Agenda-Setting Effects of Television News Coverage and the Effects Decay Curve

Watt, James H.; Mazza, Mary; Snyder, Leslie B.

doi:10.1177/009365093020003004

Cited by 83 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Previous research that found that average recall of non-urgent news stories is limited to 12-60 days [39], suggesting that this matching of news and survey data was sufficient.…”

Section: Newspaper Coverage Of Secondhand Smoke Issuesmentioning

confidence: 89%

News on tobacco and public attitudes toward smokefree air policies in the United States

Smith¹,

Siebel²,

Pham³

et al. 2008

Health Policy

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“…Previous research that found that average recall of non-urgent news stories is limited to 12-60 days [39], suggesting that this matching of news and survey data was sufficient.…”

Section: Newspaper Coverage Of Secondhand Smoke Issuesmentioning

confidence: 89%

News on tobacco and public attitudes toward smokefree air policies in the United States

Smith¹,

Siebel²,

Pham³

et al. 2008

Health Policy

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“…The AP is a wire service that is used by more than 85% of U.S. newspapers (Fan & Tims, 1989;Watt, Mazza, & Snyder, 1993) and is a reasonable proxy for broader media coverage of news topics (Fan, 1988;Romantan, 2004). The Lexis-Nexis database was used to search for cancer AP articles.…”

Section: Identification Of Cancer News Articlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cancer News Coverage and Information Seeking

Niederdeppe

Frosch

Hornik

2008

Journal of Health Communication

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The shift toward viewing patients as active consumers of health information raises questions about whether individuals respond to health news by seeking additional information. This study examines the relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking using a national survey of adults aged 18 years and older. A Lexis-Nexis database search term was used to identify Associated Press (AP) news articles about cancer released between October 21, 2002, and April 13, 2003. We merged these data to the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), a telephone survey of 6,369 adults, by date of interview. Logistic regression models assessed the relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking. Overall, we observed a marginally significant positive relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking (p < 0.07). Interaction terms revealed that the relationship was apparent only among respondents who paid close attention to health news (p < 0.01) and among those with a family history of cancer (p < 0.05). Results suggest that a notable segment of the population actively responds to periods of elevated cancer news coverage by seeking additional information, but they raise concerns about the potential for widened gaps in cancer knowledge and behavior between large segments of the population in the future.The growing emphasis in clinical medicine on patients participating more actively in making health care decisions, combined with rapid growth in the availability of health information, creates potential for widespread use of publicly available information in medical decisions (Frosch & Kaplan, 1999). In light of these systemic changes, it is vitally important to understand how health consumers navigate the health information environment. Information seeking is increasingly viewed as an important mediator between health information in the media and subsequent health knowledge and behaviors (Griffin, Dunwoody, & Neuwirth, 1999;Johnson, 1997;Niederdeppe et al., 2007). Optimistic views suggest that many search for additional health information when exposed to health news (Campion, 2004;Nelson et al., 2004), but the extent to which this occurs remains largely unknown. This article examines the relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking using data from a national survey. News Coverage and Health BehaviorHealth news coverage has contributed to notable changes in preventive behavior. Lagged timetrend analyses link news coverage to decreases in the administration of aspirin to children and (Soumerai, Ross-Degnan, & Kahn, 2002), reductions in youth marijuana use (Stryker, 2003), increased smoking cessation (Pierce & Gilpin, 2001), decreases in youth cocaine use (Fan & Holway, 1994), reductions in HIV infection in gay men (Fan, 2002), reduced youth binge drinking (Yanovitzky & Stryker, 2001), increased mammography use (Yanovitzky & Blitz, 2000), and lowered levels of drunk driving (Yanovitzky & Bennett, 1999). In most of these cases, changes in behavior tr...

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“…Understanding news coverage is an important part of understanding public perceptions of health topics-particularly those for which people may have little personal experience [34]. According to a 1989 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey, mainstream news media are the primary public source for information about mental illness [33].…”

Section: The Media's Role In Constructing Public Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%