This study links uses and gratifications theory to a theory that addresses civic engagement and then applies it to create an electronic public sphere designed to encourage citizens to participate in civic life. An experimental website on the topic of the state budget was created and tested to assure maximum usability by citizens. It found that the site designed to conform to users' wants and needs in content, navigation and appearance did indeed foster positive attitudes toward civic engagement. Participants who saw the usable site were significantly more likely to have positive attitudes toward civic engagement than those who saw a site not designed for usability. The site features under the control of website creators, such as story content and site appearance, showed strong correlations with civic engagement attitudes.
475the extent to which they are visualizers) and predisposition for learning from verbal material (i.e., the extent to which they are verbalizers). This article looks at the impact of the content relationship between photos and text and reader interest in the story topic and then asks how people's "visualizing" and "verbalizing" cognitive styles influence their response to the photo-text environment. This study builds the case that people whose cognitive style is more image focused will show a positive impact of news photos and that people whose cognitive styles are more word focused will rely more on the text. The approach borrows heavily from education theory to explain how photos and text in a newspaper create "different" environments for different people. We suggest that "cognitive styles" give media researchers an important new way of looking at responses to mass media messages.We begin by examining the literature on cognitive styles, specifically visualizing and verbalizing, and then examine key theoretical concepts from education and media literatures that have been shown to affect text comprehension: the effect of picture presence, the congruency or fit between pictures and texts, and the effects of reader interest in the topic of the text. These literatures are considered when articulating hypotheses about the effects of high levels of visualizing and verbalizing on processing news stories and photographs. The resulting hypotheses are tested in an experiment that varies presence of photographs and their congruity (or fit) with the text and the interestingness of the story, as well as visualizing and verbalizing scores.
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