Lennert Coenen

Reconceptualizing Cultivation: Implications for Testing Relationships Between Fiction Exposure and Self-Reported Alcohol Use Evaluations

ABSTRACT This article responds to calls for conceptual clarification in the media effects domain by providing a definition for attitudinal cultivation effects. Our definition contains 5 core characteristics: the (a) linear effects of (b) repeated media exposure on (c) the evaluation as given by memory associations (d) strengthened by and (e) valenced in line with those media messages. We reason that, when accepting this definition, the cultivation hypothesis predicts effects of repeated media use on evaluations to primarily occur at the level of gut evaluations given by automatically activated memory associations. Corroborating this logic for the effects of alcohol use portrayals in television fiction, we find the relationship between fiction exposure and self-reported alcohol use evaluations to be (a) moderated by speed of expressing those evaluations and (b) mediated by responses to self-reports tapping into gut feelings. The implications of these findings for future media effects studies are discussed.

The problem with our attitude: A meta-theoretical analysis of attitudinal media effects research

ABSTRACT While most studies on attitudinal media effects are concerned with a comparable scientific question they do not always coincide in their theoretical approach. In the present paper, we show that this state of affairs has caused controversies about the meaning and testability of specific types of attitudinal media effects – in particular, framing, cultivation, priming, and persuasion effects. We argue that such disagreements are misguided and could be prevented by adopting four Principles as a meta-theoretical basis for all studies on attitudinal media effects. We show what these Principles imply for theory formulation, and we discuss how they relate to empirical falsification procedures.

The Bridget Jones Effect: The Relationship Between Exposure to Romantic Media Contents and Fear of Being Single Among Emerging Adults.

Based on cultivation theory, this study examines whether an individual’s exposure to romantic media contents would be significantly related to their fear of being single. Analyses on a cross-sectional sample of 18- to 25-year olds (N = 821) did not show a significant overall relationship between exposure to romantic media contents and fear of being single, but moderation results indicated that this relationship did exist for women who were single themselves. Suggesting that romantic media contents might contribute to the fear of being single only for specific members of this genre’s audience, these findings could have general implications for theorizing on cultivation-type media effects.

The Bricklayer Effect: How Accounting for Method Bias Affects First-Order Cultivation Relationships

Although the issue of method bias is a well-known threat to the validity of self-reports, it has seldom been addressed in empirical media effects studies. This may be problematic because independent and dependent variables are often measured using similar methods. Thus, reported correlations may not only reflect common variance between the constructs of interest but also indicate common variance between the measurement methods. In this article, we present two cultivation studies investigating to what extent first-order cultivation relationships are influenced by common method variance. In both studies, controlling for a theoretically unrelated marker variable (Study 1: the estimated prevalence of bakers; Study 2: the estimated prevalence of bricklayers) diminished correlations between television-viewing frequency and prevalence estimates. This finding, referred to as the bricklayer effect, suggests a more thorough discussion on common method variance in cultivation research is needed.