It is suggested that one of the reasons that there is such a lack of clarity as to whether the media have effects is that researchers have proceeded from the wrong theoretical conceptualizations to study the wrong questions. The dependency model of media effects is presented as a theoretical alternative in which the nature of the tripartite audience-media-society relationship is assumed to most directly determine many of the effects that the media have on people and society. The present paper focuses upon audience dependency on media information resources as a key interactive condition for alteration of audience beliefs, behavior, or feelings as a result of mass communicated in formation. Audience dependency is said to be high in societies in which the media serve many central information functions and in periods of rapid social change or pervasive social conflict. The dependency model is further elaborated and illustrated by examination of several cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects which may be readily analyzed and researched from this theoretical framework.

Prior theory and research that has demonstrated the consequences of individuals' media-system dependencies upon selective exposure and message effects has not, however, addressed the equally important question of the determinants of individuals' media-system dependencies. The aim of this article is to present a sociological framework for the analysis of the macro and micro determinants of those media-system dependencies. The configuration of determinants that constitute this framework includes structural dependencies between the media and other social systems, characteristics of the social environs, media-system activity, interpersonal discourse networks, the sociostructural location of individuals, and personal goals.

The purpose of this study is to articulate the concepts and assumptions of communication infrastructure theory (CIT) in its present stage of development and validation. As an ecological approach to communication and community, CIT claims that access to storytelling community resources is a critical factor in civic engagement. When embedded in a neighborhood environment where key community storytellers encourage each other to talk about the neighborhood, individual residents are more likely to belong to their community, to have a strong sense of collective efficacy, and to participate in civic actions. CIT framework offers a way to examine the ecological processes that concern the effects of communication resources on civic community.

In a 1985 study, Inglehart compared the 4 sets of terminal value rankings thus obtained and found them to be remarkably stable. These same data also show, however, that Americans underwent dramatic value changes during the same period. The most disturbing finding is that equality, the value previously found to be highly correlated with antiracist and liberal attitudes, decreased more than any other value. This and other value changes contradict well-established NORC, Gallup, and ISR findings showing (a) impressive increases in antiracist attitudes and (b) a "'much more variable" and (c) "much lower level of support"for attitudes toward implementation of integration. We propose a theoretical explanation of the three sets of contradictory findings. Moreover, we offer a theoretical explanation of naturally occurring stability and change in American value priorities.

From a communication infrastructure theory perspective, the current study examined individuals' civic engagement (neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participation) as influenced by 2 multilevel components of the communication infrastructure-an integrated connectedness to a storytelling network (ICSN) and the residential context-focusing on ethnic heterogeneity and residential stability. Our multilevel analyses show that ICSN is the most important individual-level factor in civic engagement-neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participationafter controlling for other individual-level and neighborhood-level factors. In both ethnically homogeneous and heterogeneous areas and in both stable and unstable areas, ICSN is an important factor in civic engagement. As contextual factors, residential stability positively affects neighborhood belonging and collective efficacy, and ethnic heterogeneity is negatively related to collective efficacy. Our data do not show any direct contextual effects of residential stability or ethnic heterogeneity on civic participation. However, our HLM analysis showed that the relative importance of ICSN for the likelihood of participation in civic activities is significantly higher in unstable or ethnically heterogeneous areas than in stable or ethnically homogeneous areas.