Mass Media Effects Research

Advances Through Meta-Analysis

Raymond W. Preiss, Barbara Mae Gayle, Nancy Burrell, Mike Allen, Raymond W. Preiss, Barbara Mae Gayle, Nancy Burrell, Mike Allen

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136772245
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Categoria: Kommunikationswissenschaften

This distinctive collection offers a unique set of meta-analyses covering the breadth of media effects research. Editor Raymond W. Preiss and his colleagues bring together an all-star list of contributors. Organized by theories, outcomes, and mass media campaigns, the chapters included here offer important insights on what current social science re

1

Traditions of Mass Media
Theory and Research

Jennings Bryant

University of Alabama

R. Glenn Cummins

Kennesaw State University

In examining the use of research methods in mass communication, Lowry (1979) lamented, “For the most part, communication researchers have neglected to conduct systematic studies of their own output” (p. 262). Whether this claim was valid at the time it was published is uncertain, but what is certain is that such a condemnation simply is not true for contemporary communication research. A search through the volumes of the most popular communication journals from recent decades reveals that communication scholars have become quite mindful of where the discipline has been and where it is going. Moreover, attempts to take stock of the state of communication research have been particularly popular in recent years, a trend that may well be an artifact of the hype surrounding the turn of the century and the dawn of a new millennium. Nonetheless, such examinations are useful in understanding the big picture of communication research—past, present, and future.

TRADITIONS OF MASS
COMMUNICATION THEORY

Discerning the dominant, most popular, or most fully developed bodies of theory within mass communication research is a challenge, and any enumeration of these trends is likely to exclude what some would consider significant milestones in the discipline. Moreover, many mass communication “theories” are not true theories in the strictest meaning of the work but rather are a relatively coherent body of research guided by repeated theme and a general framework of ideas and research methods. For example, research into the effects of exposure to media sex or violence frequently is cited as a significant research tradition in our discipline. However, these domains of research subsume numerous research perspectives and theoretical mechanisms, many of which could easily stand as distinct theoretical perspectives.

Still, a review of the scholarly literature within the discipline does reveal a single preeminent theoretical trend that must be addressed first—the absence of theory from the vast majority of our scholarly literature. Numerous content analyses involving various leading communication journals paint a somewhat bleak picture about the use of theory in mass communication research, because they reveal that a mere 27% to 39% of articles within the most widely read communication journals have contained any sort of reference to a specific theory or theoretical orientation (Bryant & Miron, 2004; Cooper, Potter, & Dupagne, 1994; Kamahawi & Weaver, 2003; Riffe & Frietag, 1998). Thus, the dominant theoretical trend in mass communication research is the absence of theory. This absence will be addressed again in the conclusion of this chapter as we explore the future of mass communication theory and research, because a number of trends do give cause for celebration about theory development and testing in mass communication research, and our previous normative disregard for theory needs to be placed in its current context.

Despite this conspicuous absence of theory from communication literature, scholars have identified a number of theoretical perspectives that have dominated the discipline over the last half-century. In trying to identify the dominant trends in mass communication theory, we have the benefit of a number of perspectives, some looking forward and some looking back, to light our path. One of the earliest macroanalytic perspectives on the body of communication research was conducted at the end of a seminal stage of communication research by one of the founding fathers of the field, Wilbur Schramm (1957). Schramm's examination of 20 years of communication research concluded by posing a number of questions about the future of communication study, including the effects of media violence, the functions of the media, their usefulness as a teaching tool, the potential of distance education, and the like. Fortunately, Berelson' s (1959) prediction that communication research was “withering away” (p. 1) proved to be false prophecy, and Schramm' s approach of raising many fascinating questions became a striking predictor of some of the dominant traditions of mass communication research over the next half-century.

Decades later, at the dawn of the new millennium, a number of other scholars took stock of the most important contributions to mass communication research. DeFleur's (1998) examination of the “milestones” (p. 85) in communication research not only reviewed the brief intellectual history of communication scholarship, but it also provided a provocative condemnation of contemporary communication scholars' failure to contribute any new ideas to the discipline. In his essay, DeFleur cited seven broad theoretical perspectives within mass communication research, including the early “magic bullet” hypothesis, which gave way to more complex selective influence theories. He then cited uses and gratifications research, modeling theories, the adoption of innovations, agenda setting, and research into the effects of television on aggression as the remainder of the milestones in communication research.

Similarly, Rubin and Haridakis (2001) identified what they considered to be the dominant theoretical perspectives at the turn of the century. Although some common ground exists between their perspectives and those of DeFleur (1998), the essayists disagree on a number of significant contributions to communication theory. Like DeFleur, Rubin and Haridakis cited agenda setting, the diffusion of innovations, social cognition, and uses and gratifications research. However, the latter authors also included theoretical perspectives such as cultivation research, critical and cultural studies, and gap hypotheses, as well as relative newcomers such as framing and third-person effects. In addition, Rubin and Haridakis also listed a number of lines of research that are either without a cohesive theoretical perspective or stretch beyond the purview of any single perspective. These dominant lines of research included media portrayals, media constructions, health issues, new technologies, cultural maintenance and change, children and the media, and political communication.

Thus, all three of these reviews aid in identifying the dominant theoretical perspectives in communication research. However, what they lack is any sense of the popularity of these various theoretical perspectives. Although the authors offered numerous citations as evidence of popularity, they shed little light on the relative frequency with which these perspectives were cited or on the waxing or waning of their prominence in mass communication research over time. In one of the most recent examinations of theory and research in mass communication, Bryant and Miron (2004) sought to fill this gap. They conducted an empirical investigation into the use of theory in mass communication literature, in which they not only explored which theories were cited most often but also examined how they were used within the literature and traced the frequency with which they were used across the decades.

Bryant and Miron (2004) conducted a content analysis of articles appearing in three leading communication journals—Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Communication, and Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media—that have published mass communication research over a 45-year period. The authors randomly selected one issue per year for coding, and all articles within the issue selected were analyzed, resulting in a total of 1,806 articles coded for analysis. The authors stated three explicit goals: “(1) to identify theories (including models), broad paradigms of scientific investigation and theorizing, and schools of thought that created such paradigms; (2) to locate them in the scientific fields and subfields (areas) that generated them; and (3) to determine what the cited theories were used for in the studies in which we found them” (p. 664).

As previously stated, one of the most alarming findings of a number of content analyses of communication journals is the absence of theory from a majority of articles appearing in these leading communication journals. Bryant and Miron's (2004) findings further validated these findings, as only roughly 32% of the articles they coded included some form of theory. Moreover, this figure could potentially be a mild overestimate of the presence of theory in communication research, given that the random sampling procedure Bryant and Miron utilized resulted in the inclusion of the “Ferment in the Field” issue of Journal of Communication.

The big picture for the presence of theory in communication research does not improve when one factors in the data on how these theories were used. Almost half of the articles that contained some theory merely referenced the theory (48.03%), and an additional 26.13% of the articles containing theory used it as a theoretical framework for a study. Other uses included comparison of theories (7.9%) and critiquing a theory (4.31%). Unfortunately, the authors noted that the core elements of theory construction such as proposing a theory (3.16%), testing a new theory (2.58%), integrating theories (2.01%), and expanding a theory (1.87%) were relatively rare. Again, bear in mind that these figures are based only on the articles that contained theory not on the total sample of articles coded in the study. Thus, to some extent these data support the indictment of communication research as being largely atheoretical.

Bryant and Miron's (2004) content analysis also shed light on the dominant trends in mass communication theory. One variable coded was the origin of the various theories cited within communication literature. Although the majority of the theories cited (59.22%) originated from within the communication discipline, the results give partial support to the popular notion of the multidisciplinary nature of communication research (e.g., Rogers, 1994). The content analysis revealed that a number of other disciplines have also contributed theories to mass communication research, including psychology (12.42%), sociology (5.24%), political science (4.74%), and economics (3.30%). Although these figures may belie the oftentimes indirect influence that other social sciences have on communication theory, they nonetheless indicate that communication scholars have made great strides in solidifying communication study as a legitimate and unique domain of scholarly inquiry.

Most beneficial to the present discussion are Bryant and Miron's (2004) findings on the frequency with which scholars have utilized various theories or theoretical perspectives, as well as the distribution of these references over the years. First, it should be noted that not counting references to broad epistemological foundations or general schools of thought, an astonishing 600 theories were cited in their sample. However, only a small fraction of those theories were cited in 10 or more of the articles coded, suggesting that most mass communication theories have a short half-life and a very small loyal following. Based on these normative data, the authors composed a Top 26 list of theories in communication research. Their list reveals that only a handful of these theories—uses and gratifications (n = 61; e.g., Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974), agenda setting (n = 61; e.g., McCombs & Shaw, 1972), and cultivation (n = 56; e.g., Gerbner, 1969; Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1980)—have truly dominated the mass communication research tradition, and they, the “big 3,” were cited almost twice as often as other commonly utilized theories. Other popular theories included Bandura's social learning theory (n = 34; e.g., Bandura, 1973), Marxism (n = 34; e.g., Marx, 1867; Marx & Engels, 1848), diffusion of innovations (n = 24; e.g., Rogers, 1962), and McLuhan's sense-extension theory (n = 23; e.g., McLuhan, 1964). To some extent, these findings validate DeFleur's (1998) and Rubin and Haridakis' (2001) enumeration of the dominant trends in mass communication theory and research, as all the theories or thema cited by those authors appeared in Byrant and Miron's list of Top 26 Theories.

TRADITIONS OF MASS COMMUNICATION
RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES

Lowry's (1979) critique that communication scholars do not “conduct systematic studies of their own output” (p. 262) also no longer holds true for the research techniques utilized in mass communication research. Examples of scholarly publications examining the varied research techniques and methods used can be found throughout the past five decades of mass communication literature. Moreover, these studies paint a remarkably clear and consistent picture of the dominant trends in research methodology in our discipline, especially on the dominance of quantitative research in mass communication throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Methods

A number of scholars have made claims about the increased popularity of qualitative research methods in recent years (e.g., Lindloff, 1991; Pauly, 1991). However, a review of investigations that have systematically examined the use of qualitative versus quantitative methods contests this observation. Again, Schramm (1957) provided one of the earliest examinations of research trends in communication. Of interest to the present discussion was his content analysis of 20 years of Journalism Quarterly (now Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly),which charted the rise in the proportion of research articles utilizing quantitative methods from 10% in 1937 to 48% to 1956. In addition to this shift toward quantitative methods, Schramm noted a number of other research trends, including the study of communication process and structures and the study of international communication.

Perloff (1976) renewed this examination of Journalism Quarterly by content analyzing and comparing two eras of the journal, 1955 to 1964 and 1965 to 1974....

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• LEA'S COMMUNICATION SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Traditions of Mass Media Theory and Research
• 2 Media, Messages, and Meta-Analysis
• 3 Wherefore Art Thou Mass Media Theory?
• 4 Effects of Agenda Setting
• 5 Media Priming: A Meta-Analysis
• 6 The Third-Person Effect: A Meta-Analysis of the Perceptual Hypothesis
• 7 The Selective Exposure Hypothesis and Media Choice Processes
• 8 Meta-Analysis of Television's Impact on Special Populations
• 9 "And Miles to Go....": Reflections on the Past and Future of Mass Media Effects Research
• 10 Effects of Media Violence on Viewers' Aggression in Unconstrained Social Interaction
• 11 The Effects of Advertising on Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis
• 12 Effects of Sexually Explicit Media
• 13 Effects of Gender Stereotyping on Socialization
• 14 Enjoyment of Mediated Horror and Violence: A Meta-Analysis
• 15 Violent Video Games and Aggression: Why Can't We Find Effects?
• 16 Effects of Music
• 17 Positive Effects of Television on Children's Social Interaction: A Meta-Analysis
• 18 Parasocial Relationships and Television: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects
• 19 Many Faces of Media Effects
• 20 Meta-Analyses of Mediated Health Campaigns
• 21 An Analysis of Media Health Campaigns for Children and Adolescents: Do They Work?
• 22 The Impact of Earvin "Magic" Johnson's HIV-Positive Announcement
• 23 Media Use and Political Involvement
• 24 Mass Media and Voter Turnout
• 25 The Spiral of Silence: A Meta-Analysis and Its Impact
• 26 On the Role of Newspaper Ownership on Bias in Presidential Campaign Coverage by Newspapers
• 27 What's in a Meta-Analysis
• 28 Meta-Analysis: Demonstrating the Power of Mass Communication
• 29 The Challenge of Media Effects for Teaching and Policy
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Author Biographies