Interpersonal Communication and News Comprehension

Abstract

This study examines the role of interpersonal and mass media channels in public awareness and comprehension of major news stories. Unlike previous research which asks about respondent perceptions of their main source for news, this study attempts to determine actual comprehension of stories that had been in the news during the previous week. On the basis of two separate probability samples, respondent awareness and comprehension of a week's news was measured and related to demographic, news media use, and interpersonal discussions variables. A Multiple Classification Analysis of the data indicates that conversation about the news is a major and often overlooked correlate of comprehension, and that interpersonal channels may play at least as important a role in the public's awareness and understanding of the news as exposure to the news media. John P. Robinson is the Director of the Survey Research Center and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Mark R. Levy is an Associate Professor of Journalism and a Research Associate of the Center for Research in Public Communication, University of Maryland. An earlier version of this article was presented to the 40th annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, McAfee, NJ, May 1983. Support for this study was provided by the John and Mary Marke Foundation. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 50:160-175 ? 1986 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press 0033-362X/86/0050-160/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.27 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:15:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND NEWS COMPREHENSION 161 channel influence measure neither actual information gain nor, perhaps more important, how well that information is comprehended. These shortcomings have hindered our ability to understand the role of the mass media in the opinion formation process and suggest the need for studies based on better measures of information gain and comprehen-