Questioning our Questions: A levels-of-analysis-perspective on meaning and measurement in cultivation research

While the effects of media messages on public opinion have long been studied by scholars from various branches of the social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, political science, and communication) our theoretical understanding of the phenomenon is still limited. In my PhD dissertation I posit that this stalling of knowledge might be caused, at least in part, by the absence of a consistent definition for the effect under investigation: due to the diverse scientific backgrounds of media effects researchers the literature is laden with different perspectives on what an opinion (or attitude) is and what types of effects we need to be looking for. An extensive review of media effects studies led me to conclude that these conflicting views can largely be explained by a reliance on different ‘levels of analysis’ when defining opinions: some traditions define opinions at the level of the mental concept and others define them at the level of the expression of the mental concept. For this reason, I argue that media effects researchers need to develop a more consistent conceptual background by (1) explicitly integrating the theoretical distinction between mental concepts and observed expressions into our definitions of media effects, and (2) building theories on the circumstances under which certain mental concepts can be derived from people's expressions. Throughout all Chapters of the dissertation, I aim to explore the implications of this approach for developing media effects hypotheses and testing them in empirical research settings.