No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Evaluating the Political Relevance of Media Content: Conceptualization and Consequences
Abstract
Although evaluating media as politically relevant should be consequential for outcomes related to political attitudes and persuasion, scant research takes a viewer-centric approach to exploring such evaluations. This study conceptualizes evaluations of the political relevance of media and introduces the Politically Relevant Media (PRM) scale, then examines how media characteristics, individual-level factors, and viewing behaviors are related to PRM evaluations. Across two experiments (total N = 649), participants evaluated news and fictional entertainment television program descriptions depicting either "explicitly" political objects (e.g., politicians) or "implicitly" political objects (e.g., social issues). Although fictional shows depicting "implicitly" political objects were evaluated as less "political" than other shows, participants evaluated these shows as more politically relevant using the PRM scale than fictional shows depicting "explicitly" political objects. Regarding behaviors, PRM evaluations positively predicted high political interest viewers' exposure to entertainment programs. Implications for selective exposure, message processing, persuasion, and political polarization are discussed.
... In the case of both news and of satire/late-night comedy programming of this sort, there is an implicit assumption that media consumers engaging in selective exposure are motivated by the political nature of the content-that is, that consumers think of these programs as relevant to politics when making their media selections. This assumption is not unreasonable (Coles, 2021). ...
... Although some notable fictional entertainment programs depict fictional politicians (e.g., Cards, Scandal, Veep, etc.), the bulk of fictional programming instead depicts "implicitly" political objects such as social issues, "lifeworld content" (Holbert, 2005), or "politically informative content" (Settle, 2018) that is not directly tied to politicians, parties, and electoral processes. People also evaluate these "implicitly" political fictional entertainment programs as much less "political" than entertainment programs that depict and revolve around politicians (Coles, 2021). The political relevance of "implicitly" political fictional entertainment programming may not be as evident as that of news, satire/late-night comedy shows, or "explicitly" political fictional entertainment programs that depict politicians. ...
... How might media consumers evaluate media texts as being relevant to politics? These evaluations are specific to and influenced by the particular media text being evaluated and the individual media consumer making the evaluation (Coles, 2021;Fitzgerald, 2013;Holbert & Young, 2013;Settle, 2018). ...
Technological advances have brought with them an explosion in the amount of media available to consumers, particularly fictional entertainment programming depicting “implicitly” political content such as social issues. Although exposure to entertainment media is fractured along political lines, there remains an assumption that most viewers choose their entertainment media absent of political considerations. I contend that individuals with stronger political identities will evaluate “implicitly” political entertainment programs as more relevant to politics, and in turn engage in stronger selective exposure. In two studies (total N = 1,311), participants evaluated the political relevance of and rank their preferences for mock television shows. I find that political identity strength indirectly affects selective exposure through individuals’ evaluations of entertainment media as politically relevant. I discuss the implications that these findings have for narrative persuasion and entertainment media as a vector for political polarization.
... Dimensional relationships. Although developing a multidimensional measure of PRM evaluations is a distinct methodological undertaking (see Coles, 2020Coles, , 2021b, it is important to consider how the dimensions relate to each other on a conceptual level. Collective concerns/decisions/consequences is the primary dimension because it is a prerequisite for the other two dimensions to be meaningful regarding PRM evaluations. ...
... The objects depicted should influence PRM evaluations. Texts depicting implicitly political objects such as social issues may be evaluated differently than those depicting explicitly political objects such as politicians/parties/polls. Specifically how these objects influence PRM evaluations may depend on both user and text characteristics (Coles, 2020(Coles, , 2021bFitzgerald, 2013;Holbert & Young, 2013;Settle, 2018;Tchernev et al., 2021). Texts depicting explicitly political objects may not always receive stronger PRM evaluations, depending on these antecedents (Coles, 2020(Coles, , 2021b. ...
... Texts depicting implicitly political objects such as social issues may be evaluated differently than those depicting explicitly political objects such as politicians/parties/polls. Specifically how these objects influence PRM evaluations may depend on both user and text characteristics (Coles, 2020(Coles, , 2021bFitzgerald, 2013;Holbert & Young, 2013;Settle, 2018;Tchernev et al., 2021). Texts depicting explicitly political objects may not always receive stronger PRM evaluations, depending on these antecedents (Coles, 2020(Coles, , 2021b. This may or may not apply to explicit depictions of the words POLITICALLY RELEVANT MEDIA 19 "politics" and "political"; however, it is certain that depicted objects will influence PRM evaluations. ...
Prior research acknowledges the potential implications of how media users evaluate media texts as being relevant to politics. Yet there are limitations to existing operationalizations of these evaluations due to how people use the words "politics" and "political." What first appears as a measurement issue instead reveals a deficiency in the conceptualization of the evaluation being measured, as well as that evaluation’s relationships with its antecedents and consequences. This article fuses work from disparate fields such as political theory, media studies, media effects, and political communication to offer a multidimensional conceptualization of evaluations of the political relevance of media texts. It introduces the Politically Relevant Media Model (PRMM) connecting these evaluations to their text and user characteristic antecedents, as well as their cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. Implications for various phenomena such as agenda setting, learning, selective exposure, message processing, narrative persuasion, reinforcing media spirals, and political polarization are discussed.
Thanks to technological advances over the past two decades, media consumers now have an unprecedented number of content options. Along with an increase in news options has come an even greater expansion in the number of entertainment options available to media consumers. This is especially true when it comes to fictional entertainment television programming available via cable and services such as Netflix and Hulu. Much attention has been paid to how individuals’ political identities affect their selection of news. Although there is evidence that exposure to entertainment media is fractured along political lines, there remains an assumption that most viewers select entertainment media without any political considerations. The average individual consumes much more entertainment media than they consume news media. What if people’s political identities actually do influence what fictional entertainment media they choose? I contend that 1) individual-level differences such as political identity strength affect whether people evaluate media content as politically relevant, and 2) these evaluations affect whether people selectively expose themselves to fictional entertainment media. Rather than rely on researchers’ designations of media as politically relevant or not, I call for a viewer-centric approach to identifying politically relevant media. Any given media text may be of greater or lesser political relevance to any given media consumer. Unfortunately, asking viewers to identify what television shows are politically relevant isn’t a straightforward process due to the way people often use terms such as “political” and “politics.” To overcome limitations with existing approaches, this dissertation develops a new scale that I use to evaluate individuals’ perceptions of media as politically relevant. I propose a model predicting how the strength of a viewer’s political identities, together with a television show’s content, will affect the viewer’s evaluation of the show as politically relevant. In turn, the evaluation of the show as politically relevant will affect politically motivated selective exposure to that show. In Chapter 2, I develop the Politically Relevant Media (PRM) scale across two studies. In Chapter 3, I examine how attributes of media content and political identities affect evaluations of television programs as politically relevant, as indicated by PRM scale scores. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate the predictive and mediating abilities of the PRM scale. I find that political identity strength has a positive effect on evaluations of television programming as politically relevant, and such evaluations are associated with greater politically motivated selective exposure to fictional entertainment shows. This has implications for the study of politically motivated selective exposure more broadly, but particularly in the context of fictional entertainment media.
The reinforcing spirals model (RSM) describes the role of communication (mediated and interpersonal) in how socialization, attitudes, and social identities are formed, reinforced, and/or sustained in the face of competing perspectives. The RSM proposes that people tend to select communication sources and content that reinforces their beliefs and social identity, and in turn beliefs and behaviors can be reinforced by such communication selectivity. From this perspective, the role of mediated communication in particular can be viewed as an endogenous or mediating process. Under normal circumstances this reinforcement process is likely to have reached homeostasis, and not be readily detectable empirically. However, in times of identity formation/change (e.g., adolescence, immigration) and identity threat (e.g., social disruption, economic difficulty, life changes) the process should become dynamic and measurable. Other boundary factors impacting the process include how open or closed the communication norms are for a given individual or set of individuals in a given social identity group, as well as how open or closed communication systems are in the larger society. This entry also describes empirical findings supporting the RSM, reviews methodological issues in the study of reinforcing spirals as a dynamic model, and identifies future research directions.
This study integrates and builds upon research on moral psychology, entertainment media selection, and political communication that has established a link between political ideology and moral sentiments. An automated content analysis of the lyrics of 37,309 songs across 10 genres assessed the extent of appeals to five different moral domains defined by moral foundations theory. The results of the content analysis are integrated with nationally representative survey data (N = 1,000) by linking lyrical content with self-reported preference for and exposure to musical genres. We then correlate the content of preferred genres with self-reported moral sentiments and political ideology. We find the moral content of music lyrics in the genres used by respondents is associated with their moral preferences and political ideology.
This study uses two experimental designs to examine how audiences make genre assessments when encountering media content that blends elements of news and entertainment. Study 1 explores how audiences characterize three different versions of a fictitious political talk show program. Study 2 considers whether audience perceptions of ‘news-ness’ are influenced by shifts in headline angle and source attribution. The implications of audience definitions of news and its social function are discussed.
Current U.S. federal disaster management approaches advocate for citizens to engage in local efforts to cope with the negative consequences of disasters. In line with this approach, this project develops and validates the Citizen Disaster Communication Assessment (CDCA), which is a comprehensive survey instrument measuring individuals’ communication across disaster phases. The CDCA development process occurred over three studies. Study 1 consisted of assessment item generation and expert review. Study 2 determined the dimensionality of citizen disaster communication. Study 3 surveyed three communities experiencing different disaster phases in order to confirm the CDCA factor structure. Results (a) demonstrate evidence of an empirically derived citizen disaster communication measure and (b) inform current understanding of how citizens’ communication can participate in community disaster management. Future research should use the CDCA in other diverse communities to further validate the measure and to provide additional insight into the structural and sociodemographic factors influencing disaster communication.
Do people fundamentally perceive the Supreme Court as a political institution? Despite the central importance of this question to theories of public evaluations of the Court and its decisions, it remains largely unanswered. To this end, we develop a new, implicit measure of political perceptions of the Court. This new measure relies on a categorization task wherein respondents quickly associate political or non-political attributes with the Supreme Court relative to institutions that are high or low in politicization. We find that the public implicitly perceives the Court as less political than Congress (high politicization) and more political than traffic court (low politicization) and that this measure is distinct from self-reported (explicit) perceptions of politicization. Finally, we find that implicit perceptions have a distinct effect on predicting diffuse support for the court and specific support for one of two Court decisions.
The current work provides evidence for a psychological obstacle to the resolution of divisive social issues (e.g., affirmative action, drug legalization); specifically, people approach discussions of these issues with a threatened mind-set. Across three studies, it is shown that the prospect of discussing topics which divide social opinion is associated with threatened responding (the dissensus effect). Divisive discussion topics are associated with both a greater level of self-reported threat (Studies 1 and 3) and a greater tendency to perceive neutral faces as threatening (Study 2). Furthermore, the effect is shown to be robust across manipulations of social opinion (ratings of multiple social issues in Studies 1 and 2; fictional polling data in Study 3), and was not reducible to individual attitude extremity (Studies 1 and 3) or a valence effect (Study 2).
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an increasingly popular tool for the recruitment of research subjects. While there has been much focus on the demographic differences between MTurk samples and the national public, we know little about whether liberals and conservatives recruited from MTurk share the same psychological dispositions as their counterparts in the mass public. In the absence of such evidence, some have argued that the selection process involved in joining MTurk invalidates the subject pool for studying questions central to political science. In this paper, we evaluate this claim by comparing a large MTurk sample to two benchmark national samples – one conducted online and one conducted face-to-face. We examine the personality and value-based motivations of political ideology across the three samples. All three samples produce substantively identical results with only minor variation in effect sizes. In short, liberals and conservatives in our MTurk sample closely mirror the psychological divisions of liberals and conservatives in the mass public, though MTurk liberals hold more characteristically liberal values and attitudes than liberals from representative samples. Overall, our results suggest that MTurk is a valid recruitment tool for psychological research on political ideology.
This article presents conceptual considerations on the classification of TV series and movies according to their political references and introduces an empirical approach for measuring the constituent features. We argue that political representations in fiction vary along two dimensions: political intensity and degree of realism. These dimensions encompass four indicators relating to characters, places, themes, and time. The indicators were coded for a sample of 98 TV series and 114 movies. Cluster analyses showed four clusters of TV series and six clusters of movies. Nonpolitical fiction, thrillers, and fantasy were central types in both TV series and movies. Movies, however, stand out through a greater diversity and a focus on the past that is reflected in three additional types. Based on the identification of different types of movies and TV series, three directions for theory building are suggested.
This chapter outlines the two basic routes to persuasion. One route is based on the thoughtful consideration of arguments central to the issue, whereas the other is based on the affective associations or simple inferences tied to peripheral cues in the persuasion context. This chapter discusses a wide variety of variables that proved instrumental in affecting the elaboration likelihood, and thus the route to persuasion. One of the basic postulates of the Elaboration Likelihood Model—that variables may affect persuasion by increasing or decreasing scrutiny of message arguments—has been highly useful in accounting for the effects of a seemingly diverse list of variables. The reviewers of the attitude change literature have been disappointed with the many conflicting effects observed, even for ostensibly simple variables. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) attempts to place these many conflicting results and theories under one conceptual umbrella by specifying the major processes underlying persuasion and indicating the way many of the traditionally studied variables and theories relate to these basic processes. The ELM may prove useful in providing a guiding set of postulates from which to interpret previous work and in suggesting new hypotheses to be explored in future research.
Copyright © 1986 Academic Press Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This chapter critically reflects on the state of the art in research on the political relevance of entertainment media. It is argued that most research on this important topic has been based on the ideas of understanding or consistency. While these lines of research also need to be expanded, the authors call for bring-ing the hedonic principle into the fold as a primary explanatory principle for the study of political entertainment media. Moreover, the chapter stresses the need to expand the range of entertainment media content/genres/forms that are investi-gated for their political influence. As an example, the authors reflect on the politi-cal influence of graphic novels in this essay. In addition, the authors highlight the importance of an international perspective and of comparative work in this area of study. Only when research expands in such a manner to include these lines of research substantive judgments concerning the political relevance of entertain-ment media will be forthcoming.
How do regular people define the term “political”? This original study gives Americans and Canadians an opportunity to express their interpretations of the concept. It identifies a great deal of inter-personal variation in terms of how many and what kinds of topics people perceive as the stuff of politics. And this variation comes in predictable patterns: the findings reveal correlations between socio-political attributes (such as gender, nationality and ideology) and the boundaries people draw around the political domain. The study also provides insight into the ways people distinguish the political from the non-political in their minds. And importantly, individuals’ interpretations of the term “politics” relate systematically to other measures of self-reported political behavior including political interest and frequency of political discussion. These results can be used to refine survey analysis and to broaden knowledge of day-to-day citizen politics.
The authors provide a basic set of guidelines and recommendations for information that should be included in any manuscript that has confirmatory factor analysis or structural equation modeling as the primary statistical analysis technique. The authors provide an introduction to both techniques, along with sample analyses, recommendations for reporting, evaluation of articles in The Journal of Educational Research using these techniques, and concluding remarks.
This research was designed to assess the effects of contemporary political humor on information processing and persuasion, focusing specifically on two competing processes: processing motivation/counterargument distraction and message discounting. In Study 1, 212 undergraduates read one of four monologues by political comedian Bill Maher. Correlations and path modeling suggested that, in general, humor associated with greater source liking, closer information processing, and reduced counterargument, but also with greater message discounting. In Study 2, 204 undergraduates read one of four versions of a message based on the comedy of Chris Rock, manipulated to be more or less funny and attributed to the comedian or not. Results largely replicated those from Study 1. In addition, the humorous messages promoted more discounting than the serious messages, though they were processed with comparable depth. Although no more likely to be persuasive in the short run, the comedic transcript evidenced a sleeper effect after one week. In sum, the data were consistent with the notion that humorous messages might be processed carefully (but not critically) yet simultaneously discounted as irrelevant to attitudinal judgments. Implications for humor research and the sleeper effect are discussed.
Both implicit democratic norms and the reconstructions provided by theorists of rational choice suggest that issue voters are more sophisticated--educated, informed, and active in politics--than other voters. But some issues are clearly more difficult than others, and the voters who respond to @'hard@' and @`easy@' issues, respectively, are assumed to differ in kind. We propose the hypothesis that @'`easy-issue@' voters are no more sophisticated than non-issue voters, and this is found to be the case. The findings suggest a reevaluation of the import of rising and falling levels of issue voting and suggest a prominent role for @`easy@' issues in electoral realignments.
This article explores two hypotheses about how voters encounter information during campaigns. According to the anticipated agreement hypothesis, people prefer to hear about candidates with whom they expect to agree. The “issue publics” hypothesis posits that voters choose to encounter information on issues they consider most important personally. We tested both hypotheses by distributing a multimedia CD offering extensive information about George W. Bush and Al Gore to a representative sample of registered voters with personal computers and home Internet connections during the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign. Exposure to information was measured by tracking individuals' use of the CD. The evidence provided strong support for the issue public hypothesis and partial support for the anticipated agreement hypothesis. Republicans and conservatives preferred to access information about George Bush, but Democrats and liberals did not prefer information about Vice President Gore. No interactions appeared between these two forms of selective exposure.
The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and (c) we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality.
The factor analysis of repeated measures psychiatric data presents interesting challenges for researchers in terms of identifying the latent structure of an assessment instrument. Specifically, repeated measures contain both within and between individual sources of variance. Although a number of techniques exist for separating out these 2 sources of variance, all are problematic. Recently, researchers have proposed that exploratory multilevel factor analysis (MFA) be used to appropriately analyze the latent structure of repeated measures data. The chief objective of this report is to provide a didactic step-by-step guide on how MFA may be applied to psychiatric data. In the discussion, we describe difficulties associated with MFA and consider challenges in factor analyzing life event appraisals in psychiatric samples.
Analysis of public opinion, news consumption, and social media has examined increasing political polarization and/or partisan sorting; however, few have explored the potential connection between entertainment programming and political sorting. This paper examines viewership of U.S. television entertainment from 2001 to 2016 and finds increasing differentiation in the shows watched in primarily Democratic versus primarily Republican markets. Notably, these years coincide with partisan sorting in news consumption and enhanced fracturing of the U.S. television landscape. The article confirms growing differences in the most-watched shows in heavily Democratic versus Republican regions, a finding that provides uncommon evidence of suspected differentiation by political view and of the need to adapt theories of the “mass” media function of entertainment television to a context of greater fragmentation and choice.
How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about politics and the number of political figures followed. We find that, on average, our self-reported survey measures tend to correlate with observed social media activity. At the same time, we also find a worrying amount of individual-level discrepancy and problems related to extreme outliers. Our recommendations are twofold. The first is for survey questions about social media use to provide respondents with options covering a wider range of activity, especially in the long tail. The second is for survey questions to include specific content and anchors defining what it means for a post to be “about politics.”
Cambridge Core - Media, Mass Communication - Frenemies - by Jaime E. Settle
To what extent do survey experimental treatment effect estimates generalize to other populations and contexts? Survey experiments conducted on convenience samples have often been criticized on the grounds that subjects are sufficiently different from the public at large to render the results of such experiments uninformative more broadly. In the presence of moderate treatment effect heterogeneity, however, such concerns may be allayed. I provide evidence from a series of 15 replication experiments that results derived from convenience samples like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are similar to those obtained from national samples. Either the treatments deployed in these experiments cause similar responses for many subject types or convenience and national samples do not differ much with respect to treatment effect moderators. Using evidence of limited within-experiment heterogeneity, I show that the former is likely to be the case. Despite a wide diversity of background characteristics across samples, the effects uncovered in these experiments appear to be relatively homogeneous.
Exploring the forms and meanings of mediated politics beyond the news cycle, this book encompasses genres drawn from television, radio, the press and the internet, assessing their individual and collective contribution to contemporary political culture through textual analysis and thematic review.
A wide range of entertainment media content has been shown to influence some of our most important democratic outcomes. In addition, political communication scholarship is beginning to look at how certain entertainment-based media outlets function alongside more traditional political outlets (e.g., TV news, debates). In today's complex media environment, it is apparent that audience members do not experience entertainment media or news in complete isolation. There is hybridity across individuals, across genres, and across texts. Studying how various forms of political information work together, and how people make sense of them in tandem, is essential to understanding the broader role of media in politics. This chapter offers a plan of action designed to allow political communication researchers to engage in a theoretically grounded, systematic study of how entertainment media relates to, informs, and interacts with more traditional public affairs media within the context of politics.
Keywords:
entertainment;
politics;
narrative;
humor;
transportation;
satire;
cognition;
affect
Data collection using Internet-based samples has become increasingly popular in many social science disciplines, including advertising. This research examines whether one popular Internet data source, Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), is an appropriate substitute for other popular samples utilized in advertising research. Specifically, a five-sample between-subjects experiment was conducted to help researchers who utilize MTurk in advertising experiments understand the strengths and weaknesses of MTurk relative to student samples and professional panels. In comparisons across five samples, results show that the MTurk data outperformed panel data procured from two separate professional marketing research companies across various measures of data quality. The MTurk data were also compared to two different student samples, and results show the data were at least comparable in quality. While researchers may consider MTurk samples as a viable alternative to student samples when testing theory-driven outcomes, precautions should be taken to ensure the quality of data regardless of the source. Best practices for ensuring data quality are offered for advertising researchers who utilize MTurk for data collection.
Particularly in the context of American television, hybridity has become the defining feature of contemporary broadcast journalism. Hybridity itself manifests on multiple levels – the textual, systemic, and discursive. Together, these three levels of hybridization challenge traditional conceptions of journalism while at the same time enabling the emergence of new forms of journalistic truth-telling. This essay explores three examples of ‘public affairs narratives’, long-form fictional dramas that sit, in different configurations, at the intersections of news and narrative. It concludes that in an age of complexifying distinctions between the factual and the fictive, hybrid public affairs narratives have the potential to play a valuable journalistic function, orienting audiences to critical, but often under-explored, socio-political realities.
The media environment is changing. Today in the United States, the average viewer can choose from hundreds of channels, including several twenty-four hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on iPods, and online; it has become a ubiquitous and unavoidable reality in modern society. The purpose of this book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and new survey data, it shows how changes in the media environment reverberate through the political system, affecting news exposure, political learning, turnout, and voting behavior.
The new edition of this influential work updates and expands the scope of the original, including more sustained analyses of individual films, from The Birth of a Nation to The Wolf of Wall Street . An interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between American politics and popular films of all kindsincluding comedy, science fiction, melodrama, and action-adventure Projecting Politics offers original approaches to determining the political contours of films, and to connecting cinematic language to political messaging. A new chapter covering 2000 to 2013 updates the decade-by-decade look at the Washington-Hollywood nexus, with special areas of focus including the post-9/11 increase in political films, the rise of political war films, and films about the 2008 economic recession. The new edition also considers recent developments such as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the controversy sparked by the film Zero Dark Thirty, newer generation actor-activists, and the effects of shifting industrial financing structures on political content. A new chapter addresses the resurgence of the disaster-apocalyptic film genre with particular attention paid to its themes of political nostalgia and the turn to global settings and audiences. Updated and expanded chapters on nonfiction film and advocacy documentaries, the politics of race and African-American film, and women and gender in political films round out this expansive, timely new work. A companion website offers two additional appendices and further materials for those using the book in class.
This study focuses on the perceived effectiveness of political satire. A pair of experimental studies using original satirical works offer findings for audience perceptions regarding two types of satire, juvenalian and horatian, compared to traditional opinion-editorial argumentation. The two studies produced replicable findings that indicate clear perceptions of persuasive intent associated with both types of satire, and horatian satire ranking lower than traditional opinion-editorials in perceived message strength and perceived influence on self.
‘This is an excellent book which introduces the underlying concepts and practical issues related to psychosocial measurement and scale development’ - Statistics in Medicine. Effective measurement is a cornerstone of scientific research. Yet many social science researchers lack the tools to develop appropriate assessment instruments for the measurement of latent social-psychological constructs. Scaling Procedures: Issues and Applications examines the issues involved in developing and validating multi-item self-report scales of latent constructs. Distinguished researchers and award-winning educators Richard G Netemeyer, William O Bearden, and Subhash Sharma present a four-step approach for multi-indicator scale development. With these steps, the authors include relevant empirical examples and a review of the concepts of dimensionality, reliability, and validity. Scaling Procedures: Issues and Applications supplies cutting-edge strategies for developing and refining measures. Providing concise chapter introductions and summaries, as well as numerous tables, figures, and exhibits, the authors present recommended steps and overlapping activities in a logical, sequential progression. Designed for graduate students in measurement//psychometrics, structural equation modeling, and survey research seminars across the social science disciplines, this book also addresses the needs of researchers and academics in all business, psychology, and sociology-related disciplines.
Winner of the 2008 W J M Mackenzie Book Prize Politics was once a term with an array of broadly positive connotations, associated with public scrutiny, deliberation and accountability. Yet today it is an increasingly dirty word, typically synonymous with duplicity, corruption, inefficiency and undue interference in matters both public and private. How has this come to pass? Why do we hate politics and politicians so much? How pervasive is the contemporary condition of political disaffection? And what is politics anyway? In this lively and original work, Colin Hay provides a series of innovative and provocative answers to these questions. He begins by tracing the origins and development of the current climate of political disenchantment across a broad range of established democracies. Far from revealing a rising tide of apathy, however, he shows that a significant proportion of those who have withdrawn from formal politics are engaged in other modes of political activity. He goes on to develop and defend a broad and inclusive conception of politics and the political that is far less formal, less state–centric and less narrowly governmental than in most conventional accounts. By demonstrating how our expectations of politics and the political realities we witness are shaped decisively by the assumptions about human nature that we project onto political actors, Hay provides a powerful and highly distinctive account of contemporary political disenchantment. Why We Hate Politics will be essential reading for all those troubled by the contemporary political condition of the established democracies.
General questions concerning the role of entertainment media in politics permeated the 2004 election cycle. Political communication scholars are beginning to systematically analyze potential sociopolitical ramifications stemming from entertainment television viewing, but one difficulty with this emerging area of research is an inability to forge connections between seemingly disparate research agendas. Several distinct lines of research are summarized in this article and forged into a coherent whole through the lens of Zillmann's disposition theory and the broader study of media enjoyment. Extantworks devoted to the study of entertainment television and politics are summarized, and a ninepart typology is introduced. This article closes with a discussion of howthe typology can serve to advance the study of entertainment television and politics.
This essay argues that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience, and cultural practices as well. Offering a television-specific approach, the article explores media genres by incorporating contemporary cultural theory and exemplifying its discursive approach with a brief case study.
This investigation dealt with the role and impact of affect in the process of resistance. A total of 597 participants took part in the study in 4 phases spanning 6 weeks. Initial results indicated that the cognitive, affective-anger, and affective-happiness inoculation treatments all conferred resistance to persuasive attacks. Structural equation analyses were conducted on the cognitive, affective-anger, and affective-happiness experimental inoculation conditions in order to examine the process of resistance. The results across all 3 conditions revealed a direct path in which inoculation treatments directly induced resistance to persuasive attacks. However, indirect paths to resistance varied across the 3 experimental conditions. Cognitive inoculation treatments contributed to receiver threat and counterarguing output, which, in turn, enhanced resistance. Thus, the cognitive inoculation treatments triggered a process that is consistent with McGuire's theoretical explanation for resistance. By contrast, both affective-anger and affective-happiness inoculation treatments relied more heavily on elicited emotional responses. Finally, the results indicated that greater receiver involvement was positively associated with experienced anger and, therefore, indirectly contributed to resistance, whereas greater receiver self-efficacy tended to dampen resistance.
This article takes up Bennett and Iyengar's (2008) call for debate about the future of political communication effects research. We outline 4 key criticisms. First, Bennett and Iyengar are too quick to dismiss the importance of attitude reinforcement, long recognized as an important type of political media influence. Second, the authors take too narrow a view of the sources of political information, remaining fixated on news. Third, they offer an incomplete portrayal of selective exposure, exaggerating the extent to which individuals avoid attitude-discrepant information. Finally, they lean toward determinism when describing the role technologies play in shaping our political environment. In addition, we challenge Bennett and Iyengar's assertion that only brand new theory can serve to help researchers understand today's political communication landscape. We argue that existing tools, notably the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), retain much utility for examining political media effects. Contrary to Bennett and Iyengar's claims, the ELM suggests that the contemporary political information environment does not necessarily lead to minimal effects.
A growing body of research indicates that entertainment-education programming can be an effective way to deliver prosocial and health messages. Some have even speculated that entertainment-education may be more effective than overtly persuasive messages in certain circumstances. Despite empirical advances in this area, more work is needed to understand fully what makes entertainment-education unique from a message-processing standpoint. To this end, the present article has three objectives. First, the article examines the involvement with narrative storylines and characters that is fostered by entertainment programming. This includes a much-needed explication and separation of several related constructs, such as identification, parasocial interaction, similarity, and others. Second, the article reviews and synthesizes existing theories that have addressed entertainment-education message processing. Third, the article builds on these theories, presenting an expanded theoretical framework. A set of propositions is advanced and directions for future research are discussed. In total, the article offers a clarification of existing concepts that are critical to the study of entertainment-education, a synthesis of relevant theory, and a set of propositions to guide future research in entertainment-education message effects.
Statistical issues associated with multilevel data are becoming increasingly important to organizational researchers. This paper concentrates on the issue of assessing the factor structure of a construct at aggregate levels of analysis. Specifically, we describe a recently developed procedure for performing multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) [Muthen, B.O. (1990). Mean and covariance structure analysis of hierarchical data. Paper presented at the Psychometric Society, Princeton, NJ; Muthen, B.O. (1994). Multilevel covariance structure analysis. Sociological Methods and Research, 22, 376–398], and provide an illustrative example of its application to leadership data reflecting both the organizational and societal level of analysis. Overall, the results of our illustrative analysis support the existence of a valid societal-level leadership construct, and show the potential of this multilevel confirmatory factor analysis procedure for leadership research and the field of I/O psychology in general.
We define self-censorship as the withholding of one’s true opinion from an audience perceived to disagree with that opinion. Willingness to self-censor can be conceptualized as an individual difference, and we introduce here an 8-item self-report
instrument to measure this construct. The instrument yields reliable data in both student and nonstudent populations and can
be easily administered in no more than a few minutes in written or oral format. Evidence of the validity of the measure comes
from findings that self-censorers (i.e. those scoring relatively high on the measure) tend to be relatively more anxious about
social interaction and communication, more concerned about how other people evaluate them, less argumentative, and lower in
self-esteem. Although correlated with measures of these related constructs, confirmatory factor analyses indicate that the
willingness to self-censor scale is statistically distinguishable from these measures. The measure can serve as a useful research
tool for investigators interested in public opinion expression, political participation, media effects, interpersonal discussion,
group decision making, and other areas.
Not so implicitly political: Selective exposure to fictional entertainment media. Paper presented at the 117 th American Political Science Association annual meeting
- S M Coles
Coles, S. M. (2021, September). Not so implicitly political: Selective exposure to fictional
entertainment media. Paper presented at the 117 th American Political Science Association
annual meeting, Seattle, WA.
The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication
- M X Delli Carpini
Delli Carpini, M. X. (2014). The political effects of entertainment media. In K. Kenski & K. H.
Jamieson (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication. Oxford University
Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.30
Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
- L Mason
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago
Press.
Putting a number on Hollywood's perceived liberalism
- J Piacenza
Piacenza, J. (2018, March 1). Putting a number on Hollywood's perceived liberalism. Morning
Consult.
Hard and soft news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings
- C Reinemann
- J Stanyer
- S Scherr
- G Legnante
Reinemann, C., Stanyer, J., Scherr, S., & Legnante, G. (2012). Hard and soft news: A review of
concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism, 13(2), 221-239.
doi:10.1177/1464884911427803
Explicit persuasive intent and its impact on success at persuasion: The determining roles of attractiveness and likeableness
- M.-A Reinhard
- M Messner
- S L Sporer
Reinhard, M.-A., Messner, M., & Sporer, S. L. (2006). Explicit persuasive intent and its impact
on success at persuasion: The determining roles of attractiveness and likeableness.
Journal of Consumer Psychology, 16(3), 249-259. doi:10.2307/27609598
Federal agency: Supporting "Black Lives Matter" isn't partisan or political
- J Shannon
Shannon, J. (2020, July 17). Federal agency: Supporting "Black Lives Matter" isn't partisan or
political. USA Today.