Community Boundedness, Personal Relevance, and the Knowledge Gap

Research on the knowledge gap has explored individual and social factors that may influence the creation, maintenance, and demise of socioeconomically based differences in information gained as the result of communication campaigns. Recent work by Viswanath and colleagues suggests that the extent to which an issue affects members of a community—termed “community boundedness”—may have an independent influence on knowledge acquisition for members of the affected community. This study finds that community boundedness had a positive impact on awareness of a medical insurance program targeted to lower income children, whereas personal relevance did not. Specifically, African Americans and Latinos were more likely to be aware of a medical assistance program during the course of a campaign than were non-Hispanic Whites, controlling for income and personal relevance. The study also documents an inverse knowledge gap in which persons of lower socioeconomic status had greater awareness than did persons of higher socioeconomic status.

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