Communication Theory and Methodology 2000 Abstracts
Communication Theory and Methodology Division
Faculty
Profiling TV Ratings Users: Content-Based Advisories and Their Adoption • Robert Abelman and David Atkin, Cleveland State • In the aftermath of the ineffectiveness of the age-based MPAA television advisory ratings, this investigation examined parents’ use of the content-based ratings in their decision-making. The parents most likely to utilize TV ratings information tended to fit the profile of the target audience formed by the literature and set by the television industry: infrequent mediators of their children’s televiewing who are likely to employ a highly restrictive (deprivation-based) method of mediation, believe that television can have a significant impact on children, and are more concerned with behavioral- than cognitive-level effects.
Gender Schema and Alcohol-Related Messages: An Extension of the Message Interpretation Process Model • Julie L. Andsager, Erica Weintraub Austin, and Bruce E. Pinkleton, Washington State • The Message Interpretation Process Model posits that adolescents employ logic and emotion in analyzing messages. Gender schema theory argues that gender roles are internalized by adolescence; gender should affect information processing. We exposed 578 ninth and twelfth graders to eight alcohol-related messages. Boys were more aware of production values, especially in advertisements; girls noted emotional appeals. Both boys and girls found fantasy-based messages amusing; they were affected by realism. The MIP model should incorporate gender.
The Effects of Increased Awareness on College Students’ Interpretations of Magazine Advertisements for Alcohol • Erica Weintraub Austin, Amber Reaume, John Silva, Petra Guerra, Neva Geisler, Luxelvira Gamboa, Orlalak Phakakayai, and Bryant Kuechle, Washington State • An experiment with 496 college students tested whether heightened awareness during media exposure would affect the message interpretation process by enhancing skepticism, with the enhanced skepticism influencing both affective and cognitive aspects of decision making. The results suggest that skepticism has affective and logical components, which can be represented by trust (more affective) and perceived realism (more logical), and that skepticism’s effects on affective and logical decision making are revealed somewhat differently.
Negative Implications of the Third-Person Effect on Program Assessment Validity: An Experiment with the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program • Stephen Banning, Texas A&M • While the third-person effect hypothesis has undergone considerable testing since its inception nearly three decades ago, this research is the first project to investigate an applied use for the concept. This study introduces a formula for calculating a differential impact index and demonstrates with an experiment using middle-school age students in a Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program that a first-person or third-person effect can produce a confounding variable into traditional program evaluations.
An Effect Model of Political News and Political Advertising: The 1996 Presidential Election • Mahmoud A. M. Braima, Southern University and A&M College; Thomas J. Johnson, and Jayanthi Sothirajah, Southern Illinois-Carbondale • To determine the positive influence of exposure to an election campaign and the negative impact of the advertising campaigns of a presidential contest, we used structural equations to simultaneously assess 11 causal links between issue involvement, political news exposure, political advertising exposure, political news attention, political advertising attention, knowledge of candidates’ issue stands and voting intention. Two data sets, one from a survey of 320 adult residents of Jackson County in Illinois during the primaries and another from a survey of 368 adult residents of Pulaski County in Arkansas prior to the election, were used in the study.
Sex, Alcohol and Billboards: Memory, Attitude Change, and Purchase Intention • Xiaomei Cai, Annie Lang, Kevin Wise, and Seungwhan Lee, Indiana • This study examines the effects of product type and sexual appeals in billboard messages on college students’ recall and recognition in relation to their drinking levels. Results show that alcohol billboards are recalled better than not-alcohol billboards, particularly for alcohol billboards using sexual appeals. Heavy drinkers recall alcohol brands better than light drinkers. However, sexual appeals reduce brand free recall for heavy drinkers. Heavy drinkers also have more positive attitude towards alcohol products.
Conceptualizing and Testing the Construct “Impactiveness”: Analyzing the Effect of Visual Stimuli Eliciting Eye-Fixations, Orienting Responses and Memory-Stored Images on Ad Recall • Fiona Chew and Jay Sethuraman, Syracuse • Impactiveness is coined and proposed as a construct consisting of visual stimuli which elicit eye-fixations, orienting responses and/or memory-stored images. It was conceptualized using the seven-step inductive-deductive process outlined by Donohew and Palmgreen and predicated on theories of attention and involvement. Eighty color print ads from Gallup and Robinson’s 1996 Which Ad Pulled Best were coded and analyzed for impactiveness which was hypothesized to obtain higher recall. Findings seemed to support this hypothesis and validated the construct.
Use of Cause-Related Marketing Ads to Bolster Image in the Light of Negative News • Sameer Deshpande and Jacqueline Hitchon • University of Wisconsin – Madison • This paper presents an experimental study conducted among 178 subjects to test a bolstering strategy from Image Restoration Theory. Three different kinds of ads were compared with respect to bolstering brand image and the reputation of a nonprofit organization (NPO) after the release of an unfavorable news story: brand ads, PSAs, and Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) ads. As hypothesized, CRM ads produced more favorable responses than brand ads prior to scandal, but lost their advantage in the light of negative news.
Transactionalism Revisited: The Development of Transactional Thinking and its Impact on Communication Theory • Wolfgang Eichhorn, der Universitat Munchen • In the first half of the 20th century, John Dewey developed a concept of transaction as an alternative to stimulus-response based theories of human perception and action. Consequences of the transactional paradigm can be found in philosophy, psychology, semiotics and communication theory. This paper gives a short overview over the development of the concept of transaction and the way transactional thinking into communication theory and suggests an increased incorporation of the concept into reception research.
News Information Processing as Mediator Between Motivations and Public Affairs Knowledge • William Eveland, Jr., Ohio State • Empirical support is offered for the proposed cognitive mediation model of learning from the news. The cognitive mediation model is situated within an information processing framework and integrates existing theory and research on uses and gratifications and news information processing. It proposes that motivations for news media use influence the processing to which the news information is put, and that this processing is the proximal determinant of learning from the news.
The Assimilation of Soap Opera Portrayals into Viewer’s Relational Knowledge Structures • Steven J. Hoekstra, Kansas Weslyan and Tom Grimes and Catherine Cozzarelli, Kansas State • Two studies were conducted to test the degree to which exposure to soap opera television influences individuals’ relational schemas. Participants in the first study completed a series of questionnaires that measured their beliefs about romanticism, relationship fragility, the utility of conversation in relationships, and sexual attitudes. All participants reported their habits for television viewing in general and soap opera viewing in particular. Results showed that general and relationship-specific beliefs predicted relationship satisfaction, but that soap opera viewing time did not appear to be a central influence in either general or specific relationship beliefs.
Communication Behavior as a Critical Factor on the Third-Person Effect • Yu-Wei Hu, National Taiwan Normal University • This study examines the influence of communication behavior on the magnitude of the third-person effect. The results of a telephone survey indicate that, during an election campaign, higher level of media use will reduce the magnitude of the third-person effect. Moreover, while previous studies had ignored the possible influence of interpersonal communication on the third-person effect, this study finds a significant negative correlation between interpersonal communication and the third-person effect.
Neighborhoods, Communication and Policial Beliefs • Leo W. Jeffres, Richard Perloff, David Atkin, and Kim Neuendorf, Cleveland State • Although people tend to mobilize around local problems and restrict their political involvement at other times, the political communication literature generally has focused on national politics and elections. This is particularly surprising in investigations of political efficacy since it is at the community level that people should feel more efficacious. Also, both mass and interpersonal communication should be more significant locally given their importance in strengthening community ties. The study reported here focuses on these relationships in a community context, with a survey of six inner-city neighborhoods and six suburbs also classified on status using census data.
Receiver Control of Pacing with Mass Media: Effects on Comprehension and Persuasion • Tom Kelleher, University of Hawaii-Manoa • This study tests receiver control of pacing as a variable for examining learning and persuasion outcomes with mass media. Fifty students participated in the study’s 2X2 factorial experiment. Receiver control of pacing and the presence of images in the stimuli were the dichotomous independent variables and comprehension and attitudes toward the stimulus material were the main dependent variables. Results of the study showed that print and Web conditions • media that allow receivers control of pacing • had a significant advantage over radio and video in affecting comprehension of the science-related stimulus material from NASA. Control of pacing did not have an advantage in affecting attitudes.
Revisiting the News Media’s Liberal Bias: An Alternative Measurement of Journalists’ Political Ideologies • Tien-tsung Lee, Hawaii Pacific • A traditional approach to answer whether the news media have a liberal bias is to survey journalists. Findings of previous studies suggest that journalists tend to identify themselves as liberals and are more likely to vote for Democrats. Such results have been used to support the argument that the news media have a liberal bias. The present study revisits the issue with a more refined measurement of political ideology, and concludes that the liberal bias claim is only a myth.
Media Influences on Voter Learning, Cynicism, and the Vote in an Off-Year Issue Election • Glenn Leshner and Maria E. Len-Rios, University of Missouri • This study examined the influence of campaign news and advertising media on voter knowledge, cynicism and voting in a 1999 issue election. It also compared the patterns of association between three measures of vote behavior • vote likelihood, self-report vote, and actual vote • and demographic, political, and media variables. Two cross-sectional telephone surveys were administered • one month before the vote and the other immediately after the election. Hierarchical multiple regression models were tested. Attention to all of the campaign media predicted knowledge about the dominant issue on the ballot at the beginning of the campaign, but only attention to newspapers predicted knowledge at the end of the campaign.
The Effects of Erotica and Dehumanizing Pornography in an Online Interactive Environment • Chad Mahood, Sriram Kalyanaraman, and S. Shyam Sundar, Pennsylvania State • The present study employed a fully mixed 3 (low vs. medium vs. high interactivity) X 2 (erotica vs. de-humanizing pornography) factorial between-subjects design. After exposure to dehumanizing material, subjects held less sexual conservatism. Medium interactivity led to the most sex role satisfaction. An interaction effect showed that exposure to dehumanizing pornography with medium and high levels of interactivity led to more acceptance of violence toward women, while highly interactive erotica led to less acceptance of violence toward women.
Exploring News Media Use and Interpersonal Communication as Correlates of Accuracy and Inaccuracy in the Perception of the Climate of Opinion • Ann Marie Major, Pennsylvania • This study examines the psychological and social correlates of accuracy and inaccuracy in assessments of the climate of opinion about environmental problems from a telephone survey of 1002 adults. News media use, news media influence, and information-seeking were associated consistently with accurate assessments of the majority opinion. Problem and constraint recognition provided a means of determining whether or not respondents were accurate or were simply projecting their own opinions to the majority. Interpersonal discussions and environmental concern were associated with inaccuracy.
Cognitive Structure as a Mediator of the Influence of Communication • Jack M. McLeod and Jessica Zubric, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Nojin Kwak, University of Michigan; Maria Powell, Weiwu Zhang, and Sameer Deshpande, with Dhavan Shah and Mike Schmierbach, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This study demonstrates the importance of examining the processes that mediate the influences of communication on civic life. In this study, we analyzed the role of cognitive structure as affected by media use and interpersonal communication, and its mediating role influencing willingness to participate in a public forum on the urban growth issue. Findings illustrated that various communication patterns had distinct effects on four dimensions of cognitive structure: width, depth, causal attribution and remedy articulation.
The Ideological Dimensions of Stereotyping in the Media: Toward a Conceptual Clarification • Rick Clifton Moore, Boise State • Searching for stereotypes in the mass media is a common scholarly endeavor. Much research assumes that the media are full of stereotypes and their effects are deleterious. This study investigates the concept of “stereotype” as developed by Lippmann and examines current use of the term in mass communication research. The author suggests that most often the term is poorly conceptualized and the implications of this misconception deserve closer scrutiny by the academy.
Discussion Networks, Media Use, and Deliberative Conversation • Patricia Moy and John Gastil, University of Washington • Not all political conversation is deliberative conversation, characterized by an openness to political conflict, the absence of conversational dominance, clear and reasonable argument, and mutual comprehension. Extending McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy’s (1999) model of democratic engagement, we examine the antecedents of deliberative conversation. Structural equation modeling results indicate that network characteristics affected deliberative conversation. Print media use and interpersonal discussion tend to enhance deliberative conversation, while television news viewing hindered logic of argument and comprehension of others’ viewpoints.
Press-State Relations: A Critical Reappraisal • Hong-Won Park, University of Minnesota • This essay offers a critical reappraisal of the current thought about press-state relations. Existing studies of press-state relations are examined in terms of the normative, institutional, and symbolic approaches. To base press-state relations on a concrete theoretical framework, I consider models of power. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge enables to see the press-state nexus as a discursive terrain, where diverse actors struggle for dominant position.
The Theory is the Press: A View of the Press as Developer of Informal Theory • Robert Pennington, New Mexico State • This article proposes that the press develops and disseminates informal theories, derived from the primary culture, that govern institutions. Press freedom requires freedom from cultural restraints that are difficult to recognize. Emphasis on press content often ignores implicit relationships. In the absence of explicit relationship definition, culture defines the relationships in press content. Conflict occurs when social components reject or ignore an asserted relationship type. This study recommends analyzing relationship as monadic, dyadic or triadic.
Media Articulated Hegemony: A Symmetrical Perspective of Dominance and Resistance • Thomas Ruggiero, University of Texas at El Paso • A media “articulated” hegemony model, while recognizing that domination is presumed in any capitalist system, also acknowledges the possibility of subordinate resistance. It is in the articulation and de-articulation of media rhetoric that a political and/or cultural space is created by the tension between the two, and resistance may occur. Through a rhetorical analysis of the failed 1994 Disney’s America theme park, this study found that specialized media served as circulators of both universalizing and singularizing ideological narratives about American society.
Optimistic Bias and the Third-Person Effect: Public Estimations of Y2K Effects on Self and Others • Michael B. Salwen and Michael Dupagne, University of Miami • Telephone surveys during late November and early December 1999 gauged Americans’ beliefs about the predicted detrimental effects of Y2K and the persuasive effects of news coverage of Y2K. Drawing on optimistic bias and the third-person effect, approaches that share a “perceptual component” • an awareness of the existence of others and others’ beliefs and opinions • respondents appraised effects on “self” and on others. Optimistic bias predicts that individuals believe they are less likely than other people to experience deleterious events.
Real Talk: Manipulating the dependent variable in spiral of silence research • Dietram A. Scheufele, James Shanahan, and Eunjung Lee, Cornell • This study examines a key issue in spiral of silence research: whether the “realism” of the setting in which respondents are asked to express opinions affects their willingness to do so. Some reviews of spiral of silence theory have argued that survey measures do not capture the effect adequately because respondents see them as too hypothetical. In this study, we use a split-ballot technique to compare two closely related ways of assessing willingness to express opinions.
Individual Losses and Societal Gains: Interactive Framing Effects on the Activation of Mental Models • Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Nojin Kwak, University of Michigan; Mike Schmierbach, and Jessica Zubric, with Jack M. McLeod, Maria Powell, and Hee Jo Keum, University of Wisconsin-Madison • Although numerous studies have examined the effects of frames on individual behaviors and opinions, there has been a paucity of work looking at the possible interactions among frames. Additionally, relatively little research has tested the multivariate effects of frames on basic cognitive variables, such as common-sense mental models. Using a 2X3 experimental manipulation concerning urban growth embedded within a broader survey, this study tests for the interactive effects of two different frame dimensions on the cognitions of individual respondents concerning this issue.
Self-serving Bias and Self-esteem in Estimating Risk? • Michael A. Shapiro and David A. Dunning, Cornell University • Understanding how people form estimates of risk is important to understanding how people process risk-related messages. One speculation is that risk estimates may be related to people’s motivation to put themselves and their actions in the best possible light • a self-serving bias. Studies in other domains have shown that challenges to self-esteem tend to increase self-serving bias. The experiment reported here did indeed find a self-serving bias about behaviors related to health risk.
Effects of Communication on Economic and Political Development: A Time Series Analysis • Kim A. Smith, Iowa State • Using time series data from 1965-1996 in 107 nations, this paper re-examines effects of social, mass media and telecommunication indicators on economic and political development. Among the indicators of social development, urbanization showed a much stronger relationship with economic and political development than percent illiterate or school enrollment. Newspapers, radios, and televisions per 1,000 people all substantially predicted economic and political development. Only telephone mainlines per capita among the telecommunication indicators significantly covaried over the 32-year period of the study with both types of development.
Modeling Information Seeking, Exposure and Attention in an Expanded Theory of Reasoned Action • Craig Trumbo, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This article examines the use of communication variables in research based on Ajzen and Fishbein’s Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The literature review shows that a significant amount of such work has included communication and information variables, but perhaps not in a manner designed to purposefully elaborate the function of communication and information in these theories. In fact, a recent meta-analysis of the TRA-TPB literatures identifies a half-dozen variables that function significantly in the TRA-TPB, none of which involve communication or information.
Play Theory Revisited: Dimensions of Play in Television and Internet Use • Stanley T. Wearden and Joseph M. Harper, Kent State • It has been more than 30 years since William Stephenson’s book, “The Play Theory of Mass Communication” was published. Since then, an intuitively appealing and plausible theory has been largely neglected. Writing about it 15 years after the book’s publication, Stephenson himself acknowledged that the book had been a polemic for Q methodology and urged that the methodological approach to the theory be broadened in order to better understand it. This study attempts to do just that.
Priming Perceptions of Foreign Countries: How the Media Influence How We Think About Other Nations • Lars Willnat, Joseph Graf, and Paul Brewer, George Washington • This experimental study attempts to broaden the scope of priming research in three ways. First, unlike previous priming experiments, which have primarily relied on television news to test the effects of media priming, this study test the priming effects of printed news stories. Second, rather than assessing the impact of media priming on evaluations of political figures, as has been done in the past, we propose that the media can also prime other, less narrow defined political perceptions.
Show Me Your Beer: How Sex and Alcohol Affect the Cognitive Processing of Billboards • Kevin Wise, Annie Lang, and Xiaomei Cai, Indiana • This study investigates college students’ cognitive responses to the presence of alcohol and sexual appeal on billboards. Results show that subjects orient to billboards, and that the presence of sexual appeal in billboards leads to more attentive controlled processing. Furthermore, the interaction between the presence of alcohol and sexual appeal significantly affects the extent to which orienting occurs, as well as attention, arousal and emotional valence.
Effects of Sponsoring Negative Political Advertising on Political Decision-Making: The Roles of Involvement and Source Credibility in the Development of Voter Cynicism • Kak Yoon, Sogang University; Bruce E. Pinkleton and Wonjun Ko, Washington State • Candidates’ use of negative political advertising continues to generate objections among citizens and concern among scholars and journalists. We examined the effect of negative political advertising on political decision-making by investigating the roles of situational voter involvement and source credibility in participants’ vote determination and their development of cynicism. Research results indicate that participants’ voting intention for the sponsor of negative political advertising was higher for a high-credibility candidate, regardless of their level of involvement.
Agreement Index as a Reliability Indicator for Nominal Scales with Two Coders • Xinshu Zhao, University of North Carolina • ABSTRACT NOT AVAILABLE.
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By the Numbers: Documenting the “Newspaper Habit” • Clyde Bentley, University of Oregon • Studies of newspaper readership have traditionally focused on demographic predictors. This study examines whether habit • a factor much less obvious than the powerful predictors of age, education and income • is at work in the importance to the individual of newspaper readership. Based on a statewide telephone survey, the study showed habit is at work in the individual’s perception of how important it is to read a newspaper. Reading habits or ritual not only correlated positively with the importance of newspaper reading, but remained a significant predictor when age, education and income were controlled through regression.
News Framing as a Multi-Paradigmatic Research Program: A Response to Entman • Paul D’Angelo, Villanova • The concept “framing” is at the center of a growing body of mass media research, centering particularly on news framing. The purpose of this essay is to respond to Entman’s (1993) call for the establishment of a paradigm of news framing research. Drawing on work in the sociology of knowledge, it is argued that news framing is a research program that consists of three inter-related paradigms, introduced here as constructionist, critical, and cognitive.
It’s All About the Information: Salience Effects on the Perceptions of News Exemplification • Francesca Dillman Carpentier, Hong-Sik Yu, and Coy Callison, University of Alabama • This study expands upon previous base rate v. exemplification research in examining salience effects on perceptions of mediated messages. Using an ecologically valid news stimulus, salience is shown to interact with base rate and exemplified information with interesting results. Case information is shown to impact issue perceptions under high salience, whereas the more familiar influences of base rate and exemplified text are illuminated under low salience. Implications and directions for further research are discussed.
Issues in Qualification of Electronic Internet-based Sources for Academic and Business Historical Research • Alexander Gorelik and Jodie Peele, University of South Carolina • The paper presents a methodology for qualification of Internet-based information sources. A summary of the existing techniques for qualification of traditional mass communication sources is included. An integrated qualification strategy, consisting of four steps: pre-evaluation, classification, evaluation (application of classification) and criticism is proposed. Techniques and evaluative methods from business are adapted, and new techniques presented, aimed at reduction of ambiguity in “volatile” information and non-linear documents, such as hyper-text or multimedia documents.
News Content Matters: An Experimental Study of the Agenda-setting Effect of News Stories Depicting Negative Consequence • Yulian Li, University of Minnesota • This is an experimental study on the agenda-setting effect of threat messages or fear appeal messages. Applying the protection motivation theory, this study found that there was a positive linear relationship between the amount of threat and people’s perception of issue importance. Obtrusive issues were more susceptible to manipulation than unobtrusive issues.
Substantive and Affective Attributes on the Corporate Merger Agenda: An Examination of Second-Level Agenda-Setting Effects • Joon-Soo Lim, University of Florida • Two broad sets of attributes on the merger agenda were investigated to find whether the transfer of attributes of agenda from the media to the public occurred. Results showed that media affective attributes have varied with time and media types. Combining content analysis and Gallup Poll results, this study revealed there have been similar patterns between public opinion on the corporate mergers and media’s substantive and affective attributes on the merger agenda.
Political Distance and Message Desirability: Three Studies of Political Advertising and the Third-Person Effect • Patrick Meirick, University of Minnesota • This paper conceives of social distance as political distance, using Democrats, Republicans and the public as the groups of others on whom effects of political ads are judged. It also argues that desirability of political ads depends upon the recipient’s affiliation. In three studies using student and non-student samples, a pattern of increasing effects with increasing distance from the self was found for ads from an opposite-party candidate, while the reverse was found for ads from same-party candidates.
Timing of the Third-Person Effect Study and Winter Weather Advisories • Richard Waters, Syracuse • Through surveys before and after a winter ice storm (N=128), this project explores the strength of the relationship between the third-person effect and winter weather advisories. Drawing on previous research, which tested the nature of communications and the third-person effect’s influence on opinions on earthquake predictions, this project found people positively viewed winter weather advisories after ice storms; however, they viewed them negatively before ice storm. The third-person effect was present before the ice storm occurred, and it was not present after the inclement weathers.
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