Media Portrayal Frequency and Audience Perceptions
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Media Portrayal Frequency and Audience Perceptions
Priming is a cognitive theory that focuses on how information is organized, stored, and retrieved within the brain. Thus, the correlations observed between media portrayal frequency and audience perceptions of salience are actually attributable to the way information is stored within the brain. This extension certainly does not reduce the value of the theory; rather, the addition of priming as an explanatory mechanism for agenda setting helps us better understand why issue prominence in media influences audience estimates of issue salience. It also helps explain why issue prominence does not affect all audience members in the same way. Some audience members have different types of information stored within that cognitive schema, and consequently, mentions of issues by media activate different information based on their idiosyncratic methods of storage.
While agenda setting, cognitive priming, and issue framing are not the same phenomenon, they often occur together. Examining not only the issue of prominence (agenda setting) but in addition the characteristics of the issue employed in the message (framing) and the other issues organized within the cognitive structures of the audience members (priming) provides a strong theoretical rationale for the studying of media content and portrayals.
Bradley Greenberg (1988b) proposed the “drench hypothesis” as an explanatory vehicle for the effects of media portrayals, though this is far less commonly employed as a theoretical rationale for studying media content or portrayals. Greenberg’s argument is clear and persuasive. In the drench hypothesis, Greenberg suggests that a single event can be far more influential or life changing than a series of smaller events. Events such as the shootings at Columbine High School, the Kennedy assassinations, or the space shuttle disasters (Challenger and Columbia) can have a much more pronounced effect on audiences than the stalagmitelike effects that occur over time with repeated exposures to much smaller and less meaningful events such as shootings by fictional characters on prime-time programming.
Greenberg is suggesting that highly memorable and impression-leaving events—real or fictional—can be more influential than repeated exposure to the small, less-memorable portrayals that occur on television. Seeing a single automobile accident—such as the death of Princess Diana—can be much more influential than the cumulative effects of a season full of NASCAR accidents or a lifetime of chase scenes from Hollywood. Proponents of the drench hypothesis recognize that, in terms of media portrayals, sometimes less can be more.
Greenberg also recognized that the argument underlying the cultivation hypothesis is weakened by the fact that audience members are still affected differentially by media portrayals. Some heavy viewers of violence, for example, view the world quite differently from other heavy viewers. This suggests that audience responses to portrayals differ, to some degree, by audience member. Thus, any theory focusing on the impact of the influence of media portrayals must take into consideration that audience members are affected differentially by the same message or series of messages. If audience members are affected differentially, then it is a logical necessity to recognize that different portrayals have different levels of influence on audience members.
While only a few studies have attempted to empirically test the drench hypothesis, the empirical evidence supporting the position is promising (see Bahk, 2001; Reep & Dambrot, 1989). There is, of course, potential for tautological reasoning when using the drench hypothesis. Portrayals that are highly memorable or have a high impact influence audience members more than low-impact portrayals do. Of course, the problem stems from the fact that if drench effects are observed, then the assumption is that the portrayals were high impact. If drench effects are not observed, however, it is not an indictment of the theory but rather evidence that the image was not impactful enough. This potential does not negate the utility of the theory but rather reminds us to scrutinize carefully the assumptions of the theories before we employ them.
What is very important here is the recognition that media portrayals can and undoubtedly do affect audience members differentially and that single events or portrayals can be just as important as or more important than the cumulative effects of media portrayals. This is not to say that the cumulative effects of media portrayals are unimportant. Rather, it is to suggest that the potential for media effects is a complex and multifaceted issue. The effects of portrayals may influence audience members cumulatively as well as from a single exposure. Similarly, audience members may also go relatively uninfluenced by media portrayals as well.
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It is also important to note that while all of the theories discussed here examine the same issue—media portrayals—they are all quite different. Agenda setting focuses on how issue prominence in media content influences audience perceptions of issue salience. Priming theory focuses on how information is stored inside the head of viewers and accessibility. Accessibility here means that people are able to recall information because they have been primed or provided the opportunity to exercise that recall through exposure to media portrayals. Cultivation suggests that media portrayals influence audience members as a cumulative effect. Furthermore, cultivation theory suggests that it is not the information in the portrayals per se causing the audience to cultivate a particular worldview. Rather, cultivation suggests that the themes that run throughout media content are the culprit and not the portrayal itself. This nuance is often lost in discussions of portrayals. Audience members do not learn that elderly people are not highly valued in our culture from the content within media depictions of older adults. Rather, the audience members cultivate a negative perception of the elderly because they are underrepresented or depicted in a negative or stereotypical fashion. Those perceptions come from shows that contain older adults as well as shows that do not. By favoring younger adults on programs, the show is helping audience members to cultivate the perception that older adults are not so important. Finally, social learning theory suggests that audience members can and do learn.
Research Methods and Portrayals Research
Communication scholars employ a variety of different research methods in their quest to understand media portrayals, but the vast majority of the studies employ content analysis. Perhaps the most important scholar writing about content analysis was Ole Holsti. In his classic treatise on the subject, Holsti (1969) defines content analysis as “any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages” (p. 14). Holsti was one of the first scholars to recognize that the technique could be used with text as well as any other durable data including photographs, oral communication, Web sites, brochures, or television programs. Content analysis is a research technique that takes samples of media content (e.g., a television program, newspaper article, Web site) and reduces the content into more manageable categories. For example, a scholar looking at media portrayals of race would watch the television program and every time a character appears on the screen would classify that character by their race. Thus, at the end of the study, the researcher would be able to make claims about the racial composition of television such as “12.5% of the characters on television were black.” In this way, researchers can examine how closely the characteristics of television mirror the characteristics of reality. For example, Robinson and Skill examined television portrayals of the elderly and found that only about 2.5% of the prime- time television viewers were 65 years of age or older. Obviously, the key to meaningful content analytic studies includes the development of content categories (such as the racial cohorts on television or the types and frequency of sexual harassment behaviors on television). In addition, it is imperative that anyone trained as a coder can reproduce the same or nearly the same results from the same data. This reproducibility of results is called reliability in the realm of research methods and is critical to the researcher employing content analysis as a research tool.
Of course, content analysis need not focus exclusively on such “obvious” categories of interest. In fact, one common criticism of content analytic research is that too often content analytic schemes focus on easily observable phenomena instead of the most important images. It is relatively easy to count the number of door knobs that appear during the course of a television program, but it is not particularly interesting or useful. It is much harder, for example, to identify all the acts of altruism that occur within a television program. Acts of altruism are a much more complex phenomenon and much more difficult to identify or code. Someone telling a “little white lie” so that someone else is not embarrassed could be coded as an act of dishonesty, or an act of kindness to save the face of the other interactant can be an act of kindness in one coding scheme. Similarly, researchers can not only examine the portrayals of some behaviors but also content analyze the consequences of those behaviors, thereby providing a more complex and potentially more useful coding system.
Critical to content analysis are the techniques employed by the researcher in developing the sample. Anyone content analyzing the front pages of newspapers during the month of September in 2001 would undoubtedly find that nearly every story focused on the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Anyone looking to see how often issues such as education, the war on drugs, or the economy occur would conclude that there is little or no interest in those issues, based on their frequency of occurrence in the newspaper. So it is critical to
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use sufficiently large samples of media content and to draw those samples randomly if at all possible. Much like survey methods, however, there are of course times when such efforts are not possible or even desirable. The goals of the researcher should guide the sampling techniques employed by that same researcher.
Of course, content analysis is not the only method employed by researchers examining media portrayals. For example, researchers employing the cultivation hypothesis as the theoretical rationale for their study describe the content analysis component of their investigation as “cultivation analysis.” Once they have documented the content on television relevant to their study—either through their own content analysis or through previous studies that have analyzed media content—they may begin the second phase, which is often called “cultural indicators.”
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