Macro Level Theories

  • Knowledge Gap Hypothesis
  • Agenda Setting Theory
  • Cultivation Studies
  • Risk Communication

Knowledge Gap Hypothesis

  • Proposes that knowledge and information are not equally distributed across populations.
  • Proposes that an increasing flow of information into a social system (e.g. from a media campaign) is more likely to benefit groups of higher socioeconomic status (SES) than their counterparts with lower SES.
  • Based on the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis, large-scale public health campaigns would only perpetuate inequities.
  • Emphasizes how the structure and organization of communities and societies function as means of social control and conflict management.
  • Contradicted conventional wisdom that media campaigns are a simple panacea for resolving social problems and suggested that media have differential impact on audiences based on social class and social structural conditions in communities.
  • Has a variety of contingent and contributory conditions that could affect knowledge gaps, including: content domains; channel influence; social conflict and community mobilization; structure of communities; and individual motivational factors.
  • Content and Channel Factors
    • Does health information appeal broadly to all SES groups or does the channel of communication influence information received?
    • People who obtain their news from print media are usually more knowledgeable than those who receive it from other media.
  • Social Conflict and Mobilization
    • Social conflict and community mobilization influences knowledge gaps as they both increase public salience about interpersonal communication issues.
  • Community structure and Pluralism
    • Structure of communities is a largely non-modifiable factor that affects knowledge gaps.
  • Motivational Factors
    • Differential levels of motivation, salience and interest in specific topics, and not differential SES, influences knowledge gap.
      • The empirical evidence isn't clear in either direction SES vs. motivation, salience and interest.

Agenda Setting Theory

  • Public Agenda Setting presents high correlation between media coverage of issues and the public's opinion of the importance of those issues.
  • Agenda setting presents a number of opportunities for applications in public health interventions
  • Three types of agenda setting research
    • Public agenda setting examines the link between media portrayal of issues and their impact on issue priorities assigned by the public
    • Policy agenda setting examines the connections between media coverage and the legislative agenda of policy making bodies
    • Media agenda setting focuses on factors that influence the media to cover certain issues

Cultivation Studies

  • Assess the impact that the mass media have on our perceptions of reality.
  • Focuses on the pervasive presence of television and visual media whereby viewers accept the world portrayed by television as real.
  • Two types of research:
    • Message system analysis
      • Seeks to examine the world that television constructs
        • A study assesses television characters to show that in TV world, men outnumber women, young people and senior citizens are underrepresented and professional and law enforcement personnel are overrepresented.
    • Cultivation analysis
      • Heavy television exposure has a profound effect on viewer's social reality where they give "television answers" to opinion and knowledge, perceive the world as violent, be less trusting of others, to overestimate the number of people employed in law enforcement, and fear that they are more likely than is statistically true to be victims of crime.
  • Two distinct mechanisms:
  • Mainstreaming
    • Sharing of common outlooks. That is, irrespective of their different sociodemographic backgrounds, heavy television viewers share the same worldview.
  • Resonance
    • More powerful than mainstreaming
    • For certain individuals, reality on television maybe more congruent with the reality of their lives whereby the receive a double dose of the cultivation effect.

Risk Communication

  • Concerns how individuals and group perceive, process and act on their understanding of risk.
  • Addresses how the media and other powerful institutions shape these processes for general or specific outcomes.
  • At the individual levels, researchers have focused on understanding cognitive mechanisms, developing expert and mental models of communications, issues of confusion and misinformation, efficacy of individualized counseling and tailoring and advantages of intensive, calibrated and directed communications.
  • Researchers also emphasize cognitive mechanisms by which individuals are exposed to, and attend to information about risk; how they act upon risk information to alter their behavior.
  • At the community level, studies of risk communication focus on the interaction of populations and social institutions and the mass media in the formation of and management of public opinion and policy-making about risk.
  • Much of the theoretical basis at the community level is owed to agenda-setting and agenda-building perspectives as well as research on definition and framing of public issues.
  • Risk is seen as a social construction, a product of communication activity of social institutions, advocates and the public.
  • Public definitions of risk usually include some form of scientifically assessed risk information (objective risk) mediated by the political and social context of the risk.