Communication Yearbook 11

James Anderson, James A. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415876926
• eBook ISBN: 9781135148447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In Communication Yearbook 11 major contributions from leading scholars in a variety of communication fields are presented and then critiqued by other authorities (often representing complementary or competing schools of thought). Topics addressed and commented on include the mass media audience, the theory of mediation, effective policy for health care communication and feminist criticism of television.

Section 1

The Mass Media Audience: Perceptive, Interpretive, or Not

1 The Perceptive Audience

Barrie Gunter

Independent Broadcasting Authority, London

Arguing the claim that the content of television does not predict its effects, Gunter examines the portrayal of violence and of the sexes in objective and subjective terms. He demonstrates that objective content analytic methods do not correspond to the perceptions of children and adults in these content areas. He concludes that both children and adults actively interpret content rather than passively being cultivated by it.

THIS chapter will examine how audiences cognitively respond to and make sense of television programs for themselves. Television viewing will be conceived of as a cognitively active phenomenon during which audiences interpret and make judgments about programs on the basis of their understanding about certain rules of television format and content and through comparisons of what they see on the screen with what they may know, through more direct experience, about the world in which they live.

Traditional models of television effects have tended to underplay the significance of cognitive mediating processes. And even those perspectives— such as uses and gratifications—that do emphasize the concept of the “active” media consumer in the context of discussions about media effects lack sophistication at both conceptual and methodological levels to reveal the complexity and measure the significance of cognitive psychological interpretive mechanisms and processes.

It will be argued, and demonstrated through reference to appropriate research findings, that comprehension and judgmental processes affect perceptions of what is seen on the television screen and cognitively mediate any impact television might have on viewers’ attitudes, beliefs, values, and actions. In other words, television does not simply act on passive viewers; rather, they act on it.

Content and Inferred Impact

Recent research, for example, has shown that television viewers, young and old, are selectively perceptive and judgmental in their responses to programs (Gunter, 1985; Wober & Gunter, in press). The ways viewers perceive and evaluate characters and events on television do not always match descriptive incident counts or the meanings inferred from them by researchers. Taking the perspective of this position, this chapter will consider the problem of content analysis and inferred impact, a comparison of subjective and objective accounts of content, the relationship between audience perceptions and TV effects, and the implications of these three for our research agenda.

According to one effects model—cultivation analysis—television, principally through its fictional portrayals, may often distort social reality and convey warped messages or impressions about society to viewers (Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Gross & Morgan, 1985). “Messages” as such are usually identified and defined through content analysis, in which a priori coding frames are employed to classify the content of programs and to provide “objective” counts of objects and events portrayed in them.

At the level of content assessment, this model posits the manner in which television portrays people, institutions, and events in a distorted, stereotyped fashion and may condition beliefs among individuals who consume a heavy diet of the programs that are consonant with its own content profiles. In other words, frequent viewers, who are taken typically to be individuals for whom television is the primary source of information about the world, learn lessons from watching television that produce distorted perceptions of social reality. According to two of the proponents, “The basic hypothesis of cultivation analysis is that the more time one spends living in the world of television, the more likely one is to report conceptions of social reality that can be traced to television portrayals” (Gross & Morgan, 1985, p. 226).

The model itself describes the impact of television as composed of several stages. The first stage is to elaborate, descriptively, the nature and form of television content—to describe its features and to identify its stereotypes or aspects of reality that are distorted.

The analysis of television content, via descriptive study of what is shown in programs, has revealed that the world of television does not mirror precisely the world of reality. Television presents a stereotyped worldview in its entertainment content. Ordinary, everyday reality is not conceived to be what viewers would usually find entertaining; exaggerations of reality or fantastic situations are what turn viewers on.

Researchers who use content analysis, however, often go beyond the simple provisions of descriptions of what happens on screen to make inferences about the meanings conveyed by various patterns of television portrayals to the watching audience. Extended meanings are typically “read” into programs by the researchers themselves, who assume that the same meanings are perceived and then absorbed unchanged by viewers. Seldom, though, are these assumptions verified in terms of direct audience responses to programs.

The content analysis of television programming is typically carried out by trained two-person monitoring teams. A great deal of emphasis is placed on reliability of coding: Monitors are put through a rigorous month-long training exercise to ensure that they catalogue specified properties of programs in the same way (Signorielli, 1985). It is vital that there is strong agreement across monitors in the way a coding frame is applied. And only when there is sufficient level of agreement can the monitoring exercise be seen to have worked properly.

The technique is designed to reflect “what large communities absorb over long periods of time” (Signorielli, 1985, p. 241). But the underlying assumption throughout all this research is that the patterns of portrayed events, institutions, and descriptive fashion carry the same meanings for audiences as those that are inferred from this analysis by the researchers. This assumption, however, may give rise to inaccurate assessments of the particular aspects of television programs that have meaning or value for viewers and of what precisely the nature of that meaning might be. At this point, it might be useful to provide some illustrations of the kind of objective, description accounts of television content being referred to here. There are many areas of programming that have come under scrutiny in this way, but the arguments being put in this chapter can be elaborated succinctly with reference to two areas in particular—the portrayal of violence and the portrayal of the sex roles on television.

Measurement of TV Violence

The common method of measuring violence on television is to count the number of times particular kinds of incidents occur over a sample of programs. Perhaps the most extensive analysis of television violence has been carried out by Gerbner (1972) and his colleagues. Using a technique called “message system analysis,” these investigators have monitored samples of prime-time and weekend, daytime television put out for all major U.S. networks every year since 1967. During this time, this analysis has come to be regarded by some as the definitive measure of the nature and extent of violence on network television.

For coding purposes a simple normative definition of violence is employed: “The overt expression of physical force against self or other compelling action against one’s will on pain of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or killing” (Gerbner, 1972, p. 31). Using this definition to guide them, coders record such features as the frequency and nature of violent acts, the perpetrators and victims of violence, and the temporal and spatial settings in which the acts occur. From certain combinations of these measures, a Violence Profile is derived that purports to represent an objective and meaningful indicator of the amount of violence portrayed in television drama.

The overall picture of the world of television drama revealed by message system analysis is that it is a violent one. For example, Gerbner, Gross, Signorielli, Morgan, and Jackson-Beeck (1979) reported that since monitoring first began in 1967-68, an average of 80% of programs contained violence and 60% of major characters were involved in violence. The average rate of violent episodes was 7.5 per hour, and in weekend, daytime children’s programs, violent episodes averaged almost 18 per hour. Indeed, programs directed at children typically scored high on most measures of violence except for killing; cartoons, in particular, consistently exceeded all other categories of programs, including adult adventure action and cross-detective shows.

According to Gerbner and his colleagues, the portrayal of violence on television drama programming demonstrates a pattern of unequal relative risks among characters of different sex, age, and socioeconomic and ethnic groups, in which certain character types are victimized consistently more often than others. Between 1967 and 1979, for example, Gerbner et al. (1979) observed that victims of violence outnumbered perpetrators, but the relative levels of victimization varied, being greater for some types of characters than for others. Men were much more likely than women to become involved in violence of some kind on television, but once involved they were much less likely than their female counterparts to be victims.

Risks of victimization in the world of network television drama were high among children and adolescents and unmarried women and were especially high for elderly women. “Good” male characters, frequently featured as heroes in action-adventure series, were much more likely to be killers than killed. “Good” female characters, on the other hand, were much more likely to be fatally hurt than were “bad” female characters, even though the former were less often involved in violent episodes. Regardless of the character type involved in violence, though, all such episodes are given equal weightings of seriousness in this content analysis. As we will see, however, television scenes depicting violence perpetrated or suffered by different types of characters are not always judged as equally serious by viewers.

Portrayal of the Sexes on TV

Objective content analysis has been applied extensively to assess the way the sexes are depicted on television. Some reference was made to differential portrayals of men and women in television drama by the Gerbner group in their study of television violence. Other researchers have investigated in more detail the different attributes that television emphasizes for men and women. The overriding concern is that television portrayals of the sexes are highly stereotyped and may cultivate sex-stereotyped beliefs among viewers who are regularly exposed to them (Gunter, 1986).

Two principal features of sex stereotyping have been identified. First, there is a gross underrepresentation of women in many prime-time programs in terms of actual numbers of appearances on screen, especially in major roles, relative to the presence of men. One writer has referred to this phenomenon as the “symbolic annihilation of women” by television (Tuchman, 1978). Second, even when women do appear, they tend to be portrayed only in a very narrow range of roles. In television’s fictional life, women tend to be most often found in the home, and much less often at work. Television has also been accused of portraying women as incompetent, especially when they appear in anything other than marital or familial roles. According to some writers, this is reflected particularly in the extent to which female characters on prime-time television are depicted in the receiving end of violent attacks (Gerbner, 1972; Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Signorielli, 1984). Thus Tuchman (1978) has argued that television plots symbolically denigrate women, so that even when they are portrayed in leading roles and outside the home, they are surrounded and continually rescued by male colleagues.

The serious implications of the apparent tendency toward sex-role stereotyping on television lies with the possible impact this content may have on the public’s beliefs about men and women. The greatest concern is for the effects on young children at the stage when they are just beginning to learn sex-appropriate attitudes and behaviors.

Analyses of television content since the 1950s have consistently reported that less than one-third of all characters in prime-time television drama on networks in the United States are female (Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Head, 1954; Miller & Reeves, 1976; Tedesco, 1974). Analysis of the types of roles allocated to female characters has indicated stereotyping in terms of the social roles of women and with respect to the personality points predominantly characterizing them. Television has been accused of projecting an image of women as homemakers whose lives revolve around romantic affairs, marriage, and familial activities. Women tend only rarely to be shown as gainfully employed outside the home and as having any real ambitions to be professionally successful (De Fleur, 1964; Downing, 1974; Seggar & Wheeler, 1973). They also tend to be depicted as emotional, passive, and dependent on men for help with personal and professional problems; men tend to be shown as more powerful, more competent, and generally superior (Lemon, 1978; Turner, 1974).

All this evidence, however, has resulted from content analysis; that is, objective counts of occurrences of different female role-types as programs. In the absence of direct measures of audience response, the influence of stereotyped sex-role portrayals can only be inferred. We need to know whether individuals encode the messages implicit in television content profiles and incorporate them into their existing belief systems concerning the sexes. Studies with children and adolescents have indicated the existence of statistical relationships between amount of viewing and traditional beliefs about the role of women (Beuf, 1974; Frueh & McGhee, 1975; McGhee & Frueh, 1980; Morgan, 1982), with youngsters who watch a great deal of television tending to hold more traditional sex-role beliefs than those who view relatively little television. Further studies with children have shown, however, that responses to questions about sex-roles vary according to the nature of television portrayals to which youngsters are exposed. Viewing women in nontraditional roles, for instance, can lead to a reduction in sex-role stereotyping (Atkin & Miller, 1986; Pingree, 1978).

Objective and Subjective Accounts of Television Content

Two sets of comparisons will be made in this section. First we will examine audiences’ perceptions of how things are depicted on television (subjective descriptions) and compare them with content analytic accounts (objective descriptions). A further comparison will be made between audiences’ perceptions of how certain social entities are depicted on television and how they appear to be in real life. In so doing, we will find that research indicates that viewers do not always read the same meanings into television as do researchers. In regard to many social groups, objects, institutions, and events, viewers’ perceptions of how these things are in the real world are different from perceptions of how they are portrayed on television. Audiences often exhibit a level of sophistication in the judgments they make about television content. This sophistication is often underestimated or not taken sufficiently into account by some research models intent on demonstrating cognitive and behavioral effects of the medium.

Some writers have envisaged a process of influence in which greater amounts of TV viewing can produce biased or distorted beliefs about the world that are consistent with TV’s stereotyped portrayals (Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Gerbner et al., 1978, 1979).

These “cultivation” effects are measured by comparing the beliefs of heavy and light TV viewing to indicate associations between particular types of opinion and levels of TV watching. This model embodies many problematical assumptions about caused relationships between what is shown on TV and the formation of particular patterns of social perceptions, beliefs, and opinions among viewers about the world in which they live (Wober & Gunter, in press).

One such assumption is that “messages” inferred from program content profiles concerning various social groups are recognized and encoded by audiences, who assimilate them into their existing knowledge structures. It is also assumed that more frequent viewers will be more strongly influenced by TV’s messages than will less frequent viewers purely as a function of greater volume of exposure to them. However, measures of the amount of viewing may not be valid and sufficient indicators of TV effects, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The International Communication Association
• Preface
• Section 1: The Mass Media Audience: Perceptive, Interpretive, or Not
• Section 2 Television Criticism: Formats and Feminism
• Section 3 Health Care: Communication Policies and Practices
• Section 4 Organizations: Media and Empowerment
• Section 5 Conversations and Texts
• Section 6 Public Opinion and Agenda-Setting
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editor
• About the Authors