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Lerner's hypothesis of a "revolution of rising frustrations" as expectations generated by mass media outraced economic growth in developing countries has been widely accepted. Yet neither existing data nor much of current thinking about mass media social effects would support such a theory. In a three-year panel study of EI Salvadoran junior high school students, the relationship of early mass media use to subsequent change in social expectation is traced. Clear evidence related an increase in educational and occupational aspirations and a decrease in desire to live in an urban area to increased television exposure. These results were interpreted to suggest that media affects expectation only insofar as other elements of the social environment reinforce such changes.

This study explores the relationship between exposure to U.S. media coverage of chemical threats to pediatric environmental health and mothers' behaviors to protect their children. Prior content analytic work revealed that media coverage volume from September 2012 to February 2013 differed significantly by type of chemical (i.e., pesticides = high coverage volume; bisphenol A [BPA] = moderate; and arsenic = low). Survey data collected from new and expecting mothers in March 2013 (n = 822) revealed mothers incidentally encountered—or scanned—this information in the media in the prior six months, and after adjusting for a series of potential confounders, such scanning was positively associated with mothers' self‐reported behaviors to reduce chemical exposures. To test the hypothesis that coverage volume moderates the relationship between scanning and behavior, content analysis and survey data were combined in mixed effects regression analyses. Results showed significant differences between the effects of media scanning at different levels of coverage volume, but in a direction not entirely consistent with the study's hypothesis. The relationship between scanning and behavior was strongest for BPA, suggesting that a characteristic of media coverage other than volume may drive maternal responses to environmental health threats. Implications of these findings for risk communication research and practice are discussed.

There are disturbing racial disparities in many health outcomes. However, do health communicators know how to do interventions that redress disadvantage? This article describes what communication campaigns do to address disparities, looks for evidence that segmented campaigns reduce disparities, and describes evidence that might support segmentation decisions (about behaviors, messages, channels, or message executions). The authors note arguments that segmentation can risk negative effects yet find no evidence about whether race or ethnicity-conscious segmentation reduces disparities. Nonetheless, with evidence, some approaches to segmentation are justified on commonsense grounds and for their political legitimacy.

While databases are increasingly used for content analyses in mass communication and journalism research, concerns about sampling error have been largely ignored. We introduce a method to measure the quality of a search phrase according to two criteria: recall (its ability to accurately call up items of interest) and precision (ability to avoid extraneous ones). We present a detailed description of the evaluation procedure, offer an example of its use assessing an online search for news reports about cancer, and discuss limitations of the procedure and further potential uses.