Vincent Price

Switching Trains of Thought The Impact of News Frames on Readers' Cognitive Responses

This study investigated how journalistic story frames can affect the thoughts and feelings of readers. Two hundred and seventy-eight students participated in two studies, reading and responding to a fictitious story about possible reductions in state funding of their university. Stories were presented in one of four randomly assigned versions, all containing the same information, but varying in their opening and closing paragraphs according to the frame employed: human interest, conflict, or personal consequences. A control version contained the common body only. In Study 1, thoughts listed by participants indicated that the news frames—although they had no influence on the volume of cognitive responses—significantly affected the topical focus and evaluative implications of thoughts generated. In Study 2, evaluations and opinions offered by participants indicated that the news frames also subtly could affect audience decision making about matters of public policy. Implications for shaping public opinion are discussed.

Third-Person Effects of News Coverage: Orientations Toward Media

This research focused on empirical connections between third-person effects and media orientations - general beliefs about news and characteristic uses of the news media. The study examined the contributions of three groups of independent variables, including political factors, media schemas, and media use, to third-person effects. Results of regression analyses suggest that each of the three groups of variables is modestly related to the magnitude of third-person effects, but none individually has great predictive power or necessarily alters third-person effects in a given news scenario. Finally, the mechanisms by which different variables influence the magnitude of third-person effects clearly vary. Overall, the results suggest only modest connections between individual differences in media orientations and the tendency to exhibit third- person effects.

PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT AIDS POLICIES THE ROLE OF MISINFORMATION AND ATTITUDES TOWARD HOMOSEXUALS

In an effort to better understand the cognitive and attitudinal factors underlying public opinion on AIDS-related issues, this article proposes and empirically tests a model of the relationships between (1) knowledge of HIV transmission, specifically the misinformation that AIDS can be transmitted easily through casual contact with HIV-infected persons; (2) attitudes toward homosexuals, the most prominent of the social groups presently affected by the AIDS crisis; and (3) support for restrictive public policies aimed at HIV-infected persons. Data from two nationally representative surveys conducted in December of 1985 (N = 2,308) and in July of 1987 (N = 2,095) provide evidence that misinformation about AIDS transmission and negative attitudes toward homosexuals are strong predictors of support for stringent restrictions of persons with AIDS. The findings also suggest that several background factors, in particular, education and political liberalism, may also play decisive roles in influencing levels of support for restricting those infected with the AIDS virus.

THE POLLS—A REVIEW: EXIT POLLS IN THE 1989 VIRGINIA GUBERNATORIAL RACE: WHERE DID THEY GO WRONG?

In spite of common problems associated with sampling, question wording, and interviewing procedures, well-designed exit polls-in which voters are briefly interviewed as they leave the ballot booth-generally provide accurate projections of election outcomes (see, e.g., Mitofsky and Waksberg 1989). The fact that some recent exit polls have been considerably off the mark, then, has surprised many professionals. Moreover, recent misestimates of election outcomes have helped fuel public suspicion about the inaccuracies of polls in general (Clymer 1989; Davidson 1989). One very prominent incident occurred in the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial election. In that contest, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder narrowly defeated his Republican opponent, J. Marshall Coleman, winning by barely two-tenths of one percentage point. Yet an experienced research firm, Mason-Dixon Opinion Research (MDOR), conducted an exit poll for several television stations in Virginia and Washington, DC, and estimated an easy Wilder victory-by a 10-percentage-point margin (55-45 percent). This 5-percentage-point discrepancy was well outside the bounds of normal sampling error. In the same survey, however, MDOR accurately estimated an easy victory for the Democratic incumbent attorney general, Mary Sue Terry.

A Comparative Analysis of the Performance of Alternative Measures of Exposure

This paper compares eight approaches to measurement of exposure to cancer information in the mass media: general media exposure, exposure to health media, attention to health topics, quantity of health information, general and specific cancer exposure assessed by closed- and by open-ended questions. After demographic controls, the strongest predictor of cancer knowledge was the open-ended general measure (9.8% additional variance), then open-ended and closed-ended measures about diet and exercise (each 6.7%), attention to health topics (6.2%), quantity of health information (4.1%), and health media exposure (3.7%). General media exposure was not associated. However, other validity criteria lead to different conclusions: attention measures may confound motivation with exposure, and there may be upward bias in using knowledge to validate open-ended exposure measures; considering face validity, survey costs and respondent burden as well as criterion validity, we propose that the closed-ended specific questions may be most useful.

On the Public Aspects of Opinion: Linking Levels of Analysis in Public Opinion Research

A new information-processing paradigm, drawing heavily upon concepts generated by the cognitive sciences, has emerged in research on mass communication and public opinion. To make significant contributions to public opinion theory, however, this new cognitive paradigm must properly incorporate the “public” aspects of opinion formation—finding suitable ways to link individual-level information processing to the higher-level processes of public communication and social organization. Fundamental to public opinion theory is the notion that members of a public organize collectively through communication over a point of conflict. Researching this communicative process requires the analysis of cognition and opinion formation as individual-level phenomena that operate within, and that are thus largely dependent upon, the wider social context of public debate and collective organization. It is suggested that current developments in social identification theory may be particularly important in helping us to understand better how a mass of individuals can become a structured public through communication.

Television, Reading, and Reading Achievement A Reappraisal

The relationship between TV use and reading achievemet is reappraised, using data from a 3-year panel study. Strong and significant bivariate correlations replicate the findings of previous studies and support the contention that television use is negatively associated with reading achievement. As increasingly sophisticated analytic techniques are applied to the data, however, the relationships are seen to become progressively weaker, more ambiguous, and less compelling. When the LISREL model is used to tease apart the effects of true change from unreliability in the measures and to account for the stability of the variables over time, three patterns become apparent. First, all three variables of interest in this 3-year panel study−reading skills, TV viewing time, and reading time−are highly intercorrelated at the outset. Second, each of the three variables remains highly stable over the entire period of the study; relatively little variance in our sample measures appears to reflect true change. Finally, what change there is in reading time or in reading skills does not seem to be related consistently to time spent viewing television. Nor does time spent reading nonschool materials seem to predict increases in reading skills to any great extent. It is suggested that the entire question of the influence of out-of-school media use on reading achievement requires a far more sophisticated approach than has been typically applied in the past.

Motivations, Goals, Information Search, and Memory about Political Candidates

This study investigated the ways in which motivations and goals affect patterns of political information-seeking and the consequent structure of memory about candidates. Undergraduate participants used a computerized system that displayed different layers of information aboutfictional political candidates; the system recorded the strategies they used to search through this information. Results showed that motivations to engage in effortful processing produced tendencies to engage in within-candidate searches, better recall, and memory structures clustered by candidate. The goal of forming impressions of the candidates, which was expected to lead to within-candidate searching, was in fact modestly associated with weaker tendencies to do so, once effort was taken into account. Impression-formation goals, however, were associated with less attribute-based memory structures. The findings confirm that the manner in which people acquire candidate information has important consequences for the way they store that information in memory, and that these processes vary according to individual motivations and goals.

The Impact of Varying Reference Periods in Survey Questions about Media Use

Data from a representative, national sample of American adults are used to examine the impact of varying reference periods (the “past week” as opposed to a “typical week”) in survey questions about mass media use. Results from a split-sample experiment comparing the alternative question wordings suggest that providing respondents with the more specific and recent time period (i.e., the “past week”) results in significantly lower overall reports of usage across a variety of media. Results further suggest the potential atypicality of the narrower time period, which might in principle adversely affect the validity of responses, is not a serious concern.

Cross-Level Challenges for Communication Research Epilogue

The articles appearing in this special issue illustrate both the opportunities and the difficulties involved in cross-level communication theory and research.1 They highlight many of the key concepts and questions that surface in discussions of levels of analysis, and extend our thinking about several topical domains within the field by exploring cross-level relationships. The articles also present a variety of arguments, criticisms, and often conflicting suggestions. In short, these essays faithfully reflect the complexities and confusions that attend efforts to close what has been termed “the micro-macro gap” (Eulau, 1986, chap. 3). In this epilogue, we offer our own reflections on some of the issues raised and positions taken in the articles. Because the notion of crossing levels in research implicates both our methods of inquiry and the structure of our theories in various ways, our outline is twofold. First, we discuss some basic conceptual and methodological considerations for cross-level research. Next we turn to matters of theory construction, discussing more generally the ways in which communication researchers can achieve better cross-level theory and research. Along the way, we hope to illustrate some key points of convergence among the articles.