Suchergebnisse

Findings on attitude change (see SA 0749/C0249) are developed further to arrive at a workable tool to measure involvement in persuasive stimuli. TV & magazine media are compared in the context of a low involvement (LI) model & a high involvement (HI) model. Data on R's connections in response to commercial. & advertisements are presented in 6 tables. These data were obtained from testing F's at a shopping center in New Jersey as well as from several laboratory exercises. On their basis, 5 hyp's appeared justified: (1) Involvement with advertising tends to be highest when attention is directed to the editorial environment, less when it is directed to the advertising, & least when advertising is presented alone. (2) Involvement with advertising tends to be consistent with interest in the editorial environment, ie, greater interest carries over to produce HI. (3) Involvement tends to be higher for magazines than for TV with HI products, but no diff with LI products. (4) Involvement, as measured by a number of connections per minute, tends to be more sensitive than, & independent of, 2 other measures: (a) Starch Noting scores, & (b) seconds of stimulus exposure. (5) Involvement with specific stimuli tends to be more varied & consequently less predictable with products of intrinsically LI, while stimuli representing a HI product more often tended to share the same level of involvement. Finally, it is hyp'ed re advertising in particular that F's tend toward higher or more favorable involvement than M's. The diff may be viewed in terms of the woman's role as fam purchasing agent in US society. In the general theory of involvement presented it is suggested that the less highly involved men are more likely to be impulse buyers, while the more highly involved F's are more likely to be planful buyers of advertised goods & services. M. Maxfield.

R interest in TV commercials was judged by measuring the diameter.

The distinction between commercial & non-commercial use of.

4 TV commercials were pre-tested in varying orders of presentation with matched samples of R's. Spontaneous recall & liking for the commercials tended to form a U curve, with first & last positions eliciting most favorable response. This replication of H. Ebbinghaus' U curve finding, first noted in memorization of nonsense syllables over 40 yrs ago is taken, along with other evidence, to indicate that many principles of skill learning also apply in the marketplace to affective learning, ie, to the learning of likes & dislikes for commercial products & messages. AA.

To provide guidance for supermarket planners with respect to areas of store layouts that create conflict & tension, a nonverbal technique was sought to obtain shoppers' perceptions of supermarkets before further direct questioning. For this purpose 50 R's were supplied with a pencil without eraser & a sheet of 8.5 (mean - average) 11 white bond paper on which a rectangle 5.5 (mean - average) 7 inches was drawn in advance. As R's finished the drawing formal interviewing began. Of primary importance were the store departments omitted, the order in which departments were drawn, & relative space given to each department. Supermarket departments varied in frequency of omission, of first order inclusion & in discrepancy between actual & perceived size. The data vividly represent R's feelings & illustrate other interview findings thereby enhancing communication with store planners & design personnel. AA.

A discussion of the motivations of R's for cooperating with interviewer, as well as adaptations in interviewing method made necessary by those motivations. 65 interviews were cotlected in New York & Chicago between 1950 & 1952. Most R's were approached without prior warning & 75% of those contacted agreed to meet interviewer & hear description of project; none refused cooperation after initial meeting, & the interview thereafter involved 2 3-hour sessions, although it was necessary to spend as many as 30 hours with particularly well informed R's. 4 basic needs seemed to underly the cooperativeness: for catharsis, guidance, pol'al participation, &, ego-enhancement. (1) Catharsis was by all odds the most common & powerful need encountered & was most common among intellectuals (such interviews tended to be long, involve intimate personal detail, concerned far more with biographical data than org'al material). (2) Guidance needs dealt primarily with kinds of tangible problems people in category (1) were equally likely to have. The diff was that R's here were having problems at the time & were more concerned with them_ per se than with a more general & deeper catharsis. (3) Political participation needs seemed to fall into 2 sub-groups: (a) R who looked upon the study as an opportunity to strike back at communism & expose it, & (b) those who were socialists before & after their period of communist party membership (in most cases they came from socialist families). In both groups there seemed to be strong emotional att's of the `there is only one way to fight communism' variety. Interviews here were the easiest, & R's were much less aware of the interviewer as a person. In a sense he was treated as a recorder of R's opinions & nothing more. (4). Ego-enhancement needs were encountered with a variety of R's ranging from self-styled expert to expert. The ideal R was one who had a minimum of prior overt 'rehearsal' & who could therefore be reasonably spontaneous in the interview situation. The most valuable interviews here involved R's who had broad pol'al sci interest, superior intelligence, had full-time participation In responsible Party posts for 4 or more yrs after 1930, &/or the general org'al `know-how'. These were on occasion such people as trade union leaders. These R's tended to focus more on org'al than biographical data. In all cases the interviewer was treated as a student coming to be tutored & had to show a combination of both limited ignorance to encourage careful explanation, & understanding to appreciate the signif & value of explanations given. That R's felt a strong need for this kind of appreciation must be understood in terms of his intellectual isolation from society. In early stages of the project these interviews were quite difficult, especially because of lack of documentation, & the interviewer is still not aware of any soc sci curricula dealing with the requirements of this kind of interview. H. H. Smythe.

The publicity given motivation research (MR) in national magazines in 1955 was the result, not of MR's newness as a technique, but rather because of the conflict it had aroused among professional pollsters. The conflict among pollsters was not due to any signif sci'fic controversy over the merits of MR, since its merits had long been recognized, but was due rather to the desire of the advertising world for an alternative to 'nose-counting'. S. F. Fava.