Challenges to Selective Exposure: Selective Seeking and Avoidance in a Multitasking Media Environment

The present research investigated selective exposure online, treating selective seeking and selective avoidance as independent phenomena. A behavior tracking measure was employed. Study 1 used an online quasi-experiment with voluntary national samples (n = 271). Consistent with early reviews on selective exposure, participants sought out attitude consonant information but did not systematically avoid attitude dissonant information compared to neutral information. Study 2 involved an experiment with student samples (n = 185) to examine the impact of cognitive load on selective behavior. The results revealed that those who were asked to multitask during an information search did not exercise any selectivity in information selection. The implications of information selection behavior in a multitasking media environment are discussed.     

Techniques for Measuring Selective Exposure: A Critical Review

Prior research has identified selective exposure (i.e., the tendency to consume information that is consistent with one's existing beliefs) as a phenomenon that may reduce the likelihood that individuals are exposed to diverse information or perspectives. However, weaknesses associated with techniques commonly used to measure selective exposure have led to ambiguity in the interpretation of past results and inconsistency in findings across studies. This paper provides a review of previous research that has investigated selective exposure, particularly in a political context, by measuring participants' retrospective reports of exposure to prior information, by assessing behavioral intentions to consume information in the future, by observing selective exposure behavior directly, or by investigating aggregated behavioral information recorded over a period of time. These prior methods are critically evaluated and recommendations are made which should improve the measurement of selective exposure and consequently the validity and reliability of downstream findings stemming from research in this area.     

Expanding the Scope of Selective Exposure: An Objective Approach to Measurement of Media Ideology

The literature on selective exposure has made inestimable advances in our understanding of media and its effect on politics and the general public. However, much of the research on this topic has relied on potentially inaccurate assumptions. In our paper we apply an open-source, publicly available, high-dimensional measurement of meaning through word co-occurrence context (Shaoul & Westbury, 2010), which has historically been applied to questions of semantic relationships between words. This method allows scholars to avoid pitfalls from previous assumptions and determine previously unknown ideological positions of previously unknown sources. We demonstrate the validity and range of this method and provide a series of best practices for scholars who wish to employ this tool in their own research. Our method will ultimately expand the variety of research questions available as well as improving inferences, opening up new lines of research for scholars studying media consumption and political behavior.     

Examining Perceived Violence in and Enjoyment of Televised Rivalry Sports Contests

The scholarly attention paid to the ways in which television viewers perceive sports action as violent, how perceptions may differ across games, and how perceptions might impact enjoyment is limited. The current project extends the literature by investigating perceived violence and enjoyment across different intercollegiate (American) football contests between two heated rivals. A total of 568 individuals viewed one of four televised contests featuring the same hometown team: two against heated rivals, two against nonrivals. Results reveal that viewers clearly perceived rivalry games to be more violent than nonrivalry games. Moreover, games won by the hometeam were seen as more violent than those lost. Also, those perceiving high levels of violence reported greater enjoyment than those who perceived low levels of violence in all games. Finally, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that perceived violence contributes differently to the enjoyment of games won than to games lost. Possible explanations for and implication of the findings are offered.     

Contagious Media Effects: How Media Use and Exposure to Game-Framed News Influence Media Trust

The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which trust in media is affected by personal media use and the framing of politics as a strategic game. The study is based on a four-wave panel survey matched with media content data, which allows us to investigate not only correlations but also individual-level effects on media trust. In accordance with previous research, our analyses show that the use of specific media types leads to more trust in those specific media. The results also show that media framing of politics as a strategic game has a negative effect on trust in the media. The more citizens are exposed to game-framed news, the less they tend to trust the media, with the exception of tabloid newspapers. Overall, these results lend support to the assumption of contagious effects of game-framed news. In a concluding section, we sum up our results and discuss the implications of our findings.     

Entertainment-Oriented Gratifications of Sports Media: Contributors to Suspense,Hedonic Enjoyment,and Appreciation

This survey study investigated contributors to viewers' hedonic enjoyment, appreciation, and emotional responses to a televised baseball game. There was an indirect relationship between athlete affinity and hedonic enjoyment by way of suspense. This relationship was moderated by the game's outcome such that suspense was associated more strongly with enjoyment when the viewer's team lost. Interest and knowledge of a player was the form of affinity that had a stronger relationship to suspense, rather than the viewers' sense of having a virtual friendship. Virtual friendship and sport involvement were associated directly with appreciation. Enjoyment and appreciation were associated with different emotional responses. Whereas enjoyment was associated with stronger positive and weaker negative emotions, appreciation was associated with stronger positive, negative, and meaningful emotions.     

Re-presenting Sport: How Instant Replay and Perceived Violence Impact Enjoyment of Mediated Sports

Several long-standing theories intersect in discussing the impact of community characteristics and of the mass media. The structural pluralism model popularized by Tichenor and his colleagues says that social structure influences how mass media operate in communities because they respond to how power is distributed in the social system, whereas the linear model says that the increasing size of a community's population leads to more social differentiation and diversity and corresponding increases in subcultures with their own beliefs, customs, and behaviors. Recently, there has been a concern about how changes in society have led to a decline in organizational activity and the network of relationships and trust that constitute “social capital.” This article examines the impact of population and diversity (using census data) on individuals’ media use, interpersonal discussion and civic engagement (measured in a national survey), and the relationship among these variables. Analysis of a structural model provides evidence that the “linear hypothesis” can be combined with structural pluralism, with size—measured by population—impacting diversity, which influences the relationships that people have with their community. Concurrently, social categories influence people's communication patterns and community relationships, and communication impacts civic engagement.     

Measuring Exposure to Media with Antisocial and Prosocial Content: An Extended Version of the Content-based Media Exposure Scale (C-ME2)

The present research developed a measure for exposure to both antisocial and prosocial media content by revising and extending a previous Content-based Media Exposure Scale (C-ME). The validity and reliability of the C-ME2 was tested in two independent samples (N = 678), among young adults (Study 1) and adolescents (Study 2). Results of Confirmatory Factor Analyses showed good fit, in both studies, for both antisocial and prosocial dimensions of media content, and for both males and females. Furthermore, the C-ME2 explains unique variance beyond previous measures of violent and general media exposure. Evidence is presented of reliability, discriminant and predictive validity of the C-ME2, measuring both frequency and exposure to specific content of media. The C-ME2 covers all media platforms, is easy to use in all research designs, and allows for standardization and systematic comparisons across studies.     

Judging the Degree of Violence in Media Portrayals: A Cross-Genre Comparison

This study tests the relative importance of different factors of television narratives in how they influence people's judgments of how violent those narratives are. After watching 1 of 3 videotapes of a violent narrative, 99 college students answered a series of questions about their interpretations of the violence. It was found that participants' judgments about the degree of violence in the narratives were more strongly associated with their perceptions of the graphicness of the violent acts and the harm to the victims than with other factors such as the number of violent acts or the seriousness of those acts. Thus, people's judgments of the degree of violence in television programs differs from researchers' conceptualization. Implications of these differences are discussed.     

A Meta-Analytical Review of Family Communication Patterns and their Associations with Information Processing,Behavioral, and Psychosocial Outcomes

This meta-analysis reviews the findings of 56 studies (n=19,745) examining the associations among family communication patterns (i.e., conversation and conformity orientations) and information-processing, behavioral, and psychosocial outcomes. When both conversation and conformity orientations are considered collectively, the cumulative evidence indicates a small, but meaningful relationship between family communication patterns and overall outcomes (r=.285). Similar overall effect sizes were observed for conversation (r=.262) and conformity orientations (r=.253), though the average effect size for conversation orientation and psychosocial outcomes (r=.460) was greater in magnitude than those obtained for information processing (r=.238) or behavioral outcomes (r=.276). Slightly larger effect sizes were observed when researchers used the Revised Family Communication Patterns scale (r=.332) as compared with the Family Communication Patterns scale (r=.261), though this difference in magnitude was statistically non-significant. Collectively, the results suggest that family communication patterns have a meaningful association with a variety of cognitive activities and relational behaviors, as well as individual well-being.     

A Meta-Analytical Review of the Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Interaction and its Associations with Individual,Relational, and Communicative Outcomes

This meta-analysis reviews the findings of 74 studies (N = 14,255) examining the associations between the demand/withdraw pattern of interaction and individual, relational, and communicative outcomes. When both the individual behaviors of demanding and withdrawing and the pattern of demand/withdraw are considered collectively, the cumulative evidence indicates a moderate, meaningful relationship between demand/withdraw and overall outcomes (r=.360). Similar overall effect sizes were observed for wife demand/husband withdraw (r=.380) and husband demand/wife withdraw (r=.392), although the overall effect size for demand/withdraw patterns in studies that included distressed/clinical participants (r=.413) was greater in magnitude than that obtained for studies that included nondistressed participants (r=.345). On average, higher correlations were observed for relational (r=.423) and communicative outcomes (r=.418) than for demographic (r=.239) and well-being outcomes (r=.249).     

Changing Media Coverage of Violence Against Women

This article reports on recent research on some of the factors that may have led to changes in the way journalists report Violence Against Women (VAW) in Australia. Until recently, VAW has been largely reported by focusing on seemingly isolated events, rather than reporting VAW as a social problem, which has complex causes and requires a society-wide response. We report here on intensive interviews in two Australian newsrooms, both of which made decisions to campaign for social change on the issue of VAW. Two major themes that were evident in the interviews were, first, the influence of individual cases and, secondly, the important role of individual journalists and editors in driving coverage. We then examine the extent to which participants in our research saw VAW as an issue of gender inequality. We conclude with a brief discussion that places this journalism within the context of the work over more than 40 years of VAW activists and others to have VAW recognised as a social problem.     

中外传媒关于财富论坛报道的比较研究

’99财富全球论坛上海年会早已闭幕,一场中外媒体新闻大战的硝烟也已散去。正像《财富》给上海带来财富一样,这场新闻战也给新闻界留下了许多“财富”。本文就几个方面比较一下中外媒体报道的不同和我们从中得到的若干启示。     

The Reliability and Temporal Stability of Self-reported Media Exposure: A Meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

The measurement of media exposure is essential to not only traditional audience research, but also media effects research which relies on accurate estimates of media exposure. Even in the age of digital trace data and passive audience measurement, the workhorse of basically all communication research is self-report data. This article presents a meta-analysis of the reliability and temporal stability of media exposure self-reports in 33 panel studies. Results from a Bayesian multilevel analysis show that self-reported media exposure was moderately reliable (0.69, 90% HDI: 0.65, 0.72) and highly stable (0.90, 90% HDI: 0.88, 0.92). In line with previous studies, the reliability of media exposure measures was higher in adult samples (0.72, 90% HDI: 0.69, 0.76) compared to adolescents (0.60, 90% HDI: 0.53, 0.66). Rank-order stability of media exposure was comparable in adult (0.91, 90% HDI: 0.89, 0.93) and adolescent samples (0.85, 90% HDI: 0.81, 0.90). Moderation analyses showed that self-reported exposure to specific outlets was more reliable than general media use in adult samples. Media-specific differences in reliability were only found in adolescent samples. Overall, moderate reliability in combination with high temporal stability poses important challenges for scholars investigating causes and consequences of media exposure.     

The Effect of Perpetrator Motive and Dispositional Attributes on Enjoyment of Television Violence and Attitudes Toward Victims

Previous research (Zillmann & Bryant, 1975 Zillmann, D. and Bryant, J. 1975. Viewer's moral sanction of retribution in the appreciation of dramatic presentations.. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 11: 572–582. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggests that over-retributive and under-retributive violent acts are deemed unjust, enjoyed less, and influence attitudes toward perpetrators and victims of violence. This study extends this research to examine how disposition and motive influence enjoyment and liking of victims and perpetrators. An experiment manipulating perpetrator disposition and motive for violence showed that liking for neutral targets is decreased by incongruous perpetrator disposition and motive, whereas liking for perpetrator was affected only by motive. Balance Theory is offered to explain how dispositional considerations influence the evaluation of characters and other features of a story line.     

中国传媒经济发展历程——行业发展与理论路径

中国传媒经济学研究虽然是从1978年开始起步的,但是,中国的传媒经济活动自新中国成立时起就开始了.60年来,中国传媒经济学的形成过程大致可区分为三个阶段,即萌芽阶段、发展阶段、成熟阶段.到2008年,一个完整的、具有中国特色的中国传媒经济学体系已经形成,其标志是:中国传媒经济学的一个核心理论、三大应用传播学理论体系和十二个分支理论体系以及五十八个理论假设都经过了传媒实践的检验,得到了社会的认可,并成为我国传媒界行为的一种思想武器.     

Caught in the Act: Measuring Selective Exposure to Experimental Online Stimuli

Several techniques are available to measure an individual's selective exposure to online content, but only a few investigations have examined actual selective exposure to online stimuli experimentally generated and manipulated. We discuss a successfully implemented approach specifically developed for this purpose. By providing researchers with a combined record of observational selective exposure data and self-report data, the approach we describe here offers selective exposure investigators the opportunity to examine the joint impact of media content features and media user characteristics on selective exposure. Its theoretical and methodological foundations, applicability for a wide array of research questions, and the limitations of this approach are discussed.     

网络媒介语境下的网民暴力分析

本文从网民暴力产生的语境的三个要素话语方式、话语范围、话语风格探讨了该现象产生的原因,并认为对待网络暴力这个新媒介的新生现象应抱以宽容的态度,但同时应通过软控制来规避网络暴力现象.