-deviant and non-imagistic headlines.
Interacting with Thin Media Images: Mass Communication Theories Predict Adolescent Girls Body Image Disturbance and the Internalization of a Thin Ideal • Renee A. Botta, University of Wisconsin-Madison • The impact of media images on adolescents’ body image disturbance and formation of an unrealistically thin ideal has been consistently asserted in the body image literature, yet has remained inadequately tested. With a sample of 100 high school girls, this paper tests Social Learning, Social Comparison, cognitive processing and Cultivation theories in predicting adolescents’ body image disturbance and formation of an unrealistically thin ideal with processing and consumption of media images. Media variables predicted a combined 26% of variance for Drive for Thinness, 21% for Body Dissatisfaction, 13% for Bulimic Behaviors, and 40% for Endorsing a thin ideal.
New Media Use as Political Participation • Erik P. Bucy, University of Maryland, Paul D’Angelo, Temple University, John E. Newhagen, University of Maryland • This paper reexamines the contention that mass media have been a primary cause of the erosion of civic life and that increased media reliance, especially on television, has led to a decrease in social capital or citizen engagement in community affairs. Data are presented from two election-year surveys of suburban Maryland residents showing that political audiences regard several forms of new media including political talk radio, computer discussion groups, and call-in television, as well as traditional network news, as civically useful and politically important. Call-in shows in particular predict a significant amount of interest in politics. Consistent with these findings, the study concludes that use of the new media, especially political talk shows and the Internet, is an emergent form of civic participation for an increasing number of voters. Rather than destroying civic life, as the social erosion thesis maintains, certain media channels appear to be engaging the electorate and building a new base of mediated civic activity that may rival conventional forms of participation.
The Newspaper as an Agent of Political Socialization in Schools: Effects of El Diario en la Escuela in Argentina • Steven Chaffee, Stanford University, Roxana Morduchowicz, ADIRA (Buenos Aires), Hernan Galperin, Stanford University • This study demonstrates effects of newspaper-based teaching on political socialization of 6-7th graders in Argentina. Students using newspapers in class exceeded a control group in political tolerance, support for democracy, expressing political opinions, discussing politics, and reading newspapers at home. Each effect was stronger among students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Teaching about the free press system enhanced these kinds of effects, as did assigning students to write essays on controversial issues in the newspaper.
All Countries Not Created Equal to Be News: World System and International Communication • Tsan-Kuo Chang • No Abstract available.
The Determinants of Ethical Values Among Communication Researchers in Academia and Industry: A Case of Practice Informing Theory • Fiona Chew and Hao-Chieh Chang, Syracuse University • This study proposed to identify factors predicting core ethical values (beneficence, role conflict, integrity and confidentiality) among communication researchers in academia and industry. A survey of these two groups (395 vs 241) was conducted. The influence of path coefficients predicting ethical values was assessed using a regression model. Findings suggest that while the overearching determinants of ethical values were similar across groups, work conditions and practice led to differences. Beneficence was influenced by confidentiality mediated by integrity and role conflict.
Media Priming Effects: Accessibility, Association, and Activation • David Domke, Dhavan V. Shah, and Daniel B. Wackman, University of Minnesota • In studying priming effects the process by which activated mental constructs can influence how individuals evaluate apparently unrelated concepts and ideas political communication scholars have focused primarily on the frequency and recency of construct use in the accessibility, of specific cognitions; less attention has been given to the spread of activation among associated cognitions. Drawing from both of these research interests, we argue that media framing of issues in moral or ethical terms can prime voters (l) to make attributions about candidate integrity, and/or (2) to evaluate other political issues in ethical terms. To examine these relationships, this research utilized the same experimental design with two sub-populations evangelical Christians and university undergraduate students expected to differ in the centrality of core values and the inter-connectedness of those values with political attitudes. A single issue, which varied in the types of values in conflict, was systematically altered across four otherwise constant issue environments to examine priming effects. Findings suggest that future research should conceptualize priming more broadly to include considerations of both accessibility, of cognitions in short-term memory and the associations among information in long-term memory.
Beyond Sex: The Political Gender Gap in the 1996 Presidential Election • B. Carol Eaton, Syracuse University • A telephone survey of Syracuse, New York, residents was conducted in October/November 1996 to test the study’s hypotheses regarding the political gender gap and media sources utilized to obtain political information. The fact that this study’s results failed to replicate previous political gender gap findings is significant. Findings demonstrate that the historical distinction between traditionally male and female political issues may be changing in today’s political climate. This analysis also successfully developed a reliable gender scale which extends conventional telephone survey research methodology.
Television Portrayals and African American Stereotypes: Examination of Television Effects When Direct Contact is Lacking • Yuki Fujioka, Washington State University• A self-administered survey questionnaire distributed to Japanese international (n = 83) and White (n = 166) students measured stereotypes of African Americans and vicarious contact (television) variables. Results supported process-oriented learning model of behavior, but not cumulative model of cultivation. The study demonstrated that the media could affect one’s impression of other races, and further suggested that effects of mass media are more significant when direct information is limited. Implications of an influential role of television in stereotype formation were also discussed.
Public Opinion and Ideological Center in Media Coverage: the Center-Seeking Mechanism in Electoral Politics • Anthony Y.H. Fung, University of Minnesota and Tien-tsung Lee, University of Oregon • This paper, from a micro politico-economic perspective examines the relationship between (l) public opinion, (2) media coverage of candidates and (3) election outcomes in political campaigns. An analysis of five American electoral campaigns in 1994 and the data of the National Election Studies reveals that (l) those who were portrayed by the media as one occupying the central position in the ideological spectrum are mostly likely the elected, and that there is a correspondence between the ideological center portrayed by media and the majority public opinion (measured in the NES). The results helps rebuild the simple effect model of media and public opinion on voting results into a two-step model. We suggest that the formation of the majority opinion is the consequence of the voters’ exposure of the framed ideological center in the media, and thus the mediated ideological center indirectly influences the voters choices and hence the election outcomes.
Cognitive Processing and Cultivation Effects: Integration of Several Trends in Theory and Evidence • Eileen Gilligan, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This paper tries to expand beyond Kellerman’s (1985) use of memory paradigms to integrate recent paradigms of memory and cognitive processing of cultivation effects research. Connectionism, the embodiment framework, and implicit/explicit memory are discussed in light of recent evidence from Shrum & O’Guinn (1993, 1996) on the importance of repetition in cultivation effects and Devine’s (1989) evidence for cognitive processing of stereotypes. The embodiment framework is viewed as the overarching cognitive processing structure that may best explain cultivation effects.
Refining a Uses and Gratification Scale for Television Viewing • Jennifer Greer, Cyndi Frisby and David Harris Halpern • To create a more sensitive instrument for testing uses and gratifications, Conway and Rubin’s 1991 general television viewing scale was refined and tested with 289 subjects who completed the scale for 10 different program types. Researchers found that the six dimensions identified for television viewing in general did not hold across various program types. The research produces refined scales that could better test the gratifications being met for each program type as opposed to the medium as a whole.
Effects of News Slant and Base Rate Information on Public Opinion Inferences • Albert C. Gunther, Cindy T. Christen, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This paper examines the hypothesis that people infer public opinion based on subjective assessments of media content and the presumed effects of such content on others. Experimental results support the hypothesis of a persuasive press inference, even when content includes base rate information that contradicts story slant.
Television and Commodity Culture: A Research Proposal for the Multi-Level Analysis of Commodification in Children’s TV Shows and Ads • Joseph Harry, Michigan State University • Commodification, the theoretical notion that human and commercial values are increasingly hard to distinguish in a mass-mediated capitalist society, is conceptualized. The concept is linked with Baudrillard’s semiotic theory of language, and a general research proposal is offered as a way of incorporating commodification within mass media theory. The research proposal offered here is directed at children’s television programs and accompanying ads, but is broad enough to be applied to television programming in general.
The Third-Person Effect of Election News: The Synthesis of Contingent Factors into A Causal Model • Yu-Wei Hu, National Taiwan Normal University, Yi-Chen Wu, Catholic Fu-Jen University • This study examines a causal model on the third-person effect of election news. A number of contingent factors on the third-person phenomenon are integrated into the model to demonstrate the process of the third-person effect. The solutions to the path diagrams support the theoretical thinking underlying the model. The results suggest that higher educational level and greater involvement with an election campaign may stimulate the individual to seek more information about the campaign through mass media and interpersonal channels. The communication behaviors may increase the self-perceived knowledge on the campaign issues, and the self-expertise may then strengthen the third-person effect of election news. Future studies can elaborate the model to see whether the third-person effect of election news could result in the bandwagon effect when most of the news suggest that one or some candidates have greater chances to win the election than the other candidates do.
The Impact of Motivated Information Processing Goals and Political Expertise on Candidate Information Search, Decision-Making Strategies, and Recall • Li-Ning Huang and Vincent Price, University of Michigan • An experiment was conducted to investigate how impression-driven on-line (systematic/evaluative) processing, impression-driven shallow (non-systematic/evaluative) processing, memorization (systematic/non-evaluative) processing, and careless (non-systematic/non-evaluative) processing influenced people’s candidate information search depth and patterns, decision-making strategies, and recall. The results showed that while systematic information processing led to a deeper and within-candidate information search, a preference for a non-compensatory decision strategy, and a better recall, evaluative processing resulted in a shallower and across-candidate information search and a preference for a non-compensatory decision rule.
Information Task Equivocality and Media Richness: Implications for Health Information on the World Wide Web • Tracy Irani, Tom Kelleher, University of Florida • This experiment examines the effects of health-related information task equivocality on media choice. Equivocality is the ambiguity, or lack of clarity, of information. Media choice is based on perceived richness, a medium’s tendency to convey rich or lean information. Experiment data collected from 88 college students suggest that individuals facing a high-equivocality information-seeking task will choose a richer World Wide Web site over leaner media, and that individual media choice in low-equivocality situations may be based on perceived self-efficacy with the Web.
Unobtrusive Issues and the Agendas of the President, the Press, and the Public: The Case of the Environment, 1987-1994 • Patrick M. Jablonski, Shannon Crosby, Erica Bridges, John Daniele, Betsy Gray, Lisa Mills, University of Central Florida • This study examines the relationship among the agendas of the mass media, the president, and the public regarding the issue of the environment in the United States from 1987 to 1994. ARIMA time-series analysis is used in an attempt to assess which factors drive the environmental issue agenda: the public, the press, or the president. Most important problem survey results from multiple organizations are aggregated into a series of 96 monthly time points to measure the public agenda. The media agenda is developed from a content analysis of the frequency of coverage of the environment issue in The New York Times. The presidential agenda is developed from a similar analysis of the Public Papers of the Presidents. The three univariate time series are identified, estimated, and diagnosed. The white-noise component of each series is subsequently employed in a bivariate cross-correlation analysis to address the research questions. Results indicate that the presidential agenda was significantly negatively correlated with the press agenda. No significant agenda setting relationship was detected involving the public.
Mediating the Media: Frames, Attribution of Responsibility, and Individual Media Use • Ben Kilpatrick, Robert Wayne Leweke, University of North Carolina • Following the research of Shanto Iyengar, this study examines how episodic and thematic framing in television and print media relate to public attribution of responsibility for poverty, racial inequality and violent crime. In the methodological tradition of Agenda Setting, it couples computer-assisted content analysis with survey data. It extends the analysis in the uses and gratifications tradition by including media use style as an independent variable. The study finds limited but significant results.
The Role of Involvement and A Conceptual Model for Optimal Health Communication Strategies • Yungwook Kim, University of Florida • This study is the incipient stage for formulating a respondent-oriented conceptual model for optimal health communication strategies. As the prevailing theory in involvement research, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) is discussed. Also weaknesses of the ELM and other perspectives for involvement research are investigated. As moderators of the health communication process, involvement is divided into enduring and situational involvement. Based on the review of the literature, a new health communication model and optimal strategies are proposed. The new model has two dimensions (enduring involvement and situational involvement) and four strategies: an affect-evoking, an information-oriented, a cue-emphasizing, and a balanced argument strategy. For the empirical research, a 2 x 2 experiment with 143 undergraduate students was conducted. Generally, the moderating effects of both enduring involvement and situational involvement are supported. Regardless of some deviations from the proposed model, optimal strategies fit into the designated involvement level. Compared to the ELM, this proposed model accounts for all cases of involvement and also explains the inconsistent cases of enduring and situational involvement. As for the health behavior, this proposed model has more explanatory power than the ELM.
Cognitive-Affective and Behavior-Affective Dimensions: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory and Diffusion Approaches in the Destigmatization of Leprosy: A Case Study in Gwalior, India • Pradeep K. Krishnatray, and Srinivas R. Melkote, Bowling Green State • This was an experimental study designed to determine the relative effectiveness of diffusion and participatory strategies in (health campaigns) and the effect of caste on the dependent variables of knowledge, perception of risk, and behavioral involvement that were conceptualized as contributing to leprosy destigmatization in Madhya Pradesh state, India. Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) procedure found significant difference between the communication treatments on the dependent variables. The discriminant analysis procedure was used to locate the source of difference. This procedure identified two significant discriminant functions: cognitive affective and behavior-affective dimensions. The participatory treatment showed higher knowledge and lower perception of risk on the cognitive-affective dimension, and higher behavioral involvement on the behavior-affective dimension, but the diffusion treatment showed only lower self-perception of risk on the behavior-affective dimension. The study concluded that participatory strategies promoting dialogue, interaction and incorporating people’s knowledge and action component result in increased knowledge, lower perception of risk, higher behavioral involvement, and hence, destigmatization.
Exploring Potential Predictors of Personal Computer Adoption • Carolyn A. Lin, Cleveland State University • Today’s personal computers are equipped with the capability to function as a communication medium when used in a multimedia networking environment. The larger issue concerning the adoption of computer technology, then, is ultimately more a cultural than an economic one. This study visits that question by examining personal computer adoption rate and its relation to likely adoption factors, media use patterns, technology ownership and social locators. It also tests the validity of five adopter categories, based upon Roger’s (1995) work on diffusion of innovations, within the present study time frame. Even though the study only provided an exploratory examination of the different components in the proposed model, the findings did offer a reasonable level of support for the theoretical framework outlined. It also succeeded to a moderate degree in verifying a theoretical adoption rate model.
The Process of Political Thinking Examining Predictors of Conceptual Knowledge During the 1996 Presidential Campaign • Jack M. McLeod, Dietram A. Scheufele, William P. Eveland, Jr., Patricia Moy, Edward M. Horowitz, Seungchan Yang, Gi-woong Yun, Eileen Gilligan, Mengbai Zhong, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This paper extends current research in the area of political knowledge by incorporating different types of knowledge into one framework. More specifically, it examines the role of newspaper use, motivations, and information processing as they relate to what we label «political thinking». Our analyses are based on a telephone survey of 307 adults in XXXXXXX, XX and its contiguous cities, townships, and villages during the 1996 campaign. Measures for the dimensions of political thinking are obtained by coding tape-recorded responses to open-ended questions. Multiple regression and structural equation are used to examine predictors of knowledge and the process of political thinking.
Fearing the Mean World: Exploring the Victim-Offender Relationship’s Influence on Fear of Violent Crime • James McQuivey, Syracuse University • Current cultivation research is expanded to include a distinction among different types of violent crime and their potential cultivation impact. It is theorized that there are cognitive reasons for a difference in how mean people feel the world is when exposed to crime-filled media content. It is hypothesized that the crime type people are most significantly impacted by is stranger-perpetrated violent crime which is more likely to arouse fear than acquaintance-perpetrated crime.
The Same Old Pie? The Constancy Hypothesis Revisited • Xabier Meilan-Pita, PROEL, Haoming Denis Wu, North Carolina • The constancy hypothesis, which purports that the percentage of income spent on mass communications remains fixed over time, does not hold true with data collected from 1959 to 1993. This hypothesis, first operationalized by McCombs, was supported with data garnered in the period 1929-1968. The boom of expenditures on audiovisual media and new technologies in the last decade, with a faster growth rate than the economy, is the major factor that breaks the assumed pattern of media consumption. In addition, at the personal level of media use, this study finds no significant relationship between traditional media use and new media use Ñ indicating that people’s time and money allocated to various media is not constant either.
Changing Epistemological Foundations in Journalism and Their Implications for Environmental News • Rick Clifton Moore, Boise State University • In recent years the social sciences have witnessed a shift away from positivism and toward postmodernism. There is some evidence to suggest that pressures will grow for the press to make such a move also. In this paper the author examines the rationale for such a change and examines the consequences therein. Special attention is paid to the consequences that might lie ahead for environmental journalism if a postmodernism perspective is wholly adopted.
Affirmative Action and Racial Identity in the O.J. Simpson Case • Kimberly A. Neuendorf, David Atkin, Leo Jeffres, Alicia Williams, Theresa Loszak, Cleveland State University • In a continuing project designed to explore the role of racial identity in determining reactions to racially-charged, highly salient obstrusive events, a structural equation model is developed around the construct of perceive innocence of O.J. Simpson. We built a robust, multifaceted framework that acknowledges the power of attitudes, regardless of racial identity, in provoking such reactions. The study identifies factors that media the impact of (a) race and (b) media exposure patterns on perceptions of the guilt or innocence of O.J. Simpson attitudes toward Affirmative Action, the perceived reality of television, and perceptions of a mean world. We have shuffled the race card with a slim deck of alternative factors, eliminating race as a strong, direct causal agent. And, we have identified a number of ways in which media exposure serves as an important, yet indirect, predictor of attitudes toward the O.J. Simpson case.
What Makes an Active Citizen? Do the Media Play a Role? • Ekaterina Ognianova, Esther Thorson, Andrew Mendelson, University of Missouri-Columbia, Lewis Friedland, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This study explores the question of whether people’s civic participation makes them seek knowledge from the media or their knowledge makes them involved in civic affairs. These two alternative models were tested via path analyses from data collected in surveys of four cities throughout the US, all of which were sites of civic journalism projects in the last few years. The study sought to establish the direction of the association between exposure to and awareness of the civic journalism projects and variables that have been implicated in the likelihood that a citizen will participate in the democratic process, such as concern for community issues, knowledge of these issues, belonging to civic networks and voting. The data consistently support a model of media stimulation: exposure to and awareness of the civic journalism projects led to concern for community issues and knowledge, which in turn led to belonging to civic networks and voting.
Citizens’ Policy Reasoning and Media Influences: The Health Care Reform Case • Zhongdang Pan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Gerald M. Kosicki, The Ohio State University • This study examines the case of the health care reform debate to test the ideas of citizens’ policy reasoning and media influences in the reasoning process. It follows the line of research that attempts to integrate the theoretical work on news discourse and the cognitive research on how citizens process and incorporate media representations into their cognition to derive their policy preferences. By analyzing the 1993 and 1994 NES panel and cross-sectional survey data, this study shows that citizens’ policy reasoning can be modeled as a causal chain reflecting a logical deductive process. Information-oriented news media use is found.
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