Suchergebnisse

In this study, college students were exposed to the final 2004 Bush—Kerry televised presidential debate. Participants were randomly assigned to one of five presentation conditions (i.e., ABC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News, and PBS). Using a pretest—posttest experimental design, participants rated the candidates on 12 personal and professional attributes. A feeling thermometer also assessed whether the participants' feelings toward the candidates changed following the debate. The results suggest that various presentation styles influenced perceptions of Kerry on the attributes of success and friendliness and on the feeling thermometer. Changes in perceptions on the attribute of strength were also found for Bush.

This article suggests a theoretical explanation of the processes related to recall and learning of media news information. It does so by linking the concepts of schematic thinking and the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) to the variable of time. It argues that learning from the news may be better than many recent studies suggest. Although humans may have trouble recalling discrete news stories in recall examinations, it seems likely that they acquire "common knowledge" from the news media. Time is an important variable in helping people to remember news if they use it to think about new information in the context of previously stored knowledge.

Studies of political consumerism among young citizens are a relatively recent development. In this study, the authors use Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory of child development as a first attempt to build an explanatory model of teens' socialization into political consumption behaviors. Structural equation modeling indicates that certain cultural factors (e.g., church attendance, parent education) influence micro-level systems within which children might acquire political consumer behaviors (including parent-child interaction, school activities related to politics, and online media use). Implications are discussed.

Research on adolescent political and civic engagement has focused on a wide variety of socializing agents, including parents, school, peers, and the media. This study builds an explanatory model that connects macro-level (e.g., religion, education) and micro-level (parents, school curricula, and media) socialization agents. Using the ecological systems model of child development, the study shows a pattern of influence involving parents' political engagement and civic engagement, as well as teens' use of online political media. Media influence in the context of other factors is noted, along with the model's implications for further research on political socialization.