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Social and Behavioral Sciences
Agenda setting; group threat; media effects; spreading activation; experiments
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Cross-Issue Agenda Setting From Racism To Immigration: Spreading Activation Or Group Threat?, Martina Santia
Cross-Issue Agenda Setting From Racism To Immigration: Spreading Activation Or Group Threat?, Martina Santia
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Little research to date offers evidence for the “cross-issue agenda setting effect,” that is transfer of salience from media coverage of racism to perceived importance of immigration. Laboratory experiments afford the opportunity to facilitate causal inference in determining whether this cross-issue effect is due to a cognitive mechanism of spreading activation (as conventionally assumed in agenda setting research) or to a cumulative, affective process driven by perceived threat to a certain identity group. Observational data, on the other hand, allow to externally validate the experimental results beyond the constrained settings typical of laboratory experimentation.
This dissertation combines the strengths of …