Suchergebnisse

A cross sectional survey of newly naturalized U.S. citizens, during the month preceding the 1988 U.S. presidential election, uses within-media measures of exposure, attention, and recall to explore the influences of newspapers, television news, and television ads on political knowledge of new voters. Controlling for traditional indicators of immigrant political socialization, each channel made a separate, significant contribution to issue learning. For newspapers and television news, questions about attention were the strongest predictor items. Recall of television ads, a measure designed specifically for this study, had the greatest predictive strength.

The proposition that consistency among people's knowledge (K), attitudes (A), and behaviors (B) is contingent on high levels of involvement was tested in a long-term health intervention campaign. Support varied depending upon the indicator of involvement used. Cognitive involvement with the health topic, as indicated by number of responses to an open-ended question about heart disease, produced the clearest support. Using LISREL procedures, high K-A, K-B, and A-B correlations were found only in the high cognitive response group. Affective indicators of involvement produced mixed support. Perceived risk of heart disease was related to K-A-B consistency in a direction opposite to the hypothesis, but extremity of affective response was associated with the predicted high K-B correlation. A behavioral indicator of involvement based on reading the campaign literature produced results consistent with the hypothesis, although less so as the campaign progressed. The experimental health education campaign produced no discernible effect on K-A-B consistency, despite gains in knowledge itself.

This article tests the traditional two-part hypothesis that partisan predispositions motivate a person to be selectively exposed to political campaign communications, which in turn serve to reinforce those original predispositions. Five hundred one pairs of adolescents and their parents in Wisconsin were interviewed both early and late in the 1980 presidential campaign year. There is some evidence of selective exposure among the adolescents, less among the parents. Exposure to the campaigns of both candidates is associated with greater liking at the end of the campaign, with precampaign liking controlled. These positive effects of exposure contradict the notion that "reinforcement" would include a "negative reinforcement" effect with regard to the opposition candidate. The positive effects do not interact statistically with party identification, which indicates that partisan predispositions do not heighten any presumed reinforcement effect of exposure. In only one of four tests of a causal model in which partisan predispositions are treated as exogenous to the campaign and selective exposure as endogenous is there an indirect path from predispositions to postcampaign liking via selective exposure. This finding, which is limited to the effect of party identification of the adolescents, is more readily explained as the result of a single-object orientation toward the political campaign than it is by the hypothesis that selective exposure is a mechanism for reinforcement.

Two related propositions about legitimation as a function of an election were tested with data from a panel study of Wisconsin residents during the fall 1976 presidential campaign. The hypothesis that public confidence in governmental institutions would increase during the campaign period was supported, and these increases were associated with heavier exposure to the campaign and to the Ford-Carter debates. No support was found for the hypothesis that the candidate the person was not voting for would become more favorably evaluated as a function of the campaign. Evaluations of the candidate voted for improved over time; this change was associated most strongly with interpersonal discussion rather than with exposure to the campaign via media.

Several research models developed in recent years in postindustrial societies are applied to a field setting in Venezuela where mass media are highly advanced but the society remains highly stratified in education, income, and other socioeconomic hierarchies. Indices of functional uses and avoidances of the media show strong consistency across media and are good predictors of media use patterns. Simple exposure to the media, rather than motivations for use or avoidance, is the better type of predictor of knowledge gained from media, however. Evidence of a "correlation function" based on a common agenda of public issues set by the media is weak.