The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

Research on framing is characterized by theoretical and empirical vagueness. This is due, in part, to the lack of a commonly shared theoretical model underlying framing research. Conceptual problems translate into operational problems, limiting the comparability of instruments and results. In this paper I systematize the fragmented approaches to framing in political communication and integrate them into a comprehensive model. I classify previous approaches to framing research along two dimensions: the type of frame examined (media frames vs. audience frames) and the way frames are operationalized (independent variable or dependent variable). I develop a process model of framing, identifying four key processes that should be addressed in future research: frame building, frame setting, individual-level processes of framing, and a feedback loop from audiences to journalists.

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Framing as a theory of media effects

Agenda setting function of mass media

This study examines the role of community integration and mass and interpersonal communication in predicting two types of local political participation; more conventional, "institutionalized" acts of participation and less traditional acts of participating and speaking out in a forum. An analysis of survey data (N = 389) showed a strong role of newspaper readership and a somewhat lower impact of interpersonal discussion on institutionalized participation. Different patterns emerged for participation in a civic forum, with interpersonal discussion having the strongest impact of the three communication variables. Television news use had no direct impact on either type of participation, but it did have a modest indirect impact on institutionalized participation. The data also showed direct effects of dimensions of community integration for participation in a forum only. Orientations toward the larger community rather than the local neighborhood were positively related to participating in a civic forum.

Community, Communication, and Participation: The Role of Mass Media and Interpersonal Discussion in Local Political Participation

This research explores the influence of mass media use and community context on civic engagement. The article presents a multilevel test of print, broadcast, and Internet effects on interpersonal trust and civic participation that acknowledges there are (a) micro-level differences in the motives underlying media use, (b) age-cohort differences in patterns of media use and levels of civic engagement, and (c) macro-level differences in community / communication context. Accordingly, the effects of individual differences in media use and aggregate differences in community context are analyzed within generational subsamples using a pooled data set developed from the 1998 and 1999 DDB Life Style Studies. The data suggest that informational uses of mass media are positively related to the production of social capital, whereas social-recreational uses are negatively related to these civic indicators. Informational uses of mass media were also found to interact with community context to influence civic engagement...

Communication, Context, and Community An Exploration of Print, Broadcast, and Internet Influences

The agenda-setting hypothesis asserts that the media have an effect indirectly by choosing certain issues for emphasis, thus making those issues more salient to the audiences. The hypothesis, stated in such general terms, presents formidable conceptual and methodological difficulties that are dealt with in this article. A controlled study of the audiences of two newspapers with differing content emphases was conducted during the 1972 presidential campaign. The results show only moderate support for the agenda-setting hypothesis; the honesty in government issues, given heavy play in one of the two newspapers, failed to generate much enthusiasm among readers of either paper. In addition the results suggest agenda setting is not a broad and unqualified media effect. Predicted differences mainly were restricted to the less involved and less motivated partisans who were heavily dependent on the newspapers for their political news. Finally, the importance of studying issue saliences apart from political attitud...

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Another Look At the Agenda-Setting Function of the Press:

Research on dimensions of community integration has suffered from the lack of clear conceptual and operational definitions. The purposes of this article are to explicate the concept of community integration and its dimensions and to specify the structural and media antecedents and the political consequences of these dimensions. Using 15 indicators drawn from previous integration studies, we test the hypothesis that integration is a multidimensional concept. A factor analysis reveals that community integration has at least five dimensions: psychological attachment, interpersonal discussion networks, city versus group, localism versus cosmopolitanism, and city versus neighborhood. The structural and media use antecedents and the political consequences of these dimensions are examined to provide construct validity for our measurement. We find strong relationships between local media use and the dimensions of community integration, as well as links between local media use and community integration and local p...

Community Integration, Local Media Use, and Democratic Processes:

are thought of as &dquo;self-made,&dquo; while the poor are held to be &dquo;lazy.&dquo; Skinner (1971) points out that his theory of operant conditioning through reinforcement is resisted partly because of the popular tendency to assign both the &dquo;blame&dquo; and the &dquo;credit&dquo; for human conduct to the person’s internal psyche. Perhaps, then, it is understandable that even our &dquo;social&dquo; science employs mainly intrapersonal concepts, such as attitudes, motives, and personality traits, to account for behavior.

Jack M. McLeod

Papers

Community, Communication, and Participation: The Role of Mass Media and Interpersonal Discussion in Local Political Participation

Communication, Context, and Community An Exploration of Print, Broadcast, and Internet Influences

Another Look At the Agenda-Setting Function of the Press:

Community Integration, Local Media Use, and Democratic Processes:

Interpersonal Approaches to Communication Research