Testing the Levels of Message Effects and the Hierarchy Model of Responses with the New Scientific Issue
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This study, using a survey-experiment with a sample of 149 students randomly drawn from 102 US college campuses, testes the effects of four versions of a message about the new scientific issue of water-energy-food (WEF) nexus at the level of agenda, knowledge (frame), attitude, and behavioral intention. The study finds subjects’ attitude associated with subjects’ frame on one end and behavioral intention on the other end, and identifies some effects across the groups. The unclear position of subjects’ agenda in the hierarchy of responses that processes the nexus messages is also discussed. Keywords: Water-Energy-Food Nexus, message effects, the hierarchy of responses
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Testing the Levels of Message Effects and the Hierarchy Model of Responses with the New Scientific Issue
- 1. Testing the Levels of Message Effects and the Hierarchy Model of Responses with the New Scientific Issue of Water-Energy-Food Nexus PRESENTED TO THE 79TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION, VIRTUAL Q. J. YAO, PH.D., ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION & MEDIA, LAMAR UNIVERSITY, BEAUMONT, TX 77710. (409) 880-7656 QYAO@LAMAR.EDU
- 2. An Integrated Model of Media Effects Adopted from Yao, Liu, & Stephens (2019) Media stimuli and audience response both accumulate from attention to behaviors, following Weber’s law. Media stimuli generate greatest audience responses at the same level Lower levels of media effects are easier to capture than the higher-level ones. Better tested a new issue with no predisposition in the public mind.
- 3. WEF Nexus, A New Issue to Test the Model WEF Nexus, stands for Water-Food-Energy Nexus. It promotes governing the three resources as a nexus instead of one by one. First emerged in 2011 in the Bonn Nexus Conference; Germany opened a website afterward. The United Nations published two reports on the concept in 2013 and one in 2014. It is still a concept relatively new to scientist and unknown to the public.
- 4. Hypotheses: H1: Subjects exposed to a message of the WEF nexus, compared with those in the control group, are more likely to think the WEF nexus issue as important (classic agenda-setting hypothesis). H2a: Subjects’ agenda on WEF nexus is positively associated with subjects’ knowledge of WEF nexus. H2b: Subjects exposed to messages with knowledge components about WEF nexus, compared with those exposed to no message or messages with no knowledge components, show more knowledge of the WEF nexus. H3a: Subjects’ knowledge on WEF nexus is positively associated with subjects’ attitude supporting WEF nexus. H3b: Subjects exposed to messages with attitudinal components supporting WEF nexus, compared with those exposed to no message or messages with no attitudinal components, show a more supportive attitude toward the WEF nexus. H4a: Subjects’ supportive attitude toward WEF nexus is positively associated with subjects’ supporting behavioral intention toward WEF nexus. H4b: Subjects exposed to messages with a call to support WEF nexus with behaviors, compared with those exposed to no message or messages with no such calls, show more behavioral intention to support the WEF nexus. Exposed to a message Agenda Exposed to an informational Message Exposed to an attitudinal message Exposed to a behavioral message Knowledge/ Frame Attitude Behavioral intention H1 H2b H3b H4b H2a H3a H4a
- 5. Method Survey-experiment: collected 149 completed responses from 102 US colleges; five groups: control, agenda message, knowledge message, attitudinal message, and call-for-action message. Response variables: Subjects’ agenda: a 7-pt scale on the perceived importance of the topic on governing the three resources. Subjects’ knowledge: 5 T/F questions on the nexus concept. Subjects’ frame: a 7-pt scale on agreement with the nexus concept. Subjects’ supportive attitude: a 4-item, 7-pt index on perceiving the nexus concept as urgent, serious, important, and useful (α = .90). Subjects’ supportive behavioral intention: a 5-item, 7-pt index on promoting, donating, helping, telling others, and urging other to support the nexus concept (α = .90). Control Variables: keeping up with science news; pre-knowledge; answer quality.
- 6. Agenda & Knowledge Messages
- 7. Attitudinal & Behavioral Messages
- 8. Results H1, predicting an association of exposure to a message with agenda, is not supported. H2b, predicting an association of exposure to an informational message with knowledge, is supported. H3b, predicting an association of exposure to an attitudinal message with attitude, is not supported. H4b, predicting an association of exposure to a behavioral message with behavioral intention, is not supported.
- 9. Results Cont. H2a, predicting an associate of subject agenda with knowledge, is supported by bivariate but not partial correlation analysis. H3a, predicting an associate of subject knowledge with attitude, is not supported. The associations between agenda, frame, and attitude are supported by both correlation analyses. H4a, predicting an associate of subject attitude with behavioral intention, is supported by both analysis.
- 10. Conclusions & Discussions Maybe because the survey-experiment design (not in lab), no confirmation of media effects except the knowledge level, not even the agenda-setting level. The frame-setting hypothesis is seemingly reversed. Keeping up with science news contributes to subjects’ agenda, knowledge, attitude, and behavioral intention, showing long-term media effects. Frame is better than knowledge to serve as the middle step in the hierarchy model of responses: agenda frame attitude behavioral intention The nature of and relationships among agenda, knowledge, and frame need further studies to clarify.
- 11. Selected References Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43, 51-58. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (2010). Predicting and changing behavior: The reasoned action approach. New York: Psychology Press (Taylor & Francis). Iyengar, S. (1991). Is anyone responsible: How television frames political issues. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. McCombs, M., & Reynolds, A. (2009). News influence on our pictures of the world. In J. Bryant and D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research, (3rd ed. pp. 1-16). New York, NY: Routledge. McGuire, W. J. (2013). McGuire’s classic input-output framework for constructing persuasive messages. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds). Public communication campaigns (4th ed., pp. 133-146.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pan, Z. & Kosicki, G. M. (1993). Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Political Communication, 19, 55-76. Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R., Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., & Carpentier, F. D. R. (2002). Media priming: A synthesis. In J. Bryant and D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (2nd ed. pp. 97-120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Scheufele, D. A. (1999). Framing as a theory of media effects. Journal of Communication, 49, 103-122. Shen, F., & Edwards, H. H. (2005), Economic individualism, humanitarianism, and welfare reform: A value-based account of framing effects. Journal of Communication, 55, 795-809. Yao, Q. J., Chang, C., Joshi, P., Tran, J., McDonald, C., Wheeler, W., & Hou, S. (2017, May 25). The nature of the scientific issue as a factor on the knowledge-attitude linkage: A comparative testing of the deficit model on the hotly debated issue of climate change and the new issue of water-energy-food nexus. Paper presented to the pre-conference of the 67th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association on Strategic Environmental Communication and Exploration of Research in Crisis, Risk and Disaster. San Diego, CA. Yao, Q. J., Liu, Z., & Stephens, F. L. (2019). Exploring the dynamics in the environmental discourse: The longitudinal interaction among public opinion, presidential opinion, media coverage, policymaking in 3 decades and an integrated model of media effects. Environment Systems and Decisions, online first. Doi: 10.1007/s10669-019-09746-y.
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone, this is Q. J. Yao, associate professor at the Department of Communication & Media, Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas. I’m reporting to the ICA virtual conference a survey-experiment study that I conducted to test the levels of message effects and the hierarchy of responses with a new scientific issue of water-energy-food nexus. If you have questions or comments, please do not hesitate to send them via my email, qyao@lamar.edu.
- The study was designed based on a theoretical framework of media effects that we have worked for a long time and published last year. The framework holds that media stimuli and audience responses both accumulate, conspicuously, across five levels, from attention to agenda, knowledge, attitude, and behaviors. Following Weber’s law, when the media stimuli or audience responses accumulate enough at one level to pass a perceived threshold, they trigger the stimuli or response at a higher level. Media stimuli normally generate the greatest amount of audience responses at the same level. Lower levels of media effects, such as agenda-setting, are easier to be captured in studies, rendering agenda-setting a robust finding. Since media coverage of complicated issues, with the moderation of audience predisposition, generates both positive and negative stimuli among the audience at the same time, which makes measuring the amount of media stimuli a complicated task, the framework is better tested on a new issue that has no predisposition in the public’s minds.
- Water-Energy-Food nexus, abbreviated as WEF nexus, is such an ideal issue. the concept promotes governing water, energy, and food in a nexus approach in stead of the existing dominating approach of governing them separately. The concept was first proposed in the Bonn Nexus Conference in 2011. To promote the concept, the German federal government opened a website on the concept soon after the conference, and the United Nations published three reports about it in 2013 and 2014. But the concept is still relatively new to scientists and largely unknown to the public, creating little predisposition in the public’s minds like issues such as climate change does.
- So based on the framework of media effects, seven hypotheses are developed. H1 is the classic agenda-setting hypothesis, predicting that exposure to a message on WEF nexus increases the subjects’ agenda on the nexus concept. H2a is derived from the framework’s part about the hierarchy of responses, predicting that subjects’ agenda on the nexus concept is positively associated with their knowledge or frame of the nexus. H2b is about media effects at the knowledge level, predicting that exposure to a message with an informational component increases subjects’ knowledge or frame of the nexus concept. H3a, along the dimension of the hierarchy of responses, predicts a positive association of subjects’ knowledge or frame with their attitude. H3b predicts the media effects at the attitudinal level that exposure to a message with the attitudinal component increases subjects’ attitude supporting the nexus concept. H4a predicts a positive association of subjects’ attitude with behavioral intention. H4b, the hypothesis of media effects at the behavioral level, predicts that exposure to the message with a behavioral component increases subjects’ behavioral intention to support the nexus concept.
- The survey-experiment collected 149 completed responses from 102 colleges across the U.S., which are randomly assigned to five groups: the control group, the agenda-message group, the knowledge message group, the attitudinal message group, and the behavioral message group. We’ll talk more about the four types of messages starting the next slide. The study has five response variables on the subjects’ side, namely, their agenda or perceived importance of the topic on governing the three resources, their knowledge (score from a 5-question test about the nexus concept), their frame (how much they agree with the nexus concept), their attitude (how much they think the nexus concept as urgent, serious, important, or useful), and their behavioral intention (how much they want to promote, donate, help, tell others, or urge others to support the nexus concept. The study also has three control variables: how much the subjects keep up with science news, how much they know about the nexus concept before the study, and a measurement of the quality of their answers.
- Those two are the agenda message, which only has a title-like sentence on the nexus concept, and the knowledge message, which contains three informational paragraphs about the nexus concept.
- Those two are the attitudinal message, which has an attitudinal paragraph in addition to the three informational paragraphs, and the behavioral message, which contains a behavioral description paragraph and a call to action ending in addition to the three informational paragraphs and the attitudinal paragraph.
- Five hierarchical multiple regression models were built to test the hypotheses about the four levels of media effects, H1, H2b (two models with knowledge and frame being the response variable respectively), H3b, and H4b. Only H2b with knowledge as the response variable is confirmed. Subjects exposed to an informational message performed better in the five-item knowledge test compared to those in the control group or those exposed to a title-like sentence. Interestingly, for H2b with frame as the response variable, a negative association is considered significant at the level of a = .1. Exposure to an informational message makes the subjects less likely to recognize the nexus concept.
- A bivariate correlation analysis and a partial correlation analysis controlling the three control variables plus age and education were conducted to triangulate the hypotheses about the associations between agenda, knowledge/frame, attitude, and behavioral intention, namely, H2a, H3a, and H4a. Both correlations analyses confirmed the associations between agenda, frame, attitude, and behavioral intention, but only the bivariate correlation analysis confirms the association between agenda and knowledge.
- In a sum, this study use a survey-experiment design to test the five-level framework of media effects. Perhaps because survey-experiment, although having the strength of external reliability, lacks lab control of the study conditions, this study only confirms the media effects at the knowledge level. Media effects at other levels, including the robust agenda-setting level, are not confirmed. On the other hand, the negative contribution of exposure to an informational message to the nexus frame almost gains statistic significance. Meanwhile, the control variable keeping up with science news positively predicts subjects’ agenda, knowledge (but not frame), attitude, and behavioral intention on the nexus concept, showing long-term media effects. The bivariate and partial correlation analyses show that frame is better than knowledge to be the middle step of the hierarchy of response, because both correlation analyses conforms the positive associations between agenda, frame, and attitude. On the other hand, only the bivariate correlation analysis confirms a positive association of knowledge with agenda. The nature of, and relationships among, agenda, knowledge, and frame need further research to clarify.
- Thank you! Again, please email your questions and comments via qyao@lamar.edu.