Kimberly A. Neuendorf

Cleveland State University · School of Communication

“Humor and media,” an extremely broad area of study, encompasses multiple humor types and media outlets. Four humor mechanisms—incongruity, superiority, arousal, and social currency—have been identified, and audience members' multidimensional patterns of humor appreciation are related to media habits and social attitudes. In the study of sources of...

This study examined conflict, parenting communication style, and attitudes regarding the parent-child relationship for a marginalized special population: incarcerated mothers and their children. Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological perspective served as a guiding framework, based on its ability to consider family interactions across ecological contexts,...

This study introduces the construct of “vehicle purchase reliance” (VPR) which integrates e-vehicle-specific awareness, familiarity, browsing, and purchasing into a single conceptual dimension. In a sample of 1186 Millennial university students, 863 Chinese and 323 US, the VPR Index was applied to a broad range of 23 e-shopping vehicles. Its distin...

The way that individuals adapt to stress in their romantic relationships plays a major role in determining relational satisfaction. This study used the Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation Model as a framework to examine how individuals adapt to a relational transgression in their romantic relationships. This study examined individuals' attachment dimen...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to present a framework of five “facets,” i.e., distinct but complementary ways in which the observed appeal of a consumer shopping site’s features can potentially be generalized across product/service domains (the authors call this framework the feature appeal generalization perspective); seco...

This entry traces the history of media effects scholarship, including key instances of public concern over the impact of the media that have motivated scholarly scrutiny and advancement, the changing assumptions about the nature and strength of media influence over time, the variety of theoretical approaches that have been applied to the study of m...

A conceptually based taxonomy of 22 distinct forms of e-shopping vehicles is proposed. A modification of the UTAUT and UTAUT2 models is introduced to explain how vehicles are interrelated in regard to consumer reliance upon them for their e-purchasing. A survey of over 1,000 millennial university students, 697 Chinese and 306 US, revealed strong su...

This study examines cognitive and affective outcomes of exposure to subtitled vs. dubbed international film content. Past research has investigated issues of valid language translation, the challenges of cultural reference transference, and the benefits of subtitling for foreign language learning. Based on previous research (e.g., Wissmath, Weibel,...

This entry reviews the methodological options for and issues important to quantitative content analysis, including human coding versus computer-aided text analysis, reliability, validity (including external validity), and the integration of content analysis data with additional, extra-message data. A general overview of qualitative approaches to co...

A survey of 499 Black, Asian, and White American college students assessed their endorsement of “mainstream” American values, uncovering a 6-factor values structure, with some notable significant differences between the races. As expected, White respondents' own personal value orientations most closely matched their assessments of mainstream Americ...

This study examines the role of humor orientation and reported humorous communication behaviors during father–son conflict in predicting relational satisfaction. In addition, the main effect and interaction effect (with humor orientation) of verbal aggressiveness on relational satisfaction is investigated. A survey of adult father–son pairs pinpoin...

Two cross-cultural studies were conducted to explore how affective states from viewing favorite entertainment messages vary as a function of culture. Koreans were more likely than U.S. Americans to prefer entertainment messages that induce conflicting responses (e.g., feeling positive and negative, laughing and crying). Furthermore, this cultural d...

The relationship between citizens and local government in urban areas has had a colorful history. Here we ask how communication channels—interpersonal and mass—and organizational involvement affect citizen attempts to influence their local government through grassroots activities such as personal contacts, letter writing, attending meetings. Data f...

Democratic foundations rest on public support and a reasonably broad distribution of knowledge. The media have traditionally been assigned responsibility for providing much of that knowledge, but they do not inform all citizens equally; and communication scholars have, thus, studied the threat represented by the knowledge gap phenomenon. This study...

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...

This article is intended to serve as a primer on methodological standards for gender scholars pursuing content analytic research. The scientific underpinnings of the method are explored, including the roles of theory, past research, population definition, objectivity/intersubjectivity, reliability, validity, generalizability, and replicability. Bot...

America's pluralistic society is growing increasingly diverse as groups compete for media representation. This article focuses on people's perceptions of how their ethnic group is portrayed in the media, as well as the issue of media influence on the values portrayed. A cross-sectional survey in a major Midwest metro area measured perceived importa...

A quantitative content analysis of 20 James Bond films assessed portrayals of 195 female characters. Key findings include a trend of more sexual activity and greater harm to females over time, but few significant across-time differences in demographic characteristics of Bond women. Sexual activity is predicted by race, attractiveness, size of role,...

This study utilizes multiple methods to analyze the effects of a laugh track on audience response to four episodes of the classic sitcom, “The Andy Griffith Show.” An experimental design and a narratological approach are used in concert. One of the four episodes stood out quantitatively in terms of perceived humor and overall enjoyment, and was the...

With the expansion of telecommunication and online technologies for the purpose of survey administration, the issue of measurement validity has come to the fore. The proliferation of automated audio services and computer-based survey techniques has been matched by a corresponding denigration of the quality of traditional phone survey data, most not...

In a continuing project designed to explore the role of racial identity in determining reactions to racially charged, highly salient (“obtrusive”) events, a structural equation model was developed that identified factors influencing the impact of (a) race and (b) media exposure patterns on perceptions of the guilt or innocence of an African America...

Tailoring consumer shopping sites to fit diverse national markets requires a grasp of the similarities and differences among those national markets in preferred site features. The past literature indicates five issues that can cloud attempts to gauge the national differences in the preferability of Business-to-Consumer (B2C) site features. This pap...

Content analysis introduced Content analysis, simply put, is the quantitative investigation of message characteristics. Most definitions are a bit more specific than this, often delineated by the degree to which a scientific method is assumed. The following definition is employed here: Content analysis is a summarizing, quantitative analysis of mes...

In an earlier period of mass communication research, scholars were more adventuresome in advancing “new” theories and less hesitant to “create” theory. The 1970s, in particular, bore witness to the emergence of several such theories—from the knowledge gap and agenda-setting to cultivation. Scholars have generated substantial literatures elaborating...

The current study examined relationships between sports consumption, values, and media use. In particular, the authors considered relationships between athletic or physical values, perceptions of their portrayal in the entertainment media, sports media use, athletic behaviors (attending events, playing sports), and general media use. A probability...

This article examines the impact of a sequence of variables that includes people's communication activity and quality of life assessments. Survey results indicate that more cosmopolitan people, those with more diverse interests, those with stronger patterns of media use, and those with higher levels of community knowledge hold stronger assessments...

The present study assesses perceptions of (1) the quality of American graduate programs in communication, (2) the qualities that communication scholars deem important in a communication PhD program, and (3) the adequacy of the number of PhD programs with specific specialties and applications in communication. A national survey of communication facu...

A study of online shopping in five nations (Austria, Canada, Iran, Taiwan, and the USA) demonstrates the utility of the 7-facet “online shopping profile” (OSP), beyond the unidimensional indices widely employed in investigations of the adoption/use of online shopping. Further, the roles of domain-specific innovativeness and of two dimensions of per...

Data show that reading the newspaper and talking about things in the media make unique contributions to explaining community social capital and do not merely reflect demographics and values people hold.

This study assesses interest in curricular development in new technologies among communication faculty, with a focus on doctoral-level programs. Diffusion of innovations theory explains both individual- and organizational-level factors that may account for adoption of innovations, including those stemming from new technologies. In the field of comm...

In Germany, Stober et al. (1999, 2001) presented evidence for the validity of the SDS-17, a new measure of social desirability bias. In the current investigation, three experiments (n=800) assessed the SDS-17’s validity in the US environment. In all conditions SDS-17 scores correlated highly with Marlowe–Crowne scores. In Study 1, a group administr...

This presentation lays a foundation for the development of a model of presence that considers the form and content characteristics of a medium, the various types of presence, and the range of outcomes of presence.This model development process relies on five assumptions:

This study extends the conventional wisdom concerning how a commercial website can be configured to attract online shoppers, and specifically, initial shoppers. Based on past research [Inform. Syst. Res. 13 (2002) 187] and theory [Diffusion of Innovations (1995)], a number of ‘form’ and ‘substantive’ website features were assessed as to their attra...

The diffusion of information about critical events has been studied using events of differing importance in Americans’ lives: This study explores the diffusion of information about a tragedy that touched Americans and others around the world. Specifically, we explore how the time a person learned of the September 11 attacks influences their selecti...

The concept of cosmopoliteness previously has been associated with the diffusion of innovations. Previous research suggests that cosmopolites are earlier adopters of innovations (e.g., new media technologies) and that they use more diverse media sources. This paper details the history of the concept and identifies eight dimensions. Two surveys were...

When Smith [The Wired Nation. Cable TV: The Electronic Communications Highway. Harper & Row, New York, 1972] described the “wired nation” some three decades ago, he saw an abundance of content and services that eventually would provide audiences with an almost unlimited menu of options. Almost three decades later, that vision has expanded beyond ca...

Based on existing theory and research, a framework for the examination of national differences in Website feature appeal is developed. The framework is applied to data collected in five nations (U.S.A., Canada, Austria, Iran, Taiwan). The results confirm the importance, when assessing website appeal cross-nationally, of considering the type of user...

The Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm asserts that human computer users interact socially with computers, and has provided extensive evidence that this is the case. In this experiment (n = 134), participants received either praise or criticism from a computer. Independent variables were the direction feedback (praise or criticism), and vo...

A survey of 208 US Midwestern Internet users reveals, first, that the nature of Internet dhopping (IS) is a function of consumers’ domain specific IS Innovativeness, not only in regard to product purchasing (as has been previously observed) but also to visiting sites for product information. Second, IS innovativeness is positively associated with t...

Although the deadline for mandated digital transmission for broadcast television (DTV) is fast approaching, we still know relatively little about viewer knowledge about and interest in adopting the new, higher resolution television receivers. This study profiles likely DTV adopters in terms of social locators, media adoption, orientation toward ado...