Question

c)  Outline two factors that make it challenging for researchers to accurately measure the effect that the media has on our attitudes. Explain why these factors present a challenge to the research.

d)  What are the key differences among the various self-report measurement tools, and what are their main challenges?

Answer 1

C) When researchers try to measure the effect of media the two factors affect them are

a) Intention - when the media industries are criticized for negative effects, one of their defence stratigies is to point out that they did not intend to create negative effect. For example if media is criticized for presenting so much voilence in Hollywood movies, producers of those movies will say that they are merely trying to entertain people not teach them behave violently.

b) Level- most of the research on media effects looks at individual as the targets of the effect. Scholars have produced very large literature documenting wide array of effects on individual. But the media also exert infulences on more macro level entities such as public, society and institutions.

These factors present challenge to researchers because the differences are not only in methods needed to measure the effects but also in the type of question addressed and the type of conclusion presented.

And since the media tries to convince the society for which they have been criticized they can easily manipulate people. Hence it makes researchers confused to study impact of media.

d) Self reported measures in which respondents are asked to report directly on behaviours, beliefs, attitudes or intentions. For example many common measures of attitude such as thur-stole scales, likert scale and semantic differential are self report. Similar other constructs of interest to survey research, such as behavioural intention, belief and retrospective reports of behaviour are obtained measure via self report. The most common characteristics of self report is that learners themselves classify or dudece their own activities.

Learning stratigies are to be measured for which learning task , the use of self report instrument faces other methodological requirements such as the standard requirements of validity and reliability additionally the issue of the generalised ability of measuring methods is important.