Home

Professors guidelines for 10 page paper:
(2) The Theory/Model Construct Paper. Select a single theory, model, or construct relevant to mass communication research. Provide a critical literature review of the theory, model, or construct. A critical literature review identifies, organizes, and presents the existing literature, and then offers a critique of that literature, with the goal of illuminating directions for future research.
The paper should be presented in APA Style with an annotated bibliography. In addition to the text, you will need to reference a minimum of 5 academic sources. Your paper should be no less than 10 DOUBLE SPACED pages (Times New Roman Font- REQUIRED!!), excluding bibliography.
Class text book ( chosen theory)
Mass Communication Theory, 8th Edition
Stanley J. Baran; Dennis K. Davis
SCHEMA THEORY
Doris Graber (1984), in Processing the News, her landmark effort to understand how people “tame the information tide,” brought schema theory to the discipline. Schema theory can be traced back to 1932 and cognitive psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett’s initially ill-received Remembering. His contemporaries rejected his assertion that remembering is not reproductive, but reconstructive. That is, people do not hold memories in their minds as details of things past, to be called forth when required; instead memories are new constructions cobbled together from bits and pieces of connected experiences and applied as situations demand. What make this construction possible are schemas, cognitive structures people build up that are abstracted from prior experience and used for processing new information and organizing experiences. Bartlett (1932) himself defined a schema as “an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences” (p. 201). These complex, unconscious knowledge structures “are active, without any awareness at all” (p. 200). Moreover, schemas are “generic”; that is, after a person has encountered a phenomenon first once, then many times, he or she builds—and continues to build—an abstract, general cognitive representation (a schema) and all new incoming information related to that phenomenon is processed in terms of that schema. Schemas are also “generative”—that is, they can handle an indefinite number of new instances because individuals are constantly building and revising their schemas in response to new information (Brewer & Nakamura, 1984).
Consider your schema for something simple—for example, boat. Even if you have never been on a boat, your boat schemas no doubt contain knowledge about boats in general (float, move, hulls, decks), and quite likely information about specific types of boats, such as motor boats (sleek, fast, powerful) and sailboats (sails, wind, ropes, masts, lean over). You might also think of boats in the larger context of water-bound transportation devices—for example, tankers, navy ships, container ships, and barges are large, functional boats propelled by motors; yachts are large pleasure boats; and submarines are a special class of boat that sometimes travels under water. You may have personal experience with boats, so those experiences are part of your boat schema—musty smell, seasickness, vacationing at the ocean or lake, water skiing, swimming with friends, romance. Each new boat experience builds more information into your boat schema. So, when you hear a 45-second radio news report about a sailboat race through Capitol City’s industrial harbor, you can quite easily and efficiently make sense of the story and more than likely produce a fair account for a friend who later asks you about it.
But you also have schemas for much more complex phenomena. What is your Republican schema? Your Democrat schema? Your war-on-terror schema? Your socialism or authoritarianism schemas? How broad and deep are they? How were they built? That is, what experiences—real-world and mass-mediated—contributed to their construction and the connections they call up when something in your experience activates them?
Some schemas are for events rather than things or concepts. When these schemas are constructed episodically—if this . . . then that . . . then this . . . then that—they are called scripts, or “standardized generalized episode[s]” (Schank & Abelson, 1977, p. 19). People “understand what they see and hear” by matching those inputs to scripts, “pre-stored groupings of actions they have already experienced” (p. 67). You don’t rely on scripts? What about your last trip to a restaurant? Did you have some clear expectations about the way in which actions would take place—greeted by a host, seated at a table, presented with a menu, and so on? What if the waiter never delivered a bill? What would you do?
Now recall from earlier in this chapter Graber’s (1984) “defense” of American news media and their impossible task of trying to report on complex and unappealing events for an audience with a short attention span. In this situation, she argues, schemas serve four important functions for news consumers who, by nature, are cognitive misers:
1. They determine what information will be noticed, processed, and stored so that it becomes available for later retrieval from memory.
2. They help people organize and evaluate new information, fitting it into their already-established perceptions. People do not have to construct new concepts when familiar information is presented in the news.
3. They make it possible for people to go beyond the immediate information presented in a news report, helping them fill in missing information.
4. They help people solve problems because they contain information about likely scenarios and ways to cope with them; that is, they serve as scripts. This makes them important tools in helping people decide how to act. (p. 24)
Graber’s (1984) study of a panel of 21 registered voters/news consumers to see how people make sense of the news confirmed her assessment of the value of schema. “People tame the information tide quite well,” she wrote. “They have workable, if intellectually vulnerable, ways of paring down the flood of news to manageable proportions” (p. 201). “People from all walks of life, endowed with varying capabilities, can manage to extract substantial amounts of political knowledge from this flood of information,” she continued, “All panelists had mastered the art of paying selective attention to news and engaging in the various forms of relatedness searches. All had acquired schemas into which they were able to fit incoming political information. All were able to work with an adequate array of schema dimensions, and all frequently used multiple themes in their various schemas” (p. 204).
In fact, Graber (1988) discovered voters bring several well-formed schemas to their interpretation of political news (p. 193):
• Simple Situation Sequences—people do not process news stories to remember precise details; instead they condense the account to their bare essentials to understand what they mean in specific contexts.
• Cause-and-Effect Sequences—people link reported situations to their likely causes.
• Person Judgments—people easily process news about individuals in terms of their demographic groups because they have built schemas about human nature, goals, and behaviors.
• Institution Judgments—just as people have schemas for the behavior of individuals, they have schemas for the way institutions are supposed to operate.
• Cultural Norms and American Interests—people have a general “the American way” schema that includes the construction that democracy is the best form of government for the United States and for the world as a whole.
• Human Interest and Empathy—people interpret reports in terms of self-perception: “Is the situation depicted in the news story similar to what I have experienced directly or vicariously or similar to what I would do under the circumstances?” (p. 212).
You can read more about what happens when news frames bump up against people’s schemas in the box “Battle of the Competing Schemas.”
Schema theory has also been applied to advertising content, typically in assessing the impact of schema-inconsistent advertising—that is, advertising that intentionally violates people’s expectations of that form of content. For example, arguing that advertisers’ immediate goal is to attract consumers’ attention and have them engage their commercial messages, Hazel Warlaumont (1997) reasoned that “[o]ne aspect of schema theory is that if a text conforms to a person’s expectations, or schema, then perception will be smooth and logical; if not, it will seem incongruous, or ‘schema-inconsistent.’ If the stimuli are not what was expected, it may arouse a mild ‘perturbation’ or a feeling of surprise that may motivate the viewer to attempt to make sense out of the discrepancy through involvement with the stimuli” (p. 41). Her research demonstrated that this was indeed the case.
THINKING ABOUT THEORY
BATTLE OF THE COMPETING SCHEMAS
One of the drawbacks of schema theory is that people from different disciplines, and sometimes from the same fields, often use the term a bit casually. For example, in his very fine work on news frames and consumers’ schemas, Fuyuan Shen (2004) writes, “It is theorized here that, in response to news discourses, individuals will engage in active thinking and bring their own mental frames or schemas [emphasis added] to the interpretative process” (p. 401). Sometimes, as in this example, frames and schemas are used interchangeably; sometimes they represent different phenomena. Sometimes scripts and schemas are interchangeable; sometimes a script is a specific type of schema. Sometimes scholars try to refine the term schema—for example, employing constructs such as propositions or frame keepers (Brewer & Nakamura, 1984, p. 31). We’ll revisit the many different definitions of frames and framing in Chapter 13.
In his classic work on media coverage of presidential elections, Out of Order, Thomas Patterson (1993) defines schema as this text does: “a cognitive structure that a person uses when processing new information and retrieving old information. It is a mental framework the individual constructs from past experiences that helps make sense of a new situation” (p. 56). He also talks about frames, using that term as Shen did—that is, to refer to how news reports are constructed around a specific theme.
Patterson argues that reporters and voters have differing schemas for elections, and that this clash of mental frameworks produces such a disconnect between journalism and voters that “the United States cannot have a sensible campaign as long as it is built around the news media” (p. 25).
Regarding elections, he notes, voters have a “governing schema” that values “policy problems, leadership traits, policy debates, and the like.” Patterson quotes another political scientist, Samuel Popkin, to say that this schema produces “voters [who] actually do reason about parties, candidates, and issues. They have premises, and they use those premises to make inferences from their observations of the world around them” (p. 59). But reporters, according to Patterson, frame politics as a “game.” “When journalists encounter new information during an election, they tend to interpret it within a schematic framework according to which candidates compete for advantage. . . . [C]andidates are strategic actors whose every move is significant. . . . [P]olitics is essentially a game played by individual politicians for personal advancement, gain, or power” (pp. 57–58).
What meanings of the electoral process do reporters construct using the game frame? When candidates speak about issues, the press hears ulterior motives. When candidates make promises, reporters hear pie-in-the-sky proposals that can’t possibly be kept. For campaign reporters, elections are about the horse race: Who’s ahead; how far; what do the polls say? “In the game schema [or frame], the focus is on a few individuals—the candidates—rather than on the larger interests they represent and the broader political forces that shape their campaign,” writes Patterson. “To the press, strategy and maneuvers are not merely a component of the campaign; they are a decisive element” (p. 63).
What kind of reporting results from these constructions? In other words, how are news stories about elections framed? When Patterson wrote Out of Order in 1993, the horse-race frame (a news account’s organizing structure) made up 35% of network television news coverage, and reporting on polls accounted for another 33%. Policy issues made up less than one third of all reporting. Things did not improve much in the next 15 years. In the 2008 election, 71% of all political stories in all the major media were horse-race reports; only 13% dealt with policy. These data led William Hudson (2013) to write, “This journalistic ‘schema’ or ‘frame’ of an election as a strategic game between opposing campaign teams not only diminishes discussion of issues but also distorts such discussion at the rare times when issues are raised. Rather than portraying the candidates’ issue statements as serious proposals for addressing the country’s problems, the strategic game frame treats such statements merely as positions taken to attract the support of particular constituencies” (p. 196). The press’s framing of campaign news stories damages democracy because, as Patterson (2013) argued, “[V]oters are intensely interested in learning about candidates’ issue positions as a way of evaluating their capacity to address real problems, even though the journalists’ strategic frame lets little of that information get through to them” (p. 196). And there is evidence that this is not good for democracy. Nicholas Valentino and his colleagues demonstrated that framing affects turnout, trust in government, civic duty, and the perceived value of elections. Nonpartisans and people with less than a college degree are most impacted by strategy-based framing, becoming more alienated and less motivated to vote, more so than partisans (Valentino, Beckmann, & Buhr, 2001).
Do you agree with researchers Patterson and Hudson? Do you think journalists and voters actually have these dramatically different schemas/frames for elections? Is it possible that these scholars are overly generous in their view of American voters and maybe a little too negative about the press? Here are some data on news coverage, trust in news media, and voter turnout to help you with your answers. In the 2016 presidential primaries, when voters were still deciding who would represent their political party in the general election, 56% of all news reports were horse-race coverage; 35% were about campaign process, such as which states to campaign in, fundraising, and so on; and 11% of coverage was on policy issues (Patterson, 2016b). Once the candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, were selected, general election coverage did not get much better. Forty-two percent of news coverage was horse-race; 17% covered controversies; only 10% was about policy. And when news reports did deal with the candidates’ “fitness for office,” 82% were negative for both contenders (Patterson, 2016a). In the wake of that election, nearly 7 in 10 Americans, 69%, said they had lost trust in the news media (“Indicators of News Media,” 2018). Finally, despite a very close and contentious presidential election, major issues at stake, and $6.5 billion spent in the presidential and congressional races, voter turnout was its lowest in two decades, with fewer than 60% of voting-age Americans making their way to the polls, or, expressed differently, more than 4 in 10 citizens in the “world’s greatest democracy” did not vote (Wallace, 2016).
INSTANT ACCESS
SCHEMA THEORY
Strengths
1. Focuses attention on individual cognitive processing in the mass communication process
2. Respects the information-processing ability of media consumers
3. Provides specificity in describing the role of experience in information processing
4. Provides exploration of a wide variety of media information
5. Provides consistent results across a wide range of communication situations and settings
Weaknesses
1. Too oriented toward micro-level
2. Suffers from label confusion (e.g., schema, frame, script)
3. Insufficiently accounts for neurological influences
4. More research is needed to understand the processes involved in schema formation and changeI’m