Slater Michael D, Hayes Andrew F, Reineke Jason B, Long Marilee A, Bettinghaus Erwin P
The Ohio State University.
J Commun. 2009 Sep;59(3):514. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01433.x.
Prior research on knowledge gap effects, in health as well as in other domains, has focused largely on assessing individual-level differences in exposure to news based on self-report of media use. Inherent inferential limitations of this approach are addressed by testing the hypothesis that the relationship between education and cancer prevention knowledge will be moderated by regional differences in U.S. news coverage of cancer prevention. The study also tests, using these methods, findings by Kwak (1999) suggesting that the importance of attention to relevant news in predicting knowledge decreases as information available in the news increases. Using a representative national sample of newspaper coverage to assess regional differences in cancer prevention coverage, a representative national probability sample to assess respondent education and cancer prevention knowledge, and multilevel analyses of the relationship between regional coverage differences and knowledge of persons in those regions, support is found for both of these propositions.
先前关于健康及其他领域知识差距效应的研究，很大程度上集中于根据媒体使用的自我报告来评估个体层面在接触新闻方面的差异。通过检验“教育与癌症预防知识之间的关系将受到美国癌症预防新闻报道的地区差异影响”这一假设，解决了该方法固有的推断局限性。该研究还运用这些方法检验了夸克（1999年）的研究结果，即随着新闻中可得信息的增加，关注相关新闻在预测知识方面的重要性会降低。利用报纸报道的全国代表性样本评估癌症预防报道的地区差异，利用全国代表性概率样本评估受访者的教育程度和癌症预防知识，并对地区报道差异与这些地区人群知识之间的关系进行多层次分析，结果发现这两个命题均得到了支持。
