Page 212 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

8. INTERMEDIA PROCESSES 201

marathon were measured by individuals’ purchases of, and
pledges to buy, U.S. War Bonds, which totaled an amazing $39
million (two earlier radio marathons had raised only $1 million
and $2 million, respectively). Merton and associates’ (1946)
dependent variable was whether or not their survey respondents
made telephone pledges in response to the radio marathon.
Orson Welles’ “Invasion from Mars” radio broadcast panicked an
estimated one million (16 %) of the approximately 6 million indi-
viduals who listened to the broadcast (Cantril, with others, 1940).
As Lowery and DeFleur (1995, p. 45) stated: “What occurred that
October night was one of the most remarkable media events of all
time. If nothing else was proved that night, it was demonstrated
to many people that radio could have a powerful impact on its
audience.”

These early, influential media effects studies of 60 years ago helped
form the central elements in the initial paradigm (Kuhn, 1962/1970) for
scholarly research investigating media effects: (a) select an unusual
media event for study, (b) gather data from audience individuals about
its behavioral effects (for example, buying War Bonds or panicking),
and (c) analyze the message content in order to understand how the
media effects occurred. For example, Merton et al. (1946, p. 142) con-
cluded that the perceived genuineness of Kate Smith’s patriotic appeals
in the radio fund-raiser were actually a carefully engineered kind of
“pseudo-Gemeinschaft,” defined as the feigning of personal concern for
another individual in order to manipulate the individual more effec-
1
tively. The paradigm for the early media effects research represented
(a) a combination of audience survey methods and message content
2
analysis, (b) both qualitative and quantitative data, and (c) “firehouse

1 This concept of pseudo-Gemeinschaft led to later research (1) by Beniger (1987) on psuedo-
community and the mass media, and (2) by Horton and Wohl (1956), and many others, on
parasocial interaction, defined as the degree to which an individual perceives a media person-
ality as someone with whom they have an interpersonal relationship (Sood & Rogers, 2000).
Carl Hovland, the founder of experimental research on persuasion, said that he became
interested in investigating the attitude change effects of source credibility because of the
Kate Smith radio marathon (Rogers, 1994, p. 375).
2 For example, the Merton et al. (1946) investigation was based on 100 focused interviews
with New York City respondents, 75 of whom had called in pledges to buy War Bonds, plus
survey interviews with another sample of 978 respondents in New York City. A generally
similar procedure was followed by Cantril with others (1940) in studying the effects of the
“War of the Worlds” broadcast on panic behavior. So both studies used a combination of
quantitative and qualitative data-gathering methods.