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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
News Of Corporate Failure: Evaluating The Relationship Between Individual Assessments And Market Investments, Ann Williams
News Of Corporate Failure: Evaluating The Relationship Between Individual Assessments And Market Investments, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
Individuals’ comprehension of communication is shaped by the use of metaphor. This study illustrates how the use of metaphor in business and economic news coverage shapes individuals’ responsibility attributions in ways that can ultimately influence consumers’ investment decisions. In a randomized experimental design, participants were invited to read news articles that described the bankruptcy of a business. The treatment text narrated the bankruptcy using metaphor, while the control text narrated the same event without the use of metaphor. After exposure to the communication text narrated with metaphor, responsibility attributions and subsequent investment decisions were significantly altered. The findings suggest that …
Trust Or Bust?: Questioning The Relationship Between Media Trust And News Attention, Ann E. Williams
Trust Or Bust?: Questioning The Relationship Between Media Trust And News Attention, Ann E. Williams
Ann E Williams
This article establishes the theoretical significance of media trust and explores the relationships between individuals' levels of media trust and news attention. Three distinct types of media trust are introduced: 1) trust of news information, 2) trust of those who deliver the news, and 3) trust of media corporations. The findings indicate that these different types of media trust relate to news attention in distinct ways, specifically when examined across medium. The theoretical significance of the findings are discussed and contextualized in light of an evolving media environment.
Media Evolution And Public Understanding Of Climate Science, Ann Williams
Media Evolution And Public Understanding Of Climate Science, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
This paper employs public opinion data from a nationally representative probability sample to examine how information encounters and exposure to different media sources relate to individuals' beliefs about global warming. The analyses indicate that media source exposure (i.e., exposure to news and information about science presented through different media outlets), intentional information exposure (i.e., deliberate exposure to global warming news coverage), and inadvertent information exposure (i.e., unplanned exposure to news and information about science that is encountered online while searching for other forms of information) relate to beliefs about global warming, in significant and meaningful ways. Namely, the findings show …
Use Of Unnamed Sources Drops From Peaks In 1960s And 1970s, Ann Williams
Use Of Unnamed Sources Drops From Peaks In 1960s And 1970s, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
This content analysis of The Washington Post and The New York Times finds that the use of anonymous sources peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. The analysis also finds that contemporary journalists are more likely to explain the reason for anonymity.
Who's To Blame When A Business Fails? How Journalistic Death Metaphors Influence Responsibility Attributions, Ann Williams
Who's To Blame When A Business Fails? How Journalistic Death Metaphors Influence Responsibility Attributions, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
This study unites a textual analysis and an experimental audience study to document the use of death metaphor in business news and to assess the impact that death metaphor has on audiences' attributions of responsibility for corporate failure. The findings show that death metaphors are frequently used in financial press coverage and that the use of death metaphor influences audience members' responsibility attributions by intensifying overall levels of blame, while simultaneously deflecting blame away from the executives responsible for managing the firm and diffusing it to other factors, including the state of the economy, the government, and individual consumers.
Stratification And Global Elite Theory: A Cross-Cultural And Longitudinal Analysis Of Public Opinion, Ann Williams
Stratification And Global Elite Theory: A Cross-Cultural And Longitudinal Analysis Of Public Opinion, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
Many scholars have argued that globalization involves the emergence of a global elite, who are attached more to supra-national identities than others, who remain more local. Two variants of the global elite can be found in the literature: cosmopolitan and capitalist. This literature suggests more broadly that cross-nationally stratification has a consistent influence on attitudes pertinent to globalization such as support for global economic institutions. Using a social stratification approach, we examined nine developed societies from the World Values Survey to test whether stratification is related to attitudes towards globalization, and find only modest support for the contention that the …
The Seven Deadly Sins Of Communication Research, Ann Williams
The Seven Deadly Sins Of Communication Research, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
We analyzed anonymized copies of the complete reviewer comments for 120 recent submissions to the Journal of Communication and attempted to identify the scholarly "sins" and "virtues" most frequently mentioned by the reviewers and most closely associated with the decision to publish the submission. We assessed levels of interreviewer agreement and patterns of evaluation in different subfields of communication scholarship. An explicit connection to a clearly identified theoretical corpus and novel findings or perspectives proved to be the most important predictors of publication. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for the current state of communication research.
Talking Politics And Engaging Politics: An Examination Of The Interactive Relationships Between Structural Features Of Political Talk And Discussion Engagement, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
This study takes a process-oriented approach to understand the current status of political discussion research and identifies discussion engagement—discussion attention and integrative discussion—as an unexplored but important facet of political discussion. As a block, these two variables of discussion engagement independently accounted for significant variance in two criterion variables of political engagement, political knowledge and political participation, after controlling for not only a host of demographic, attitudinal, and media use variables but also three most researched structural features of political discussion—network size, discussion frequency, and network heterogeneity. In addition, the study analyzes the interplay between various attributes of political discussion …
To Broadband Or Not To Broadband: The Relationship Between High-Speed Internet And Knowledge And Participation, Ann Williams
To Broadband Or Not To Broadband: The Relationship Between High-Speed Internet And Knowledge And Participation, Ann Williams
Ann E Williams
This study tests 2 competing theoretical models that attempt to understand the roles that broadband Internet plays in society. The linear model posits that the gains or harms introduced by the Internet via narrowband will further increase with the adoption of broadband. On the contrary, the differential gains model proposes that changes stemming from advances to different stages of Internet connection technology should be unique to each technological advance. Findings show that support for these models was contingent upon the domain that each criterion variable represents. For hard engagement, such as political discussion, hard knowledge, and civic participation, there was …