Effects of Mass Media

 Research often looks at questions and the answers to those questions are turned into theories  American research begins in the 1920s  Most media research is quantitative  Content analysis/violent acts/drugs used  Questions about consumption/volume  Arbitron  Nielsen

 Questions about impact/make you violent  Developmental view  Slow and steady accumulation of knowledge  Self-correcting

 Do mass communications present false images of the world to the public?  Do the American media promote unacceptable behavior among children?  Can mass media shape our attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors?  Are mass communications dominating the political process and limiting intelligent decision making?

 Immediate, direct and uniform effects on everyone who received a media message  Darwin/evolution  Uniform inherited instincts  Basic biology would say all humans will respond to stimuli in the same way

 Motion Picture Research Council 1920s  40 million minors in a year including almost half under 14 went to the movies weekly  This is the first large scale attempt to measure effects of a major medium  13 reports published in the 1930s  Confirmed critics charges and parental fears  Established important questions STILL being pursued

 Blumer says movies are source of imitation, unintentional learning and emotional influence  Peterson/Thurstone say seeing movies changes children’s attitudes  Both were and can be shown to be invalid due to improper almost unethical research methods

 Have a random sample  Be valid—measures what it claims to measure  Be reliable—if repeated using the same techniques it would yield similar results  Be unbiased  Use both control and experimental groups  Experimental groups each element can be controlled and evaluated individually  Control groups allow elements to occur naturally

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