Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1984

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Communication

Major Professor

Jack B. Haskins

Committee Members

George Everett, Kelly Leiter, Ken McCullough

Abstract

Much of the content of the mass media is repetitious, at least at a topical level. Certainly one reason for this is the beat system employed by most news-gathering organizations. By assigning reporters to cover traditional news sources, the media are assured of receiving reports about the same news topics on a continuing basis. Does this topical repetition have any expected or unexpected effects on media audiences?

To address this question, the author designed an experiment involving 158 students as subjects. The treatment sub jects read either one, five, nine or nineteen news stories about a repeated news topic over a two-week period. The subjects were measured on eight dependent variables both before and after the experimental treatments. The dependent variables were: four reading interest variables, information seeking, information utility, information utility to others and number of times topic is discussed.

The author hypothesized that the measures of the dependent variables would display an inverted-U relationship with increasing numbers of repetitions, indicating a type of satiation factor at work. An analysis of covariance was performed to measure changes in the dependent variables. An analysis of variance was performed to measure changes when controlling for level of interest.

At the first post-test, all four reading interest variables displayed an inverted-U relationship; the other four variables did not. The effect, however, did not last until a second post-test, two weeks later. The author concludes that a repetion effect does exist for reading interest and that the use of a validated measurement item for the reading interest variables contributed to the results. The other variables were measured with items adapted or created for this study. Better measures may have reflected the inverted-U relationship in all variables.

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