W. James Potter

• University of California, Santa Barbara

As people spend more time with the growing variety of media and become more engrossed in their media exposures, concern about media literacy has increased. This concern has attracted a wide variety of people who have created a huge literature of ideas. Some of those ideas address conceptual issues, such as what literacy about media should mean and...

Over the past half century, media scholars have generated a large literature of empirical studies, criticisms, and reviews that present many different ideas about what cultivation means. Those meanings are analyzed across three major components of the cultivation literature: George Gerbner’s macro theory, the Cultural Indicators Project design, and...

This study is an examination of validity in published articles that have provided tests of the effectiveness of media literacy interventions. We identified 88 published tests of media literacy interventions then analyzed their content using five coding variables that indicated the degree to which authors of those studies established basic validity....

International Journal of Media and Information Literacy 2016-2017, free full texts Emma Camarero, David Varona Life Story as a Research Technique for Evaluating Formation Processes in Media Literacy for Social Change. Approaching a Case of Success of the Educational Project "Training, Education and Innovation in Audiovisual Media to Raise Awarenes...

This essay presents a critical analysis of patterns of research design decisions exhibited by authors of recently published empirical tests of media effects. The content of 211 articles published from 2010 to 2015 in six core communication journals were analyzed to document the design decisions made by the authors concerning their use of theory, sa...

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with questions about the nature of what exists. Philosophers have articulated a variety of ontological beliefs over the last several millennia, and these beliefs have shaped the thinking of physical scientists, social scientists, and communication scholars. Within the field of communication, scholars...

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge, its possibility, scope, and general basis. For millennia, philosophers have debated a variety of epistemological beliefs about the value of different sources of knowledge, especially rationalism, idealism, and empiricism. With the rise of the physical sciences, a belie...

This entry presents a broad conceptual analysis of media effects. It begins with an examination of schemes used to organize this vast literature and uses a template to reveal four fundamental functions of media influence: acquiring, triggering, altering, and reinforcing. Altering and reinforcing exhibit themselves as baseline effects, developed ove...

The analysis of the existing conceptualizations in the media literacy literature reported in this article revealed that there are considerable gaps in the media literacy literature. While there are a many definitions of media literacy, the existing definitions typically cluster around highlighting several components, especially skills and knowledge...

C O N T E N T S Articles and Statements Life Story as a Research Technique for Evaluating Formation Processes in Media Literacy for Social Change. Approaching a Case of Success of the Educational Project "Training, Education and Innovation in Audiovisual Media to Raise Awareness of Hunger in Nicaragua" Emma Camarero, David Varona .....................

This essay focuses on six methodological practices that are widespread in the literature examining media effects on children and adolescents by presenting a critical analyses of the assumptions that underlie each of these practices. The first three practices deal with measurement—the use of attribute variables as surrogates, the use of behavioral s...

This critical analysis of the "cultivation" literature reveals 3 conceptions of the term: (a) George Gerbner's macrosystem explanation of mass media processes and effects, (b) a pattern of operational practices that searches for relationships between television exposure and a wide range of cultivation indicators, and (c) a general forum of explorat...

Research on the impact of learning style preferences is very rare in economic education. This article reports the results of a project in which the student's preferred learning style and the instructor's teaching style were included as variables in a regression model. Those favoring independent styles achieved significantly more than students favor...

The use of theory in the production of a scholarly literature is a key indicator about how systematically scholars in a field generate research studies and integrate those findings into knowledge structures about their phenomenon of interest. This chapter examines patterns in the way theory is used in the scholarly field concerned with media effect...

Stripping away the hype, this book describes how, when, and why media violence can influence children of different ages, giving parents and teachers the power to maximize the media's benefits and minimize its harm. There are many opinions about media violence and children, but not all are supported by science. In this book, the top experts gather t...

Media literacy is a topic that has attracted a wide variety of scholars as well as non-scholars. This review begins with an analysis of how media literacy has been defined by the range of contributors to the huge and growing literature on media literacy. The review then lays out the big picture concerning media literacy interventions as well as how...

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Media scholars as well as the public frequently use the terms “mass communication” and “mass media,” but the meaning of these terms is often ambiguous. While it is assumed that everyone knows what these terms mean, the few scholars who attempt to define these terms struggle to capture the essence of their meaning without including elements that are...

The Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology explores facets of human behavior, thoughts, and feelings experienced in the context of media use and creation. Divided into six sections, chapters in this volume trace the history of media psychology; address content areas for media research, including children's media use, media violence and desensitization...

Scholars have generated evidence of a wide variety of mass media effects over almost 9 decades of research. Although each of these effects has been defined in a relatively clear manner, there has been much less conceptualizing about what constitutes a mass media effect in general. Rarely have scholars provided a formal definition of mass media effe...

Using Shrum's (1996) heuristic processing model as an explanatory mechanism, we propose that people who hold vivid autobiographical memories for a specific past experience with media violence will overstate the prevalence of real-world crime versus individuals without vivid memories. We also explore the effects of frequency and recency on social re...

Media literacy is a term that means many different things to different people???scholars, educators, citizen activists, and the general public. This article reviews the variety of definitions and presents a synthesis of commonalities that most definitions of media literacy share. The review presents an overview of how media literacy has been treate...

There appears to be little discernible change in television violence over time, and violent acts by children and adolescents are rarely shown on television. Perhaps as a result, adolescent portrayal in television violence has been under-studied. Nevertheless, children and adolescents exposed to heavy amounts of television violence behave more aggre...

This study advances research on the boomerang effect in response to anti-aggression media literacy interventions. Previous findings indicate that elementary school children can become more aggressive after exposure to such interventions. We test two competing explanations for the boomerang effect, media priming and psychological reactance, in a 2 ×...

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how survey researchers assess information gained through exposures to media messages, particularly how they consider, or do not consider, the psychological state of the person during those exposures. The thesis of this paper is that exposure states are essential characteristics that constrain how people exp...

This study focuses attention on scholarship on mass media effects. Our purpose is to profile that effects literature in terms of specific medium tested, type of content, use of theory, use of method, and type of effect. We conducted a content analysis of the mass media effects literature published in sixteen scholarly journals published from 1993 t...

Media literacy is a term that has been used to refer to a great many ideas. It has been treated as a public policy health issue; a critical‐cultural issue; as a set of pedagogical tools for school teachers or suggestions for parents; and as a topic of scholarly inquiry from a physiological, psychological, behavioral, sociological, and/or anthropolo...

This study tests the relative importance of different factors of television narratives in how they influence people's judgments of how violent those narratives are. After watching 1 of 3 videotapes of a violent narrative, 99 college students answered a series of questions about their interpretations of the violence. It was found that participants'...

Scholars who write about the paradigms influencing mass media research differ in their speculations. This study was conducted to provide an empirical analysis by examining six characteristics of mass media research articles published in eight major communication journals. The social science paradigm was found to account for over 60% of the studies,...

This is a critical analysis of how cultivation has been conceptualized in theory and research. Cultivation indicators are examined for their meaning in texts, the meaning received by viewers, and the distinction between estimations and beliefs. The construct of television exposure is analyzed in terms of the assumptions of uniform messages and nons...

This study examines the relationship between exposure to various types of television programs and measures of achievement, both of knowledge and skills. The results support a differential viewing hypothesis and a displacement of time hypothesis as explanations for the relationship. Furthermore, a threshold effect resulted that indicates that televi...

Cultivation theorists hypothesize a monotonic pattern of means across viewing subgroups, that is, that people in groups defined by higher levels of television viewing will be more likely to give the “television world” answer than will people in groups defined by lower levels of viewing. This prediction, along with the methodological practices used...

In the research literature on the cultivation hypothesis, there are two types of measures: first order and second order. First-order measures require respondents to provide estimates of occurrences. Second-order measures assess respondents’ attitudes. This study seeks to determine whether this measurement distinction results in operationalizations...

What is it about the portrayal of violence in comedy programs that provides cues to viewers that television violence is trivial or even nonexistent in that type of show? In this study we develop and test four content-based explanations for this phenomenon. The findings suggest that the rate of violence (especially verbal forms) is very high on come...

For decades, lawmakers have been debating what they can do to protect children from the harmful effects of violence on television. The debate has intensified recently with three major proposals: (a) to require manufacturers to install a V-chip into all new televisions so parents can program their sets, thus preventing their children from being expo...

This initial essay in the Media Literacy Symposium serves two purposes. First, we introduce the nine authors who have written the eight essays especially for this symposium. Second, we provide a broad context for the thinking expressed by those nine scholars. In building that context, we discuss a range of conceptual and application issues. The con...

We focused on contextual patterns in the portrayals of television violence. Patterns are constructed by comparing contextual cues at one level of the television show, such as the macrolevel of the entire program, with the contextual cues at a more microlevel, such as the violent interaction. When the two sets of cues match on characteristics such a...

The authors argue that the inclusion of viewer interpretation variables in experimental design and analysis procedures can greatly increase the methodology's ability to explain variance. The experiment primarily focused attention on the between-group differences, while an analysis of how individual participants interpret the cues in the stimulus ma...

The thesis of this article is that the individual should be regarded as the locus of media literacy—not schools, parents, or the media industries. Furthermore, the article argues that it is not sufficient to educate individuals about the nature of the media and the potential harm of various messages. There is an issue more fundamental than educatio...

Obra que explica cómo absorvemos el flujo de información que generan los medios masivos de comunicación y cómo construimos sentido de esos mensajes. El autor revisa el proceso de pensamiento humano en el proceso de comunicación, con el fin de revelar los mecanismos que utilizamos para filtrar información.

The authors argue that the inclusion of viewer interpretation variables in experimental design and analysis procedures can greatly increase the methodology's ability to explain variance. The experiment primarily focused attention on the between-group differences, while an analysis of how individual participants interpret the cues in the stimulus ma...

The purpose of this study is to determine the relative contributions of two factors- content and schema-as an explanation for how people make interpretations about how much violence they perceive in television programs. An experiment was conducted in which 99 participants were exposed to either a high, moderate, or low amount of violence in one epi...

This study investigates the nature and extent of violence contained in television programming that targets children aged 12 and younger. The measures employed in this content analysis are grounded in previous experimental research that bas identified contextual features that either diminish or enhance the risk of harmful effects associated with vie...

This content analysis identifies the web of context that typically appears in the portrayal of television fictional violence. Highly graphic portrayals of violence are most likely in live action non-humorous programs with human perpetrators and targets. Graphicness was also found to vary across consequences to the victim, levels of reward, and use...

Media effects research has documented that violence can have a disinhibiting effect on viewers. It has also identified a number of factors that contribute to this effect. But it has yet to address the issue of how to assemble the multiple contributing elements into a single scale that could usefully predict risk of disinhibition. This study provide...

This study replicates the content analysis of antisocial acts on entertainment programming conducted by Greenberg and his colleagues in the mid 1970s. Our purpose is to determine if the frequency of antisocial behavior has changed. We found an overall rate of 42.1 antisocial acts per hour which is very similar to Greenberg's rate of 40.8 acts per h...

This study poses two questions about the portrayals of aggressive behavior on non‐fictional television programs. First, to what extent do the patterns of antisocial activity in televised non‐fictional programming correspond to patterns in the real world? These patterns were assessed by comparing the patterns of criminal acts, as well as the demogra...

How realistic is the portrayal of aggressive behavior in entertainment programming on television? An answer to this question is operationalized in terms of (1) replicated reality and (2) contextualized reality. Replicated reality is assessed by comparing the characteristics of televised portrayals to real world characteristics, such as the demograp...

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The purpose of this study is to investigate women's scholarship in mass communications from 1965 to 1989. A content analysis was conducted to examine the percentage of mass media research published by female scholars in eight leading communication journals. Additional research questions involve sex differences in research topics and methods in the...

A three-wave panel study across a five-year period finds that middle and high school students change their views of television along three ways of evaluating television: as a “magic window” to reality, as a utility route to information, as an identity source through which one can relate to others as almost real people. With aging, the window view d...

Students'' preferences for learning styles as well as their preferences for communication styles of their teachers are examined to determine if those preferences are related to gender, grade level, and major in college. A total of 327 adolescents in grades eight through twelve completed questionnaires measuring their preferred learning styles (Depe...

This study attempts to elaborate the cultivation hypothesis by examining some proposed subprocesses, especially learning and construction with first-and second-order measures. The results from a sample of adolescents provide support for a construction subprocess but only with first-order measures. Results on the subprocess of learning as well as th...

This study of middle and high school students finds some support for cultivation theory. Some values associated with television—i.e., “hard work yields rewards” or “good wins over evil”—are more valued by higher versus lower exposed-to-television watchers. There were interactions. The ultimate triumph of hard work and good conduct, for example, wer...

This research measures the preferences students express for the communicator styles of their instructors as conceptualized by Norton (1978). The most preferred styles were friendly and attentive followed by relaxed, impression leaving, animated, dramatic, open, precise, dominant and contentious. The patterns of those preferences were then examined...

This study tests five different operationalizations of television exposure in terms of their relative abilities to predict cultivation among adolescents. The creators of the cultivation hypothesis argue that cultivation is an effect resulting from a person's total exposure to television. In this study, total exposure is compared with four alternati...

Content-analyzes prime time television to determine the frequency of certain contexts in which prosocial activity is portrayed. Finds that prime time television continues to portray a great deal of prosocial content presented in prosocial contexts. (RS)

This essay illuminates critical findings, limitations, and assumptions underlying the literature on perceived reality. Following a process of construct validation, the paper is structured to develop a conceptual definition and to hypothesize how the elements of that definition should be logically and empirically related to other relevant concepts a...

Prime-time commercial television content is analyzed to determine the frequency and the context of antisocial activity enacted by heroes, villains, and secondary characters. All three types of characters were found to commit a great deal of antisocial activity. Furthermore, the context in which such activity is portrayed is very antisocial. It is a...

Contrasts the demographic properties--gender, race, and age--of the perpetrators and receivers of antisocial and prosocial acts on prime-time network television. Concludes that antisocial activity has declined and that a White, middle-class male is now most likely to be the perpetrator or recipient. (MM)

The relationship specified by the cultivation hypothesis was elaborated by using a concept of perceived reality that included the dimensions of Magic Window, Instruction, and Identity. As in previous studies, the cultivation effect was nonsignificant after controls for demographics were introduced. However, the cultivation effect was found in certa...