Reading I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK

C H A P T E R T W O

The Field of Media Effects

Like all scholarly fields, media effects research began in an exploratory phase where scholars had to start with speculations about their focal phenomenon, created con- cepts, tried out definitions for those concepts, and made guesses about which con- cepts were most important and how those concepts were related to each other. To accomplish these tasks, media effects scholars borrowed ideas and methods from the more established contiguous fields, especially from psychology, sociology, and political science. Researchers began testing their initial speculations about what media effects were and how they occurred. As the empirical literature grew, pat- terns of findings began to emerge that showed some of those early speculations were more useful than others.

Then in the later third of the last century, the field began to transition out of its initial exploratory phase and into a more explanatory phase as a number of scholars created systems of explanation that were built from the emerging patterns in the growing literature. The most notable of these systems of explanation were cultivation theory (Gerbner, 1969), agenda setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), framing (Goffman, 1974), uses and gratifications (Blumler & Katz, 1974), social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), and third person (Davison, 1983).

In this chapter, I will show how the field of media effects has struggled with its evolution out of an exploratory phase and into an explanatory one. This will provide the necessary background for answering questions about how far the field

24 | FOUNDATIONS

has evolved so far, the factors that have enhanced that evolution, and the factors that have held the field back from making more progress in that evolution.

Evolution

The 20th century was a period of great technological development that produced industries that have come to be known as the mass media. Researchers began studying the effects of the media, particularly newspapers, film, and radio, almost a century ago (Pearce, 2009). By the mid-1900s, a large number of scholars were attracted to media effects as television became a dominant medium, with almost all households having a television receiver. Television reached virtually complete household penetration shortly after midcentury, and scholars began conducting a great deal of research about the effects of such a powerful medium. Then in the last few decades of the 20th century, newer technologies caught the attention of vast audiences as major content providers turned these newer channels of infor- mation distribution into mass media. As the number of media outlets grew with the dissemination of cable TV, computers, the internet, and portable devices even more, scholars were attracted to the study of media effects. The first two decades of the 21st century have shown the media undergoing enormous changes in terms of their business practices, their conceptions of audiences, and the content they produce.

The scholarly field of media effects has also been undergoing an evolution from exploration to explanation in order to keep up with its focal phenomenon. In this section, I will compare and contrast the two phases along four analytical dimensions:  motivation for research studies, the design of research studies, the perspectives on building knowledge, and the nature of findings.

Exploratory Phase

Like with all scholarly fields, media effects studies started out in an exploratory phase. The exploratory phase of research is characterized by wide-ranging debates where the purpose has been to ask as many questions as possible and to try as many approaches, methods, and designs as possible to see what generates the most useful answers to which questions, such as:  What are the intended and unintended effects of media on audiences? Which media, types of messages, and message elements are especially influential in bringing about which effects? And are there certain types of audience members who are especially influenced by the media?

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 25

1. Motivation for research studies. In the exploratory phase, researchers are driven by curiosity about a topic so they pose a question. For example, during the 1950s, researchers were curious about why television had spread so fast in the culture and why people were spending more time with it, so they posed questions such as: Why do people like TV so much? Why do people spend more time with TV than with other media? In the 1960s there was a lot of cultural unrest with the protest of the Vietnam War and with the assassination of leaders such as President Kennedy, his brother, and Martin Luther King. Researchers were curious about the power of TV to influence people so they posed questions such as: Does watching violence on TV lead people to behave more aggressively?, Are particular age groups more vulnerable to TV’s influence?, and Why is there so much violence on TV?

All questions about the media were useful because scholars were trying to figure out what media effects there were and how they came about. No approach, method, or assumption was considered out of bounds; all were tried for their use- fulness in addressing all kinds of questions. Researchers were guided by intuition, creativity, and the bits and pieces of knowledge about the media that were scat- tered across other scholarly fields. This brainstorming activity was necessary to “feel our way in the dark” and find out where the boundaries and contours of the phenomenon were.

2. Design of research studies. To help in this exploratory process of examining the new phenomenon of the mass media, scholars imported ideas and methods from other fields. This is understandable because other fields—particularly the more established social sciences and humanities—had theoretical and method- ological traditions that they had been using as tools to examine the mass media within the context of their own scholarship. Media scholars found it very helpful to use these tools and continued to import these ideas heavily even into the late 20th century (Reeves & Borgman, 1983; Rice, Borgman, & Reeves, 1988).

3. Perspective on building knowledge. In the exploratory phase, researchers rely on the inductive method, that is, they collect data, then look for patterns in those data. When they find a pattern—such as a statistically significant treatment dif- ference across means or a relatively strong degree of association among variables— they report their findings as a tentative answer to their research question.

Using this inductive approach, scholars could ignore no question because they could not be sure which question would tap into a rich mine of insight. The posing of any question was valuable because so little was known about the mass media. The results of just about any research study had the potential to contribute some- thing useful to knowledge.

4. Nature of findings. In the exploratory phase of research, findings are highly tentative for two reasons. First, the use of the inductive method to build knowledge

26 | FOUNDATIONS

is a process that begins with researchers making observations, then speculating about patterns across those observations that can reveal something about a focal phenomenon. These initial guesses about patterns require testing so they can be confirmed through replication. When additional testing continually supports the initial guesses about patterns, those patterns gradually gain status over time as trusted findings. More typically however, those initial guesses will require refine- ment over time as continual testing reveals that those initial guesses were too broad, too superficial, or faulty in some way. Thus the findings produced initially in a new line of research are much more tentative than the findings produced after many rounds of testing.

A second reason why findings produced in the exploratory phase of research are tentative is that research designs are typically weaker in the exploratory phase. When researchers conduct a programmatic line of research, they learn more not just about the phenomenon they are studying, but also about how to design their studies to avoid practices that are found to be faulty or weak.

Thus the research designed to generate answers to questions in the exploratory phase of a scholarly field is limited to producing suggestive answers to questions rather than definitive answers. While some of those suggestive answers may be found to be highly accurate explanations about parts of the field’s focal phenome- non, most of them start out as very rough approximations that if continually tested and refined will grow into more valid explanations.

Explanation Phase

In evolving from an exploratory phase to an explanatory phase, a scholarly field demonstrates a shift in values that shows up in practices about motivation of research studies, how they are designed, their perspective on building knowledge, and what constitutes useful findings.

1. Motivation for research studies. In contrast to exploratory research with its question-motivation, explanatory research is motivated by a desire to test general claims. These claims can be informal, such as researchers’ speculations about media effects, or they can be formal, such as propositions in theories.

Explanatory researchers are more motivated by extending the depth of a scholarly field rather than by extending its breadth. This means that researchers become less interested exploring what new effects can be discovered or exploring what new factors might be influencing those effects, because the field has evolved to a point where a great many effects and factors of influence have already been well documented. Instead they are motived more by a desire to determine which of those effects are the most important and which factors are most influential.

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 27

Once a field has generated a good deal of suggested findings across the span of the phenomenon, the challenge shifts to sorting through those suggestive findings and testing which are robust enough to be general claims and which are sensitive to contingencies. This requires more programmatic research to get below surface findings and unpack the complexity of the phenomenon. Thus the research is less concerned with questions about which effects might be taking place and much more concerned about which effects are the most powerful, the most prevalent, and the most widespread.

2. Design of research studies. In the explanatory phase, researchers rely on a more deductive approach where they start with general principles to guide their design of new tests through a process of operationalization. That is, they take gen- eral statements and translate those ideas into specific measures. The challenge is to make operational design decisions that are improvements over past research so that the findings they generate will be more useful. Designers of research stud- ies reject the exploratory value of “anything goes” and instead are sensitive to the essential need that research be progressive, that is, researchers need to learn from the mistakes exhibited in the literature and exhibit improvements in all areas of their designs. Thus scholars with an explanatory perspective present a much more critical analysis of the literature where they identify faulty design decisions in pre- vious studies and demonstrate that their designs use more valid measures, more useful samples, and more appropriate statistical procedures. Thus as the strength of their designs increases so too does the value of their findings.

3. Perspective on building knowledge. When moving the focus of the field from producing individual studies to generating knowledge, scholars pay more attention to issues of validity and calibration. Thus reviews of the literature move away from listing studies descriptively and more toward critically analyzing the literature. Critical analysis is about organizing the review by issues; not just by findings but also by study design features. Critical analysis is also about evaluating the findings of studies based on the strength of their designs and analyses. This leads to the rejection of some findings and the calibration of other findings so that equivocal statements of findings are resolved. The primary scholarly work in the explan- atory phase is identifying the most important findings in the existing literature and organizing them in a way to extend their power of capturing the essence of our phenomenon. In this calibration process, researchers begin with an analysis of existing definitions for key terms, so they can weed out the less useful definitions and further explicate the more useful ones. Researchers make a critical assessment of existing theories, so they can focus on deducing stronger tests from their key propositions, use the results of those empirical tests to pare away faulty predictions, and extend the theory’s predictive power by synthesizing additional propositions.

28 | FOUNDATIONS

And researchers regard methods as tools that are useful only insofar as they can access various parts of our phenomenon of interest.

When designing their studies, researchers focus much more on developing knowledge than on using methods. In exploratory research, scholars are trained on methods so they design studies where they can use their methods; in contrast, explanatory-focused scholars design studies in a way to maximize the contribution of their eventual findings, so they search for methods that will allow them to build the strongest design to generate that type of finding.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of the explanatory phase is the focus on the big picture, that is, the nature of the media as the field’s phenom- enon of interest. Thus, scholars focus on contributing to systems of explanation rather than generating another set of findings. Empirical studies are essential. But when scholars design their individual studies and get down to the micro-de- tails of their one topic, their decisions are better when they keep in mind how their study fits into the map of the overall phenomenon. When researchers think carefully about how to position their eventual findings as they design their stud- ies, they will be better able to highlight the value of their contribution to the overall progression of knowledge. Without such positioning in the design, the findings easily can get lost in the clutter of a fragmented literature. This is why programmatic research is so important; each new study is clearly positioned along a developing path. Theories guide scholars more efficiently along paths of programmatic research. This is also why critical reviews of the literature are so important; they provide a map of a particular topic area. And at the most macro-level, this is why a general framework is so important; it can provide the global map of the full phenomenon.

With explanatory research, there is a shift away from contributing one-shot studies and toward building on the work of other scholars. This requires a focus on convergence of sharing definitions, assumptions, and procedures. An effect of convergence is the bringing together of scholars into a more unified field. The more we share a common understanding of the nature of our phenomenon and how best to go about constructing explanations for it, the more we will share a sense of community and hence achieve a higher scholarly profile. Kuhn (1970) provided a definition of a scientific community that can be applied usefully to any scholarly community: “Bound together by common elements of their education and apprenticeship, they see themselves and are seen by others as . . . responsible for the pursuit of a set of shared goals, including the training of their successors. Such communities are characterized by the relative fullness of communication within the group and by the relative unanimity of the group’s judgment in professional matters” (p. 296). Community requires convergence.

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 29

4. Nature of findings. In the explanatory phase, research studies are designed so that the findings are more definitive than suggestive. Thus the findings make their contribution less in expanding the breadth of knowledge and more in elaborating knowledge by developing greater depth in their explanations.

Current State of the Field

Large Fragmented Literature

Now in the early 21st century, the published research literature that examines some aspect of the mass media has grown to a very large size and covered a great many topics. A decade ago, the size of this literature was estimated to already be over 6,000 published studies (Potter & Riddle, 2006). Clearly the phenomenon of media effects has been of great interest to many researchers.

Although it is a positive indicator of health of the scholarly field that so many scholars have generated such a large literature, critics have pointed out that the value of this literature has been limited by its fragmented nature (Berger, 1991; Hardt, 1992; Jensen & Rosengren, 1990; McQuail, 1989; Pietila, 1994; Power, Kubey, & Kiousis, 2002). This literature continues to be plagued by little synthe- sis across studies, little programmatic research, many theories but with a small proportion of the literature that is theory-driven research, and little translation of ideas and methods from other fields where they were originally developed for other purposes.

1. Limited programmatic research. In Milestones in Mass Communication Research, Lowry and DeFleur (1988) argued that the “study of mass communica- tion has been particularly unsystematic.” They elaborated this point by saying that scholars “almost never coordinated their efforts or built upon the results of previous research” and that many of the questions guiding the research “were not theoreti- cally significant” (p. 3). This condition persists today. Scholars who publish many studies typically will do a study or two on one topic and then move on to another topic, publish a few studies on that topic, and then move on to another topic. This pattern can be characterized as a “honeybee” approach to research, where scholars are busy bees whose attention is attracted by so many interesting topics (flowers in bloom). They flit from one topic to another as they make their way across the field of so many attractive kinds of flowers. The positive aspect of this “honeybee” nature of the research is that many topics get explored. Also, the travels of the bees have an effect of cross-pollinating topics with ideas and methods from other topics.

However, there is a limitation to this honeybee approach. While cross-pol- lination of ideas has some value, the development of a scholarly field requires a

30 | FOUNDATIONS

sustained effort of constructing knowledge. To shift the metaphor, think of hun- dreds of craftsmen interested in creating a new town in an open field. If those workers take a honeybee approach, then each craftsman does a piece of work at one place then moves on to another place and on and on. There is no overall design of streets, neighborhoods, electrical systems, etc. Over time, there are more and more pieces of construction but without an overall design, those pieces contribute more to a condition of congestion and chaos than to a condition of producing the systems required for a livable city.

To the extent that scholars spend time trying out lots of different topics, the field is prevented from building much elevation—that is, there are few places where scholars conduct programmatic research that is essential to elaborating knowledge on a topic.

Definitional variation. A  major indicator of fragmentation is that many of the key terms are used with varying meaning across scholars. For example, the term media violence exhibits considerable variation in definitions, especially when we look at how this term has been defined by content analysts (see Potter, 1999). Some of these definitions included verbal acts, while most did not; some include accidents, while others are limited to intentional acts; some required action to be explicitly depicted on the screen, while others allowed action to be implied.

Another example of definitional confounding is with the term flow. Raymond Williams (1974) used flow to refer to how people experience a sequence of mes- sages in a medium, such as television. He explained that television programs do not exist as discrete entities in the minds of viewers. Rather, a kind of flow across texts is the central experience of the medium (p. 95)—a fact that accounts for much of television’s critical significance. This is when the audience member con- tinues an exposure while having one message replace another and where a message is interrupted by other messages. Thus, to Williams, flow is an endless random juxtaposition of different texts. Newcomb and Hirsch (1984) picked up on this idea but referred to the elements as “viewing strips.” In contrast, Csikszentmihalyi (1988) used the term flow to refer to a psychological state of being swept away by a task where the person loses a sense of time and place in the pursuit of a highly engrossing goal. Other scholars have referred to the same idea but use a different term, such as transportation (Bilandzic & Busselle, 2008; Green & Brock, 2000). Definitional variation is not limited to the few examples I have presented; it is common throughout the field of media effects. When a field is in its explor- atory phase, definitional proliferation is valuable because it highlights a range of meaning. But over time, scholars in a field need to look for patterns where certain meanings are more valuable than others; where multiple meanings are found to be valuable, there then needs to be a relabeling so that the different meanings are

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 31

uniquely identified. When a field has many niche scholars each with their own specialized meaning for a particular term, then communication across niches is limited. To the extent that a field avoids the scholarly tasks of comparing and con- trasting meanings, evaluating meanings for utility, and relabeling, it is very difficult to group findings together into meaningful patterns of knowledge. The definitional confounding substantially increases the costs to readers and serves to slow down the sharing of meaning. The field’s diversity turns into confusion and this limits the ability of scholars to form a true community.

Low Elevation

A second problem with the slow evolution of this scholarly field from an explor- atory phase to an explanatory phase is its low elevation of knowledge. What do I mean by “low elevation” of knowledge? Think of the findings of each empirical study as forming a base of a pyramid. Scholars who review the literature on a particular topic make statements about patterns across the relevant findings on that topic, and these statements move us up a level on the pyramid because these statements are more general than the description of results from any one research study. When scholars look for patterns across several topic areas, they move knowl- edge up another step in generality. The more steps upward a field exhibits, the more elevation there is in its knowledge—movement away from listing individual particulars and toward constructing nested layers of general patterns. Because the purpose of scholarly fields is to generate knowledge—not just empirical findings— the health of a scholarly field can be seen in how much elevation it has achieved.

Recall from the previous chapter that scholarly fields employ a hermeneutic process where the findings of individual studies are used to construct a big picture of the field’s focal phenomenon. Think of this big picture articulation as being the tip of the pyramid. Thus the more layers of synthesizing results a field has pro- duced, the more general are those statements that explain the phenomenon and the more clear the big picture becomes. Fields that place a high premium on qual- ity reviews of the literature generate more evaluation of findings, more integration of patterns, and more calibration of what is most important—all of which serves to increase the elevation of knowledge in the field. With the field of media effects, it appears that the scholarly energy is focused much more on conducting individual empirical studies than in undertaking the tasks required to build elevation.

Limited synthesis. There are few published efforts at synthesizing parts of this very large literature. By synthesis, I mean that when a literature is reviewed, it is not just described or summarized but that a scholar conducts a critical analysis of that literature and provides fresh insights about patterns of findings. Thus synthesis is

32 | FOUNDATIONS

a multistep process that entails breaking a literature down into component issues (such as design issues or findings contingent on factors of participants or media messages), evaluating the credibility of findings along each analytical dimension, filtering out findings that fail to meet the standard used in the evaluation, calibrat- ing the importance of the filtered-in findings, identifying patterns across the most important and valid findings, then using those perceived patterns as a springboard for presenting fresh insights into the nature of the phenomenon examined by the literature.

The literature examined in a synthesis can be relatively small, such as a handful of studies relevant to the design of a particular study like what authors do when presenting a review of the literature in an article of an empirical study. Or the reviewed literature can be relatively large, such as when scholars write a chapter on a broad topic for an edited volume. When a field has skilled syntheses at all levels, there is a greater chance that the faulty findings are weeded out and that the focus is put on the most important findings that can be trusted to create explanations of the phenomenon that can move the scholarly field forward.

In the media effects field, almost all of the work published in even the top- rated scholarly journals are descriptive reports of empirical studies. In their content analysis of the mass media effects literature, Potter and Riddle (2006) analyzed 936 articles that were concerned with media effects published in 16 scholarly jour- nals. Only 47 articles (5.0 %) were not quantitative analyses of data gathered in an empirical study, and most of these (n = 36) were stand-alone narrative reviews, while the remaining 11 published articles were meta-analyses. I want to point out two things this content analysis revealed. First, it appears that new empirical work is much more valued than secondary work that uses the findings of empirical stud- ies to analyze, evaluate, and calibrate those findings in order to create claims for general patterns that would elevate the knowledge in the field. And second, while narrative reviews and meta-analyses contribute to the development of scholarly fields, their contribution is limited when they are uncritical, that is, they accept all published work on a topic as equally valid and useful. When reviewers of the literature are descriptive and not critical, they disregard the scholarly task of filter- ing and thus the studies with the weakest designs and/or findings are given equal weight with the studies with the strongest designs and/or findings.

When synthesis work is valued much less than exploratory empirical work, almost all the scholarly effort is expended on growing the base of the pyramid. This results in an ever larger fragmented literature where the findings of individual studies are left alone in isolation rather than integrated into knowledge patterns. When there is little interest in perceiving patterns across the best studies while discounting the findings from weaker studies, a field achieves little elevation. And

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 33

when a field has little elevation of knowledge, researchers labor in a field with scattered findings, thus making it very difficult to choose the most important areas to work on and to access the full set of best thinking when conducting a literature review.

Limited translation. There is little translation of ideas into media effects research from other fields. While importing ideas into a field can be a good thing— by expanding the pool of ideas to consider and tools to try—it can also be a prob- lem if those ideas are not adapted well to the specific needs of the importing field. Media scholars are more likely to import ideas from other social sciences rather than cite other media scholars in communication. To illustrate this point, Reeves and Borgman (1983) studied nine core communication journals. They reported that communication scholars are dependent on journals outside of communica- tion, with communication journal articles exhibiting five cites of other journals for each cite they receive. In a subsequent bibliometric analysis and network analysis of citations in 20 communication journals from 1977 to 1985, Rice and colleagues (1988) found that for all communication journals, the average impact ratio was .43, which was the lowest impact ratio among 10 social science fields. A ratio of 1.0 means that the articles published in a journal received an average of one citation per year subsequent to its publication. So an impact ratio of .4 means that the articles a journal published this year will receive an average of one citation every 2.5 years. This indicates that compared with other social sciences, communication scholars are much less likely to cite the work of other scholars publishing in their journals. This pattern gives greater weight to the conclusion that the degree of programmatic research is lower in communication than in other fields.

This is not an argument that we need to invent all our own ideas, especially when contiguous fields offer so many great ideas that have usefulness for mass media scholars. However, I am arguing that when we import an idea, we typically need to transform it in some way to fit the purpose of explaining some aspect of the mass media, and this usually requires some translation. These translations serve to tailor the constructs for our own purposes. Over time, we need to cite more of our translations in proportion to the untranslated constructs from other fields. Also, over time, we will find that we have special needs for mapping that are dif- ferent from other fields, and therefore there are no constructs we can import. In these cases, we need to develop our own constructs. But doing this requires greater attention to our own special mapping arcs, but in order to do this, we need more programmatic research to develop greater sensitivity to our own special challenges.

In summary, it appears that the field of media effects research is fragmented for several reasons. There is an ever-expanding literature, but because so little of it is programmatic or theory driven, there is great difficulty in synthesizing the

34 | FOUNDATIONS

major findings across studies. C. R. Berger (1998), writing about the field of com- munication research in general, said, “The traditionally high level of fragmenta- tion manifested by the field seems to be increasing as the field expands. Although specialization is almost an inevitable consequence of growth, the fact that there is no particular theoretical paradigm or touchstone theory around which commu- nication researchers might organize their efforts is a least one source of concern” (p. 101).

Role of Theory in Media Effects Scholarship

Theories can be very useful tools in generating and communicating knowledge. When a theory is introduced into a literature, it offers the potential to efficiently guide research on a particular topic if it presents a clear set of ideas and offers a system of explanation that shows how those ideas are related to one another. If the claims in the theory are tested repeatedly in programmatic research, then knowledge builds systematically. The theory matures when theoreticians use the emerging patterns from the empirical tests of their claims to refine their systems of explanation. And the scholarly field matures as the knowledge structure about the field’s focal phenomenon is elaborated. Thus the more that theories mature, the more valuable a scholarly field becomes.

What is the pattern in the use of theories to guide designers of research stud- ies in the field of media effects? In this section we first look at those patterns then we look for explanations for why those patterns exist.

Many Theories

There are a large number of theories in the media effects literature. While no one has yet attempted to identify all the different theories mentioned in the published media effects literature, I  found over 150 in a content analysis of media effects articles published in a sampling of eight communication journals published from 2003 to 2008 (Potter, 2009). When compiling this list, I used a broad conception of theory that included any scholarly attempt to organize, predict, or explain some aspect of the media effects phenomenon. Given the limited sampling of journals and years, this finding of 150 theories is likely to be an underreporting of the total number of theories in the full literature of media effects. Even so, the 150 identi- fied theories (see Table 2.1) reveal a great variety of explanation. While a few of these theories are widely known, others are relatively unknown either because they are new or have yet to be discovered by many scholars. Some are formal systems

(Continued)

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 35

Table 2.1. Partial List of Media Effects Advertising Elite Pluralism Affluent Society Empathy Activation Agenda Building Encoding–Decoding Agenda Setting Excitation Transfer Aggression Exemplification Associative Network Building Expectancy Value Attitude Construct Creation Fraction of Selection Audience as Commodification Framing Audience Construction by Media Gatekeeping Audience Flow Global Village Audience Polarization Gratification Seeking Automatic Activation Gravitation Availability-Valence Altering Hegemony Buffering Heuristic Processing Capacity Limits Hidden Persuaders Catharsis Homogenization Channel Repertoire Reinforcement Imitation Character Affiliation Indirect Effects Civic Engagement Information Flow Coalition Building Information Seeking Cognitive Dissonance Integrated Response Cognitive Response Interpretation by Social Class Conservative/Moralist Decision Making Interpretive Resistance Consumer Culture Creation and

Reinforcement Knowledge Gap Least Objectionable

Programming Levels of Processing Limited Capacity Information

Processing Marketplace Alteration Mass Audience Media Access Media Culture Media as Culture Industries Media Enjoyment Media Enjoyment as Attitude Media Entertainment Media Flow Media System Dependency

Cue Activation Cultivation Cultural Imperialism Culture of Narcissism Decision Making Diffusion of Innovations Direct Effects Disinhibition Disposition Altering Distribution of Knowledge Double Action Gatekeeping Double Jeopardy Drench

36 | FOUNDATIONS

Table 2.1. Continued

of explanations that have generated many tests of their claims, while others have been generated from an inductive process in a single study. While most focus their explanations on a small piece of the overall media effects phenomenon, a few are broader and would qualify as middle-range theories (Merton, 1967). Some have been constructed by social scientists working in media studies or related fields (such as psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, business,

Elaboration Likelihood Medium as Message Message Construction Psychological Conditioning Mood Management Rally Effect Motivated Attention and Motivated

Processing Reasoned Action Reception Resource Dependency Revealed Preferences Ritual Reinforcement Selective Exposure Selective Gatekeeping Selective Perception Semiotic Interpretations Social Cognitions Social Construction of

Meaning Social Construction of Media

Technologies Social Identity Social Norms Sociology of News Spiral of Silence Synapse Priming Technological Determinism Television Trivialization of

Public Life Third Person Effect Transactional Effects Transmission of Information Transportation of Audiences Two-Step Flow Uses and Dependency Uses and Gratifications Video Malaise

Neo-associationistic Thinking Neo-mass Audience Network Political Priming News Content News Diffusion News Factory News Frame Creation News Selection News Worker Socialization One-Dimensional Man Parasocial Interaction Perception of Hostile Media Persuasion Play Pluralistic Ignorance Political Signification Political Socialization Polysemic Interpretations Power Elite Priming Principled Reasoning Profit-Driven Logic of Safety Program Choice Proteus effect Pseudo-events Blur Reality Psychodynamics

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 37

and education), while others have been created by humanistic scholars working in fields (such as film studies, comparative literature, linguistics, feminist studies, ethnic studies, and art). Some of these explanations display the term theory in their titles, while others are referred to as models, hypotheses, or effects. Regardless of their origin or their title, each of these listed in Table 2.1 provides an articulation of a relationship among concepts as a way to explain something about the phe- nomenon of media effects.

Small Proportion of Research Is Theory Guided

Even though the field of media effects research has many theories available to guide the construction of empirical tests, a sizable proportion of our literature continues to ignore not only these identified theories but all theories. For example, in an analysis of published literature on mass communication from 1965 to 1989 in eight competitive peer-reviewed journals, Potter, Cooper, and Dupagne (1993) found that only 8.1 % of 1,326 articles were guided by a theory and provided a test of that theory; another 19.5 % were tests of hypotheses, but these hypotheses were not derived from a theory. A similar pattern was found in an analysis of studies published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, when Riffe and Freitag (1997) reported that only 27.6 % of the studies used an explicit theoretical frame- work, and there was no change in this percentage over the 25-year period they examined from 1971 to 1995. Similar findings were reported by Kamhawi and Weaver (2003) who examined all articles published in 10 communication journals from 1980 to 1999 and found that only 30.5 % specifically mentioned a theory. Trumbo (2004) in an updating of the Potter et al. (1993) content analysis reported finding that 18 % of 2,649 studies he examined from 1990 to 2000 were guided by a theory, and that an additional 24 % mentioned a theory but did not use it to create either an hypothesis or a research question to guide their studies. Potter and Riddle (2007) analyzed media effects articles published in 16 journals from 1993 to 2005 and found that 35 % of coded articles featured a theory prominently.

The pattern of findings across all these content analysis shows a slow but dis- cernable growth in the proportion of media effects empirical studies using theory, although it is difficult to make clear comparisons across those studies due to dif- ferent definitions of theory. However, the general trend appears to be an increase in theory-driven research from 34 % until 1990, then 42 % from 1990 to 2000, if we use a broad definition of theory.

We need to be careful that we do not equate the mentioning of a theory with using a theory to guide a research study. When we look for articles that begin with a mention of an existing media effects theory then use that theory’s

38 | FOUNDATIONS

conceptualizations as a basis for deducing hypotheses to test a claim in the theory, we can see that there still appears to be an increase in the use of theory but with lower proportions—from 8.1 % (Potter et al., 1993) to 18 % (Trumbo, 2004) to 28.0 % (Potter, 2018).

While the increase in the proportions of the media effects research that is guided by theory is a positive trend, it is still alarming that such a high proportion of our current research literature is still ignoring theories. Media scholars have repeatedly argued for the importance of theory in developing the field of media effects (Kamhawi & Weaver, 2003; McQuail, 2005; Nabi & Oliver, 2009; Potter, 2009). When major scholars in the field of mass communication were surveyed several decades ago, 63 % of respondents thought that the theoretical development should be a lot better (So & Chan, 1991). And interpreting the results of their content analysis, Kamhawi and Weaver (2003) argued that “theoretical develop- ment is probably the main consideration in evaluating the disciplinary status of the field. As our field grows in scope and complexity, the pressure for theoretical integration increases” (p. 20).

Journal reviewers have also been found to be critical of the lack of use of theory. An analysis of reviewer comments for 120 manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Communication found that one of the most important concerns of those reviewers was a lack of theoretical integration (Neuman, Davidson, Joo, Park, & Williams, 2008, p. 220). But yet, about three quarters of the media effects research published in top scholarly journals is not motivated by a theory and about half of the published research studies appear to ignore theories altogether.

Why This Pattern?

With so many theories available to guide researchers in the design of their studies, why do so many designers of studies ignore all this potential guidance? Theories can deliver a great deal of efficiency to researchers by giving them access to con- cepts with a higher degree of explication, which helps researchers design studies with greater efficiency and precision. Good theories provide researchers with a history of measurement and data gathering procedures showing a progression of increasing validity, and they provide researchers with a much stronger context for interpreting their findings in a more conceptual and useful manner. With all these advantages that theories have to offer researchers, why do so many study designers continue to ignore theory guidance?

One possible answer is that the existing theories are not very helpful. That is, while theories have the potential to offer researchers many advantages, the existing theories fall short of delivering on that potential. There are two ways to test this, although they are both indirect ways. One way is to look at patterns of design

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 39

decisions in theory-driven research compared to nontheory exploratory research. A second way is to examine the heuristic ability of theories.

If theories offer guidance to designers of empirical studies, then those stud- ies should be more likely to avoid methodological weaknesses. For example, one methodological weakness in the media effects literature is the use of attribute vari- ables as surrogates for active influences. Researchers who design a study to test if a media effect is contingent on gender socialization patterns might ask their participants to simply respond whether they are a male or a female, which is a biological attribute but easy to measure. If these researchers instead were testing this claim made by an existing theory, then the theory is likely to provide them with a history of previous tests that would show that this operationalization was faulty and alert designers to use a specific test of gender socialization that has been validated. Therefore, if theories are useful in providing guidance to designers of empirical studies, then those studies should show a pattern of avoiding method- ological weaknesses compared to a pattern of studies that are exploratory.

To test this explanation, I examined articles of media effects published in six leading communication journals from 2010 to 2015 (Potter, 2018). I  recorded whether the study was theory guided, patterns of design decisions, and strength of findings as indicated by proportion of variance explained. Of the total of 211 arti- cles analyzed, 166 (78.7 %) mentioned at least one media effects theory. This figure is quite a bit higher than figures reported in previous content analyses. However, mentioning a theory is not the same as using a theory to guide the design of a study. Again using 211 studies as a base, about half of the coded articles mentioned at least one theory but did not use any of those theories to generate hypotheses; instead these studies either developed their own hypotheses (33.6 %) and tested them or developed their own model (16.6 %) and tested that new model. Only 59 (28.0 %) were theory driven, that is, the authors referenced an existing the- ory, deduced hypotheses from that theory, and conducted their study to test those hypotheses (Table 2.2).

I expected that the theory-driven studies as a group would exhibit lower per- centages of methodological weaknesses compared to the nontheory-driven studies. Furthermore, I expected that the theory-driven studies would exhibit findings that explained a higher proportion of variance compared to the nontheory-driven group of studies. This is not what I found. The general patterns found in my sample are shown in Table 2.3. Notice that the authors of 43.6 % of studies in the sample reported using an easy-to-measure attribute as a surrogate for an active influence and that this percentage was higher in the group of studies that were not theory driven compared to stud- ies that were theory driven, which is what I expected, but those differences were not large enough to be statistically significant. Out of the nine examined methodological

40 | FOUNDATIONS

Table 2.2. Methodological Patterns Widespread design problems 87.3 % measured the effect variable at only one point in time

Problem: Almost all media effects studies assume change, that is, media influence alters something in respondents. But in surveys, cross-sectional data are not adequate to suggest change. And in experiments, postexposure data alone are not adequate to suggest change, even when those single-point measures from individuals are averaged to form group means.

81.6 % used nonrepresentative samples Problem: The patterns from nonrepresentative samples cannot be generalized and there is no basis for the use of inferential statistics.

64.8 % measured mundane behaviors with self-reports Problem: Self-report data, especially about mundane behaviors and behavioral intentions, have repeatedly been found to have very low validity.

56.7 % reported inferential statistics without providing a basis to warrant their use. Problem: Inferential statistics require representative samples in order to make p-values meaningful. In experiments, random assignment of participants to conditions is required in order to make p-values meaningful.

54.0 % made no attempt to establish a case for validity of measures Problem: The default seems to be that all measures are valid.

43.6 % reported using attribute variables as surrogates for active influences Problem: Surface characteristics of individuals (such as sex and age) are not valid indicators of active factors (such as gender socialization, development cognitively, emotionally, morally)

Problems with design of experiments 86.3 % of experiments reported no balance check on the assignment of Ss to treatments

Problem: It is faulty to assume that treatment groups result in a balance of participants on the traits and key characteristics that are sensitive to the influence being tested. Even with random assignment of participants to treatment conditions, the probability of matching is infinitesimal.

72.6 % of experiments reported no manipulation check of their treatments Problem: The assumption that all participants in the same assigned condition experience the same treatment is faulty.

45.3 % of experiments indicated no random assignment of their participants to treatments Problem: Without random assignment of participants to experimental conditions, researchers have no basis for using inferential statistics, yet researchers still use these statistical procedures.

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 41

features, eight of them showed the theory-driven studies avoiding these methodolog- ical shortcomings slightly more often than the nontheory-driven studies, but these differences are too slight to be statistically significant. Also, surprisingly, the nonthe- ory-driven studies exhibited a pattern of explaining more variance (median =14.5 %) compared to theory-driven studies (9.8 %).

These findings provide a bit of support for the argument that theory-driven studies are more likely to have stronger designs in the sense they are more likely to avoid practices that we have come to realize are faulty in the general social science literature. However, the differences I found between theory-driven and nontheo- ry-driven studies are often tiny. For example, 65.5 % of nontheory-driven stud- ies used self-report measures of mundane behaviors compared to “only” 62.7 % of theory-driven studies. The bigger picture and more important finding here is that the media effects literature continues to be built on studies where designers

Table 2.3. Uniformity of Patterns Across Theory Usage

Data Gathering All ( %)

No Theory ( %)

Theory Deduced Hs ( %)

Tested Model ( %)

Sample Represent

19.4 20.5 28.0 16.6 X2 = 0.07 df = 2 p = .701

Attribute Surrogate

43.6 48.7 37.3 37.1 X2 = 2.80 df = 2 p = .247

Behavior Self-Report

64.8 65.5 62.7 65.7 X2 = 0.15 df = 2 p = .927

Validity Support

46.0 39.3 57.6 48.6 X2 = 5.41 df = 2 p = .067

Change Scores

12.7 11.8 16.9 8.6 X2 = 1.57 df = 2 p = .456

Experiment Method

45.0 41.9 49.2 48.6 X2 = 4.14 df = 4 p = .387

Random Assignment

55.3 51.0 64.3 52.9 X2 = 1.32 df = 2 p = .518

Balance Check

13.8 14.3 10.7 17.6 X2 = 0.44 df = 2 p = .801

Manipulation Check

27.7 24.5 28.6 35.3 X2 = 0.75 df = 2 p = .686

Median Variance Expl

13.8 14.5 9.8 18.2 F = 2.604 df = 2 p = .078

42 | FOUNDATIONS

frequently select weaker design options over stronger ones, even though given the size of the empirical literature of media effects, scholars should be well aware of these weaknesses.

Conclusion

The scholarly field of media effects has grown in many ways since its beginnings almost a century ago. Like all scholarly fields, it has faced many challenges as it has sought to generate and share knowledge about media effects. Arguably, the most important tool in engaging these tasks well is theory. While scholars have created a large number of theories over the years, it appears that only a handful of these theories are generally well known among scholars and have generated relatively large literatures of tests of their claims.

In the next section of this book, I will develop a strategy to analyze what can be regarded as the most important theories of media effects. Then I will systemat- ically use this strategy to critically analyze each of those core theories.

In his analysis of 20 years of journalism research, Wilbur Schramm (1957) reflected on how far the field of media studies had come since 1935 by look- ing at the pressing questions of the time. He cited the work of Malcolm Willey who took stock of research on journalism in 1936 and listed what the most important unanswered questions were about journalism in the United States: How many newspapers are there in the United States? How are these geographically distributed? How are the numbers changing, if at all? How many communities are there in the United States in which newspapers are published? Is the number increasing or decreasing? How many newspapers are published in each community? By 1957, journalism researchers had provided clear answers to all these questions and more. Schramm then laid out a series of questions for 1957 and among them were: What is the effect of violence in the mass media? Do media affect juvenile delinquency? How do the media influence public opinion? How can the media be used in teaching situations? How can textbooks be best used as a teaching aid?

Now 60 years later, we have made some varying progress on these ques- tions but we have yet to provide clear answers. Of course, Schramm’s set of 1957 questions were more challenging than Willey’s set of 1936 questions. But we have also had far more time and far more resources, yet we have only equivocal answers at best. Why?

THE FIELD OF MEDIA EFFEC TS | 43

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Berger, C. R. (1991). Communication theories and other curios. Communication Monographs,

58, 101–113. Berger, C. R. (1998). Processing quantitative data about risk and threat in news reports. Journal

of Communication, 48(3), 87–106. Bilandzic, H., & Busselle, R. W. (2008). Transportation and transportability in the cultivation of

genreconsistent attitudes and estimates. Journal of Communication, 58, 508–529. Blumler, J. G., & Katz, E. (1974). The uses of mass communications: Current perspectives on gratifi-

cations research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). The flow experience and its significance for human psychology.

In M. Csikszentmihalyi & I. S. Csikszentmihalyi (Eds.), Optimal experience: Psychological studies in flow in consciousness (pp. 15–35). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Davison, W. P. (1983). The third-person effect in communication. Public Opinion Quarterly, 47(1), 1–15. doi:10.1086/268763

Gerbner, G. (1969). Toward ‘cultural indicators:’ The analysis of mass mediated public message systems. AV Communication Review, 17(2), 137–148.

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis:  An essay on the organization of experience. New  York, NY: Harper & Row.

Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 701–721.

Hardt, H. (1992). Critical communication studies: Communication, history and theory in America. New York, NY: Routledge.

Jensen, K. B., & Rosengren, K. E. (1990). Five traditions in search of the audience. European Journal of Communication, 5, 207–238.

Kamhawi, R., & Weaver, D. (2003). Mass communication research trends from 1980 to 1999. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 80(1), 7–27.

Kuhn, T. (1970). The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lowry, S. A., & DeFleur, M. L. (1988). Milestones in mass communication research. New York, NY: Longman.

McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176. doi:10.1086/267990. ISSN 0033-362X

McQuail, D. (1989). Communication research: Past, present and future. In M. Ferguson (Ed.), Public communication: The new imperatives (pp. 135–151). London: Sage.

McQuail, D. (2005). McQuail ’s mass communication theory (5th ed.). London: Sage. Merton, R. K. (1967). On theoretical sociology. New York, NY: Free Press. Nabi, R. L., & Oliver, M. B. (Eds.). (2009). Media processes and effects. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

44 | FOUNDATIONS

Neuman, W. R., Davidson, R., Joo, S.-H., Park, Y. J., & Williams, A. E. (2008). The seven deadly sins of communication research. Journal of Communication, 58, 220–237.

Newcomb, H., & Hirsch, P. M. (1984). Television as a cultural forum: Implications for research. In W. Rowland & B. Watkins (Eds.), Interpreting television (pp.  58–73). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Pearce, K. J. (2009). Media and mass communication theories. In S. W. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss (Eds.), Encyclopedia of communication theory (pp. 623–627). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Pietila, V. (1994). Perspectives on our past: Charting the histories of mass communication stud- ies. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 11, 346–361.

Potter, W. J. (1999). On media violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Potter, W. J. (2009). Arguing for a general framework for mass media scholarship. Thousand Oaks,

CA: Sage. Potter, W. J. (2018). An analysis of patterns of design decisions in recent media effects research.

Review of Communication Research, 6, 1–29, doi:10.12840/issn.2255-4165.2018.06.01.014 Potter, W. J., Cooper, R., & Dupagne, M. (1993). The three paradigms of mass media research in

mainstream journals. Communication Theory, 3, 317–335. Potter, W. J., & Riddle, K. (2006, November). A content analysis of the mass media effects literature.

Paper presented at the annual convention of the National Communication Association, San Antonio, TX.

Potter, W. J., & Riddle, K. (2007). Profile of mass media effects research in scholarly journals. Journalism & Mass of Communication Quarterly, 84, 90–104.

Power, P., Kubey, R., & Kiousis, S. (2002). Audience activity and passivity. In W. B. Gudyknst (Ed.), Communication yearbook (Vol. 26, pp. 116–159). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Reeves, B., & Borgman, C. L. (1983). A bibliometric evaluation of core journals in communica- tion research. Human Communication Research, 10, 119–136.

Rice, R. E., Borgman, C. L., & Reeves, B. (1988). Citation networks of communication jour- nals, 1997–1985:  Cliques and positions, citations made and citations received. Human Communication Research, 15, 256–283.

Riffe, D., & Freitag, A. (1997). A content analysis of content analyses: Twenty-five years of Journalism Quarterly. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 74, 873–882.

Schramm, W. (1957). Twenty years of journalism research. Public Opinion Quarterly, 21, 91–107. So, C., & Chan, J. (1991, August). Evaluating and conceptualizing the field of mass communica-

tion: A survey of the core scholars. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the AEJMC, Boston.

Trumbo, C. W. (2004). Research methods in mass communication research: A census of eight journals 1990 to 2000. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 80(2), 417–436.

Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and cultural form. New York, NY: Schocken.