Citation

Potter WJ, Tomasello TK. J. Commun. 2003; 53(2): 315-329.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, International Communication Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1460-2466.2003.tb02593.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The authors argue that the inclusion of viewer interpretation variables in experimental design and analysis procedures can greatly increase the methodology's ability to explain variance. The experiment primarily focused attention on the between-group differences, while an analysis of how individual participants interpret the cues in the stimulus material focused attention on the within-group differences. We demonstrated such an analysis in this study in which 99 participants were exposed to 1 of 3 treatment conditions (high violence, mid violence, and low violence) and found significant differences across treatment groups. However, the treatment differences accounted for only about 7% of the variance in judgments of the degree of violence, whereas a set of interpretive variables accounted for more than 48%.