Publications

Publication details [#66440]

McCombs, Maxwell E. and Jennifer Kowalewski. 2019. Measuring public opinion formation. Assessing first- and second-level agenda setting through salience measures. The Agenda Setting Journal 3 (1) : 43–62.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/asj

Annotation

For the past 50 years since the seminal agenda-setting study, scholars have continued to make strides in understanding the importance mass communication plays in public opinion formation. Although scholars have measured both first- and second-level agenda setting often using open-ended response, more close-ended measures might assist in measuring the theory, adding to the rich data. This experimental study directly compared open-ended responses shown to gauge an agenda-setting effect with close-ended responses to enhance the assessment of both first- and second-level agenda setting. The findings identified close-ended scales, including news salience, social salience, personal salience, and feelings salience, that add to the precision of measuring the salience of issues and attributes, indicating we have alternative measures to gauge agenda setting.