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Article published In:
The Agenda Setting Journal
Vol. 1:2 (2017) ► pp.117–136

Online agenda-setting research

Challenges and dilemmas

| Yezreel Valley College
| Yezreel Valley College
| Yezreel Valley College
| Yezreel Valley College

Agenda-setting research has been performed for more than four decades, both in traditional and online media, and the tools employed for this task have been very much accepted by media researchers around the world. Nevertheless, analysis of the public agenda in new media, particularly across social networks, requires re-thinking these same tools, which creates a series of methodological and theoretical challenges. The present paper seeks to illuminate these challenges and propose possible solutions for some of them.

Keywords: Agenda-setting theory, online research, new media, research challenges
Article outline
  • Agenda-setting theory
  • Agenda-setting theory in the age of new media
  • Current challenges facing agenda-setting researchers
  • Defining the boundaries of the online public
  • What’s on the online public agenda? Evaluating the public agenda in the online public sphere
  • Conceptualizing and measuring salience
  • Relying on automatic monitoring systems
  • Putting a sample together
  • Defining units of time
    • Interactions among and mutual influences among different media outlets
  • Inter-source contamination
  • Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 4 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/asj.1.2.03ari
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