Media impact research

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The media impact is concerned with the effects that media have on the recipients (both individuals and groups and companies). It is a branch of media and communication studies .

Early media impact research

In textbooks and overview works one often finds the assertion that at the beginning of media impact research in the first decades of the 20th century, science assumed a very large, mostly negative media impact. However, this representation is not tenable; differentiated impact models were already known to social science at that time. Simplified impact models certainly played a role in some studies. Hypotheses about strong media effects were based on the fascination exercised by the new media of cinema and radio. The great success of professional advertising and political propaganda (during World War I ) reinforced the impression. In order to test the thesis of the strong, generally negative media effect, the Payne Fund Studies were carried out in the United States from 1929 to 1932 , which were supposed to prove the negative influence of cinema, especially on young men. The study seemed to confirm this influence: respondent moviegoers were on average more aggressive. Since their publication (1933–35), however, “the studies have been methodically criticized because they had withheld the formal and content analysis of the films used.” In addition, it was not taken into account that at the time of the study, the medium of cinema was mainly used by members of lower social classes , so that the ascertained higher aggressiveness could have been attributed to the social class of the interviewees rather than to the films.

An often cited example of supposed media effects is the radio play adaptation The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles 1938 about an extraterrestrial invasion. The legend of the mass panic , which supposedly seized the audience, holds up to this day with some reservations. A survey conducted by Lazarsfeld and Hadley Cantril in the weeks after it aired found that 28 percent of listeners thought the messages sent were true. Since not everyone was willing to admit to having been caught up in a fiction, the researchers also sent questionnaires to the radio stations, which reported that they had received more than five times as many calls than usual after that program. When Cantril published the results in 1940, he was already pointing out that the reaction of the individual depended to a considerable extent on the respective social listening situation, the interpretation of what was heard, the level of education, etc., factors that can have a decisive influence on the media effect.

On the other hand, the first approaches to the theoretical recording of mass communication assumed that one could directly and linearly infer from the content of the mass media that it had the same effect on all recipients. In the context of this simple stimulus-response model of mass communication ( hypodermic needle model ) was the mass media granted the ability societies " gleichschalten to". The first empirical studies already led to the refutation of the stimulus-response model. Differences in personality (e.g. different levels of attention, perception, etc.) were now taken into account as a kind of effect-modifying “filter”. The direction of impact research within the framework of this stimulus-organism-reaction model is still one-sided in the sense of a one-way or transport model of mass communication. The attitude concept (such as the concept of selective attention ) took the place of the assumed instinct to imitate earlier approaches .

Lazarsfeld and the Minimal Effects Studies

In the early 1940s, the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld was commissioned by the United States Army to research the effect of the propaganda film The Battle of Britain on American soldiers, who were to be prepared for war with it. He found that there was a hierarchy of stability: knowledge and, with some restrictions, superficial opinions could be influenced fairly well by the film, but attitudes or even motivation were little or no. Lazarsfeld concluded that the most important thing was the optimal design of the messages to be conveyed, how far the media effect can reach and whether a persuasion , i.e. a conviction, can take place.

Lazarsfeld 's 1944 study " The People's Choice " (cf. communication model according to Lazarsfeld ), which examined the influence of the mass media on the voting behavior of Americans, disappointed the researcher, who had assumed that the media had a very large impact: he found that one for his terms very little influence of modern means of communication on the presidential election existed. This led to the formation of a paradigm of low media impact that was to determine media impact research for decades. Lazarsfeld underpinned his findings with numerous "Minimal Effects Studies", which again and again confirmed the low impact of the mass media.

Instead of an opinion-changing effect of the media, Lazarsfeld found a reinforcing effect: mass media do not change existing attitudes, but reinforce them. This is due, among other things, to selective perception .

The new finding of Lazarsfeld's studies was that the recipient is definitely active and has an effect on the process of media impact - among other things through selectivity. Here the stimulus-response model is finally contradicted, which assumes a uniform reception and media effect for all recipients. The active recipient is an undisputed factor in media impact research.

Modern theories of media impact research

Lazarsfeld shaped the paradigm of low media impact. However, since the 1970s there have been attempts to put his results into perspective, because Lazarsfeld only referred to something as media impact when a change in opinion was due to media influence. However, the reinforcement of existing points of view through the reception of media content can also be assessed as a media effect.

With increasing research, however, the opinion prevailed again that the media had a strong impact (e.g. on public opinion, the view of the world of the recipients, etc.), although the simple cause-and-effect model was not represented. Rather, the active interaction of the recipient with the media is taken into account (e.g. benefit and reward approach ).

There are currently four dominant directions in impact research:

  1. Audience research looking for direct effects (see media use )
  2. the search for correspondences, whereby an attempt is made to find correspondences between media reality and social developments
  3. the problem of the breaking of reality, whereby it is assumed that the media create a reality of its own, which in turn contributes to the definition of the social situation
  4. the analysis of the role of the media in the development of socially significant events (e.g. the relationship between media and terrorism)

See also

literature

  • Martin Andree: Archeology of the media effect. Types of fascination from antiquity to today. Fink, Munich 2005.
  • Hanko Bommert , Karl-W. Weich, Christel Dirksmeier: Recipient personality and media effect . 2nd Edition. LIT-Verlag, Münster 2000. ISBN 3-8258-2109-9 .
  • Heinz Bonfadelli , Thomas N. Friemel: Media Effects Research . 6th edition. UVK, Konstanz 2017, ISBN 978-3-8252-4699-0 .
  • Pascal Hunziker, Etienne Ruedin: Media Effect. Benziger, Zurich 2009.
  • Michael Jäckel: Media Effects. An introductory study book. VS, Wiesbaden 2005. ISBN 978-3-531-43073-7
  • Michael Schenk : Media Effects Research. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-16-149240-2 .
  • Gerd Strohmeier : Politics and the mass media. An introduction. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2002. - Offers a compact overview of the various media impact research approaches.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ H.-B. Brosius, F. Esser: Myths in Effect Research: In Search of the Stimulus-Response-Model . In: Publizistik , 43, 1998, pp. 341–361.
  2. ↑ T. Bussemer: Wanted and found: the stimulus-response model in effects research. In: Publizistik , 48 (2), 2003, pp. 176-189, doi: 10.1007 / s11616-003-0041-5
  3. ^ Hans Jürgen Wulff : Payne Fund Studies in Lexicon of Filmbegriffe
  4. ^ Hadley Cantril: The invasion from Mars: a study in the psychology of panic; with the complete script of the famous Orson Welles broadcast. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1952/1982.
  5. ^ Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, Hazel Gaudet: The People's Choice. How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign . New York / London 1968 (Original 1944)