Melvin L. DeFleur's research while affiliated with Complutense University of Madrid and other places

This paper reports on the methods, findings, and implications of a large-scale cross-cultural experiment on audience recall of brief news stories. Subjects from Spain and from the United States were exposed, one-at-a-time and under highly controlled conditions, to one of three local spot news stories presented via either newspaper, computer screen, television, or radio. Each of the 720 subjects was a student in a beginning course in media studies, in either a Spanish or an American university. The stories were the same for each group, with each carefully prepared in the two languages so as to be “matched.” Careful attention was given to making the stories as close as possible in length, topic, organization, and coverage of specific details so as to permit direct comparisons between similar subjects in the two cultural settings. Distinct patterns of results with statistically significant differences between the two cultural groups were found.

This study reports results of a large-scale experiment in which subjects were exposed to news stories presented by one of four media. The goal was to provide both baseline data and a reasonably definitive answer as to the relative level of recall resulting from presentations by newspapers, computer screen, television and radio while controlling for other factors. Facts from news stories presented by newspaper or computer screen were recalled at a significantly higher level than were facts from the same stories when presented via radio or television. Somewhat surprisingly, results from computer screens were closer to newspapers than to television.