Don D. Smith

COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY AND THE PERCEPTION OF OTHERS' OPINIONS

Public opinion researchers are keenly aware of the many areas of ignorance that exist among respondents questioned on relatively simple matters. But how does knowledge of the facts really affect ones opinions? In a pioneering effort the author uses consistency theory to test empirically several hypotheses regarding the relation of knowledge and opinion. Don D. Smith is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Florida State University, Tallahassee.

AMERICA'S SHORT-WAVE AUDIENCE: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

The last time the American audience for international political broadcasts was examined was in the early 1940s. Reporting on an intensive re-examination of this audience twenty-five years later, the author finds that it consists of two distinct groups whose listening serves different purposes and who differ from each other on a variety of demographic characteristics as well. Don D. Smith is Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida State University.

Radio Moscow's North American Broadcasts: An Exploratory Study

Since 1950, there has been a tremendous increase in short-wave radio broadcasting as part of the growth of international political communications. While we are probably correct when we attribute little effectiveness to those broadcasts assumed to be seeking opinion conversion,l there has been little recent investigation of short-wave broadcasts to American audiences. Having noted previously the possibility of a selfexposed audience in the United States to Radio MOSCOW,~ this report presents the results obtained from a small study which examined the effect on a group of Americans of Radio Moscow’s North American broadcasts under controlled conditions. The research design consists of 61 respondents, divided into one experimental group and two control groups. Each group was composed of college students and adult townspeople, all of whom volunteered their participation. Each group was given before-and-after, 30-minute interviews on the respondents’ views about the Soviet government and other issues. The experimental group (34 respondents) was exposed to an average of two hours broadcasting per week, each week for three months,