Communication Research

This article argues that a genuine social history of reading in the nineteenth century requires more direct attention to audiences in addition to the traditional attention to producers and product. It suggests that historians of literacy have been more creative than mass media historians in using individual-level historical data (such as censuses, deeds, wills, government surveys) to study past reading behavior. One type of individual-level data that may be of use to mass communication historians is the series of family cost-of-living surveys conducted by state and federal bureaus of labor statistics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These studies of working-class family budgets, some of which were published in nonaggregated form, include detailed information on family structure, income, and expenditures, including expenditures on newspapers and books. Through an analysis of a sample of cotton textile worker budgets from an 1889-1890 federal survey, this study found that expenditures for newspapers and books were associated in interesting ways with family income patterns, region of residence, and ethnicity. The study also found some evidence that reading among working-class families may have been related to the changing nature of community life in the new industrial society of late nineteenth-century America.

This article introduces the reader to the EEG via a literature review and then presents data from a study that uses television commercials to modify EEG. Data show correlations between level of EEG activity and several measures of learning and affect. Further analysis presents a method to evaluate EEG change across half-second increments of the commercial. Speculations are made as to meaning and value of the EEG method.

An electronically estimated form complexity variable, static complexity, is analyzed throughout the course of a network TV newscast. No support is found for the hypothesis that audiences prefer an optimal level of static complexity, but there is support for the hypothesis that longitudinal analysis accounts for more variance than a cross-sectional approach. This study has implications for research in TV news that confines itself to content-based variables and assumes only a cross-sectional relationship between newscast material and audience responses. Both form variables and time should be considered along with content in the study of reactions to TV news.

Children's attention to television, measured by visual attention and by self-reports, varied in this study depending on the comprehensibility of the content. Children's visual attention was lower when they viewed Sesame Street, Greek, and backwards language bits than with randomly edited or normal bits, but their visual attention did not discriminate between random and normal bits. However, self-reports of effort to comprehend showed that the oldest children found the random bits harder to understand than the normal bits. Because the older children's visual attention was equivalent for two types of bits that they reported were different in difficulty, the results suggest that comprehensibility may be of limited value in explaining older children's active television viewing, but also that studies explicitly tying together visual attention, effort, perceptions of a wide variety of program characteristics, and comprehension are in order.

A random telephone survey of parents of children between the ages of 3 and 18 was conducted the night after The Day After was aired on television. Based on theories and research indicating a developmental shift from perceptual to conceptual information, it was expected that the level of emotional upset to the movie would increase with age. This prediction was confirmed, despite the fact that the movie was not very upsetting overall. Other findings revealed that children's postviewing behaviors were significantly related to both age and degree of upset. Nonpermissive parents (those who had prevented a child from viewing the movie) were more likely than permissive parents to have been upset by the movie. Parents reported mass media to be more influential than schools, in their decisions regarding whether or not to let a child view the movie; schools, in turn, were more influential than both religious and political organizations. The influence of advice from schools was stronger among nonpermissive than among permissive parents.

A case is presented for separating Shannon's (1949) paper on information theory from Weaver's introduction, which is shown to contain distortions, as well as proofs by coincidence and homonym. Shannon's mathematical tools and methods are distinguished from his theory, which consists of 23 theorems setting forth the conditions for maximum efficiency in electromechanical signal transmission. Attempts to apply Shannon's theory to our field are reviewed, along with previous critiques, and it is recommended that future uses of Shannon's theory adopt a more methodologically rigorous approach. In particular, it is argued that Shannon's assumptions must be shown to hold before his theorems can be successfully applied.

The long-term decline in U.S. newspaper circulation has prompted numerous efforts to research, reorganize, and restructure the newspaper in order to meet the changing needs of the various audiences. One audience of particular interest is that of the adolescent, for it is the young person who is just developing newspaper usage patterns that may remain with him a good part of his adult life. This study is the first of a two-part investigation of adolescent newspaper readership and its evolution as young people grow into adulthood. Using data from over 1300 eleventh and twelfth graders in Dallas, Texas high schools, the author identifies four different types of newspaper readers and attempts to classify them on the basis of a comprehensive set of individual, environmental, and stimulus object factors. The findings emphasize the importance of environment variables in explaining differences in adolescent newspaper readership.