In this study, I examine a model through which I attempt to identify how peers mediate media influences on adolescent sexuality. The data for this paper came from a paper-and-pencil survey involving 213 late adolescents who were between the ages of 18 and 19. The findings show that (a) adolescents attend to sex-related media and believe that their peers attend to similar media, (b) adolescents make estimates of possible media influences on their friends, (c) perceptions of media influence on peer norms regarding sexual issues are positively related to adolescents' own sexual permissiveness, and (d) the permissive sexual attitudes of adolescents predict the possibility for adolescents to engage in sexual activities.
This study focused on media coverage of a controversial issue—the use of primates in laboratory research—to examine pluralistic ignorance, the potential for public misjudgment of public opinion. We hypothesized that people on both sides of the issue would find news coverage relatively disagreeable to their own point of view (the relative hostile media perception). We also expected to find that perceived public opinion would be influenced by personal opinions (the projection bias) and by perceived news slant (the persuasive press inference) and that, because of the hostile media perception, these latter two factors would push perceived public opinion in contrary directions. Data from a national probability sample (N=402) indicated support for all three hypotheses. In addition, along with an aggregate perception of unfavorable news coverage we found that people substantially overestimated public opposition to the use of primates in research. The results suggest that perceptions of the slant of press coverage can predict collective misjudgments of public opinion.
This study proposed a theoretical framework by which it can be identified how media influence and social influence interplay and produce joint effects on adolescents’ materialistic values. The framework began with how adolescents estimate parents’ and friends’ materialistic values from media exposure and interpersonal communication and then facilitated an examination of how the parents’ and friends’ materialistic values, in turn, influence adolescents’ materialistic values. This framework was tested with survey data of 697 adolescents in Singapore. Results showed that an adolescent’s exposure to advertising was both directly and indirectly associated with his or her materialistic values. The indirect association was mediated by the adolescent’s perception of advertising effect on friends and by the adolescents’ interpersonal communication with parents and with friends.
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