Page 241 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

230 McLEOD, KOSICKI, McLEOD

Cognitive Complexity. Traditional measures of factual knowledge
may be too limited to capture the full range of what audience members
take away from political communication. To evaluate learning from the
media, researchers have gone beyond the recognition or recall of specific
factual knowledge to examine audience understandings of news stories
and events more broadly. Techniques of open-ended questions and
recording of group discussion are used to measure the complexity and
structure of audience thinking on a given issue or news story. The cogni-
tive complexity of audience understanding can be measured reliably by
counting such features of open-ended responses as the number of argu-
ments, time frames, and causes and implications the person brings into
the discussion (McLeod et al., 1987; McLeod, Pan, & Rucinski, 1989;
Sotirovic, 2001a). Cognitive complexity so measured is moderately corre-
lated with factual knowledge from closed-ended questions, but the two
criteria have distinct sets of social structural and media use antecedents.
Complexity of thinking about public issues appears to be a function both
of personal characteristics and patterns of news media use.

Framing. Consideration of framing effects on audiences has become
an important and lively research area. A key theoretical concern is that
news reports can alter patterns of knowledge activation (Price & Tewks-
bury, 1997). Their formulation of framing suggests that news messages
help determine what aspects of a problem are focused on by individuals.
Although their knowledge activation model is primarily an organizing
model rather than a precise set of hypotheses, it does involve both applic-
ability effects and accessibility effects. Applicability involves first-order
effects of media messages at the time of message processing. Once acti-
vated, ideas and feelings retain some potential for further use, making
them likely to be drawn on in making subsequent evaluations. These sec-
ondary effects of messages are known as accessibility effects (Price,
Tewksbury, & Powers, 1997).
For framing research to meet its full potential, audience research needs
to be tied carefully to the work of journalists in meaningful ways beyond
merely the simple dimensions of episodic versus thematic as specified by
Iyengar (1991), denoting framing effects of event-oriented news stories
versus stories embedded in considerable background information and
issue context. Corresponding to the journalist’s role in framing news sto-
ries discussed earlier (Tuchman, 1978), audiences also can be seen as
framing (or perhaps reframing) the news that comes to their attention.
Audience framing involves, according to Goffman (1974), invoking
“schemata of interpretation” that allow individuals to “locate, perceive,
identify, and label” information coming from the environment. News sto-
ries use standard forms such as the summary lead and the inverted pyra-