Measure for Measure: Comparing methodologies for determining newspaper exposure.

Measure for Measure: Comparing Methodologies for Determining Newspaper Exposure Measuring media exposure requires careful consideration of both the reliability and validity of the operational definitions. This study compares two ways of measuring newspaper exposure — exposure to newspapers in general and exposure to specific sections of a newspaper. The study found that respondents report more time spent with the newspaper when measuring exposure to specific sections, rather than to the newspaper overall. Although the aggregated index of exposure to specific newspaper sections did not correlate with attitude measures, results did show correlations between specific newspaper sections and knowledge and attitudes. Measure for Measure 3 Measure for Measure: Comparing Methodologies for Determining Newspaper Exposure For most communication scholars, measuring exposure to a mass medium involves little more than asking how many days a week or minutes a day the respondent uses the medium. The alternative is to ask about exposure to specific parts of the medium, such as, in a newspaper, sections for world, national state and local news; business and sports news; feature sections and advertisements (Shoemaker & Reese, 1990). This may result in a more precise operationalization of how much time a person spends with the media. The purpose of this study is to compare the traditional general newspaper exposure measures with measures that ask respondents to report their exposure to specific sections of the newspaper. Four dependent variables — election knowledge, interest in current events, likelihood to vote, and perceptions of crime victims — are used as comparison points for the two indexes and for the separate newspaper sections. We want to know whether the two ways of measuring newspaper exposure correlate equally well with the dependent measures and whether the exposure to individual newspaper sections correlate differently with the dependent measures.

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