Dogmatism and intrinsic religious orientation as predictors of good news /bad news preference

The primary purpose of this research was to determine if dogmatism and intrinsic religious orientation could be used as predictors of good news or bad news preference.

It was hypothesized that these personality variables would be related to college students' reading preference for good news or bad news.

A nonrandom sample of 66 students (47 females and 19 males) was selected from five undergraduate classes during the spring quarter, 1985, in the College of Communications at The University of Tennessee.

On May 9, the respondents rated 25 headlines using Haskins' (1960) headline rating technique. Prior to the rating of the headlines by the respondents, coders had used Raskins' (1982) news morbidity scale to categorize each headline as a "bad news" headline or a "good news" headline.

On May 14, the respondents completed an "Opinion Survey" questionnaire which consisted of a 40-item dogmatism scale (Rokeach, 1956), an extrinsic/intrinsic religious orientation scale (Allport and Ross, 1967), demographic questions, and media-use questions.

The data were analyzed using multiple linear regression analysis. SAS 82 was used as the computer system for anlysis. A Proc Stepwise procedure was used to identify the good news model and the bad news model which accounted for the most variance and provided the largest significance.

The bad news model showed no relationship between bad news preference and any of the independent variables included in the study.

The good news model yielded significant information. Analysis showed that there was a significant inverse relationship (a correlation of -.229 at an alpha level of 0.05) between good news preference and dogmatism—the higher the good news preference, the lower the dogmatism. Also, analysis of the good news model revealed that women in the study sample were less likely than men to prefer good news (a correlation of -.319 at an alpha level of 0.05). In this study, intrinsic religious orientation did not appear to be a significant predictor of either good news preference or bad news preference.