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Measurement of Media Exposure
Abstract
Media exposure is a crucial prerequisite for media effects: People must first be exposed to media content if it is to influence them. Yet, despite media exposure's centrality in communication research, there is little scholarly consensus on how best to measure it. Moreover, today's media landscape, in which fragmented audiences are exposed to media messages from myriad sources, makes accurately capturing exposure even more challenging. Three major approaches to media exposure measurement can be identified in the communication literature: (i) survey measures of self‐reported exposure, (ii) ecological measures of potential exposure, and (iii) hybrid measures that combine the two. Because each of these approaches has its strengths and weaknesses, researchers may be well advised to use them in concert to best capture media exposure. More scholarly efforts are needed to improve the reliability and validity of exposure measurement.
... Information about the age (165 8-year-olds, 177 9-year-olds) and sex of the children (167 boys, 175 girls) were provided to us by Kantar Netherlands. Children's media exposure to non-fictional robots was assessed through a content-specific self-report measure [55]. Children were shown a set of pictures of non-fictional robots and asked how frequently they had seen this type of robot or similar robots "on TV," "in books," "on the Internet (for example, YouTube)," and "in magazines." ...
Research on children’s anthropomorphism of social robots is mostly cross-sectional and based on a single measurement. However, because social robots are new type of technology with which children have little experience, children’s initial responses to social robots may be biased by a novelty effect. Accordingly, a single measurement of anthropomorphism may not accurately reflect how children anthropomorphize social robots over time. Thus, we used data from a six-wave panel study to investigate longitudinal changes in 8- to 9-year-old children’s anthropomorphism of a social robot. Latent class growth analyses revealed that anthropomorphism peaked after the first interaction with the social robot, remained stable for a brief period of time, and then decreased. Moreover, two distinct longitudinal trajectories of anthropomorphism could be identified: one with moderate to high anthropomorphism and one with low to moderate anthropomorphism. Previous media exposure to non-fictional robots increased the probability that children experienced higher levels of anthropomorphism.
... Along with our survey-based approach, this generalized treatment of media exposure may explain why our findings on negative emotion were not consistent with those of an experimental study about the effects of negative emotion on attitudes toward climate change (Wong-Parodi & Feygina, 2021), which specifically studied narrative messages. While our measures of media exposure have been established in media effects and risk communication literature (e.g., Shi & Nagler, 2020;Yoo et al., 2020), future research should use an experimental manipulation to test which specific types of media messages could enhance risk perceptions, efficacy beliefs, and negative emotion. Another issue worth investigating further is the extent to which platforms and types of media differentially relate to people's cognitive, emotional, and attitudinal reactions to climate change risks. ...
... This is especially relevant in this study as we relied on adolescents' self-reports of their social media interactions with climate content. This is a typical approach in social media research, but it means that adolescents may have over-or underestimated the amount of exposure and interactions they had with the content of interest (Shi & Nagler, 2020;Verbeij et al., 2021). Future research should rely on experiments or data donations to better control and investigate the effects of interest. ...
Despite the circulation of climate content on social media, little longitudinal research has explored their relations with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. Considering that individual behaviours, in conjunction with structural change, are critical to mitigate climate change, this two-wave panel study among 657 adolescents examined how social media interactions (i.e. exposure, liking, commenting, sharing and posting of climate messages) reciprocally related to adolescents’ pro-environmental cognitions (i.e. descriptive and injunctive norms, attitudes) and behaviour. The study showed transactional relationships between self-posting and sharing of climate content over time. Pro-environmental behaviour at Wave 1 (W1) positively related to all cognitive variables at Wave 2 (W2), yet no reciprocal relationship occurred as none of the cognitive variables (W1) predicted behaviour (W2) over time. Moreover, with the exception of the positive link between ‘liking’ (W1) and attitudes (W2), no (reciprocal) relationships between social media interactions and adolescents’ pro-environmental cognitions and behaviour occurred over time.
The measurement of how people are “exposed” to media content, which is crucial for the understanding of media use and effects, has been a challenge for a long time. Today’s media landscape, in which individuals are exposed to a diversity of messages anytime, anywhere, and from a great variety of sources on an increasing number of different media platforms, has complicated the measurement of media exposure even more. However, today’s digital media landscape also offers new possibilities to map media exposure by means of passive measurement. In this Introduction article to the special issue, we give an overview of the different ways in which media exposure is measured and the various issues associated with their applications. We conclude with a research agenda for issues that need to be tackled in future research and also introduce a research tool for media exposure measurement.
The ability of researchers to empirically test theories of media effects and to assess impact of communication campaigns depends on their ability to identify levels of exposure to the media or messages of interest. This paper critically examines exposure operationalization and analysis strategies, including some not yet widely used in the communication field.
The past several decades have witnessed thousands of studies into the effects of media on children and adults. The effects sizes that are found in these studies are typically small to moderate, at best. In this article, we first compare the effect sizes found in media-effects research to those found in other social and behavioral sciences, and demonstrate that small effect sizes are just as common in these other disciplines. Then, we discuss why, in contradiction to these other disciplines, small media effects often lead to opposing, or even polarized views among communication scholars. Finally, we present five challenges for future media-effects research that may increase the explanatory power of current media-effects models: 1) improved media exposure measures; 2) more programmatic research on conditional media effects; 3) more targeted, cumulative theory testing; 4) a broader recognition of transactional media effects; and 5) a reconsideration of the media-effects paradigm in the context of new media. © 2013 (Patti M. Valkenburg, [email protected]
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The aim of most population-based studies of media is to relate a specific exposure to an outcome of interest. A research program has been developed that evaluates exposure to different components of movies in an attempt of assess the association of such exposure with the adoption of substance use during adolescence. To assess exposure to movie substance use, one must measure both viewing time and content. In developing the exposure measure, the study team was interested in circumventing a common problem in exposure measurement, where measures often conflate exposure to media with attention to media. Our aim in this paper is to present a validated measure of exposure to entertainment media, the Beach method, which combines recognition of a movie title with content analysis of the movie for substance use, to generate population based measures of exposure to substance use in this form of entertainment.
Background
Endoscopic placement of 3 branched self‐expandable metallic stents (SEMSs) for high‐grade malignant hilar biliary obstructions (MHBOs) is technically challenging. We examined the feasibility and efficacy of a novel stenting method combining side‐by‐side and stent‐in‐stent (SBSIS) placement for MHBO.
Methods
Between January 2015 and December 2018, 27 consecutive patients with high‐grade MHBO underwent SBSIS placement. We evaluated the technical success, functional success, recurrent biliary obstruction (RBO), adverse events other than RBO, and reintervention success rates associated with SBSIS placement.
Results
The technical success rate was 85% (23/27). Insertion of the third SEMS failed in 4 patients, and the median diameter of the common bile duct (CBD) was significantly smaller in patients in whom technical failure occurred (5 mm vs. 8 mm; P = 0.004). Functional success was achieved in all patients in whom the procedure was a technical success. The rate of adverse events other than RBO was 15% (4/27). The RBO rate was 43% (10/23), and the median time to RBO was 157 days. The success rate of endoscopic reintervention for RBO was 89% (8/9).
Conclusions
SBSIS placement showed favorable results and is a promising option in patients with high‐grade MHBO requiring triple metal stenting. However, it might be preferable to avoid SBSIS in patients with a narrow CBD. (Clinical Trial Registry: UMIN000035721)
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How to measure media exposure is one of the most central—and most challenging—questions in communication research, particularly the media effects paradigm. For there to be media effects, there must first be media exposure, defined as the extent to which individuals encounter specific media messages or content. Remarkably, despite media exposure's centrality to the study of effects, there has been little scholarly consensus on how to measure it. This entry begins by reviewing traditional approaches to measurement, describing the major classes of exposure measures and drawing on examples from health communication, political communication, and other media effects domains. This historical approach to measurement is contrasted with more recent developments, including efforts to provide reliability and validity evidence for novel measures. The entry concludes by considering future questions that could be addressed by media effects scholars interested in advancing measurement of media exposure.
Research on social media content overwhelmingly relies on self-reports, which we suggest are meaningfully limited and likely biased. Instead, we apply an under-utilized method—corneal eye tracking—for gauging attention to content in social media. We expose subjects to different types of Facebook content and track their gaze as they browse through posts. Substantively, we find that news and social content garner equal attention, with politics trailing behind both. We also find that the style of the post matters for attention patterns, with richer content (e.g., pictures, links) enhancing attention especially for social and news posts. Methodologically, we conclude that participants are unable to accurately report the topics and types of content available on the Facebook feed, even immediately after exposure. We discuss the implications of these findings and also make recommendations for appropriate methods in this area.
In today’s convergent media environment, media exposure becomes
increasingly channel-independent and social media-bound, and media content
is more frequently accessed on mobile devices. This calls for new
approaches to measuring media exposure. This study applies an innovative
approach to survey (n = 2378) exposure to political information in the form
of a mobile diary measurement, accessible via a specifically developed app.
Respondents exhibited broad acceptance and uptake of the mobile measurement,
resulting in an almost representative sample and equally satisfactory
application of different platform modes. The study furthermore
confirms limitations of mere usage time measurements of social media
platforms in effects research and explores a range of actual content types
that citizens encounter in social networks. It recommends more frequent
use of mobile exposure measurements and argues for a content-related
assessment of social media use in effects research.
Measurement of exposure has long been one of the most central and fundamental issues in communication research. While self-reported measures remain dominant in the field, alternative approaches such as exogenous or hybrid measures have received increasing scholarly attention and been employed in various contexts for the estimation of media exposure; however, systematic scrutiny of such measures is thin. This study aims to address the gap by systematically reviewing the studies which utilized exogenous or hybrid exposure measures for examining the effects of media exposure on tobacco-related outcomes. We then proceed to discuss the strengths and weaknesses, current developments in this class of measurement, drawing some implications for the appropriate utilization of exogenous and hybrid measures.
Surveys, although widely used to measure media exposure, are blunt instruments. In today’s complex media environments it is difficult to accurately recall usage. Audience measurement data, often collected by the media industries for commercial purposes, offer an alternative. However, unlike surveys, where individuals are the unit of analysis, audience measurement companies report data aggregated at the level of media outlets. Despite this limitation, audience measurement data may be analyzed for deciphering media use patterns in theoretically productive ways.
In light of a recent exchange between Prior (2013a) and Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013), we evaluate the new American National Election Study program-count measures of news exposure using a unique dataset that tracks self-reports as well as actual exposure to news collected via passive tracking devices. We bring these data to bear on concerns raised by Prior (2013a) about the construct and convergent validity of the new ANES measures. Our results add nuance to previous findings showing respondents’ propensity to overreport exposure to news, and also demonstrate that on average, self-reported measures reflect relative levels of exposure quite well. Additionally, we show that the more unique news programs a person watches, the more total time he or she is exposed to political news. Very few people watch only one program but watch it repeatedly. The data also reveal an increase in the number of programs watched leading up to election day, and a concomitant increase in the amount of time per capita spent with political news as elections approach. We conclude, however, that the program-count measure is not without its weaknesses. Shortening the list of programs affects construct validity by introducing noise into the low end of the scale. Expanding the list of programs in the survey to include local news and special reports will improve fidelity at the low end of this new measure.
The ability to validly measure campaign exposure is central to claims of public communication campaign effectiveness. Surprisingly, scholars have paid remarkably little attention to questions about the validity of various ways to measure campaign exposure. This paper begins to address this gap by outlining conceptual, empirical, and practical issues in developing valid measures of campaign exposure. First, I offer a brief definition of measurement validity and describe a variety of measurement options utilized in recent, large–scale health communication campaign evaluations. Next, I outline conceptual and empirical assumptions behind these various measurement strategies. I continue with a review of research that has applied validation criteria to specific measures of campaign exposure. I conclude by offering a series of guidelines for exposure measurement and validation practices based on the evidence to date, which I caveat by describing tensions and emergent issues that researchers will need to consider in future work.
Background:
In 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration licensed a vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV) that prevents the strains of HPV that cause 70% of cervical cancers. Within months, many states introduced legislation requiring the vaccine for girls, prompting controversy and heightened political and media attention to the issue. Previous research has shown differences in HPV vaccine awareness by individual-level characteristics such as race/ethnicity, income, and education levels. We examined how individual political orientation and exposure to media coverage can also shape awareness of the vaccine.
Methods:
Using data from a 2009 Internet survey of 1,216 nationally representative adult respondents linked to data on state-specific news coverage, we assessed how political orientation, media exposure, and state political context predicted HPV vaccine awareness.
Results:
Younger people, women, and those with more education were significantly more likely to be aware of the vaccine. Even after controlling for these characteristics, we found that exposure to news media was associated with higher HPV vaccine awareness. Whereas liberals and conservatives were both more aware of the vaccine compared with moderates, the data are suggestive that liberals were more sensitive to news coverage.
Conclusion:
These findings suggest that individual-level political identities and their interaction with the informational environment may be important factors to consider in evaluating the determinants of individuals' attitudes and behaviors related to politically charged women's health issues.