Collaborative Research: The Measurement and Identification of Media Priming Effects in Political Science.

该奖项根据 2009 年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法 111-5）提供资金。媒体启动已被确定为竞选信息环境影响公众舆论的最重要方式之一。通过改变公民评估政策和政客的标准，媒体有条件地影响大众的偏好。在过去的二十年中，数十项研究证明了通过各种媒体内容产生的媒体启动效应。然而，最近，人们对用于证明媒体启动效应的测量和识别策略提出了担忧。对于研究人员来说，一个关键的决定涉及测量与媒体信息曝光相关的启动维度的时间。文献中使用了两种替代策略：预测试与后测试设计。在预测试设计中，在给予刺激之前测量启动态度，而在后测试设计中，在给予治疗之后进行测量。这种设计选择的重要性在最近关于隐性种族线索影响的争论中得到了强调，一些人发现在测试前设计下没有显着的启动效应，这与之前在测试后设计下获得的经验证据相矛盾。拟议研究的目的是阐明这一一般测量问题以及媒体启动研究的相关实质性发现。 PI 从数学上证明，无论是预测试还是后测试设计都不足以识别媒体启动效应。采用后测试设计的现有研究存在高估媒体启动效应的风险，而最近采用前测试设计的研究可能发现即使启动已经发生也不会产生任何影响。为了克服这个识别问题，该项目以创造性的方式结合了两种设计。这一策略对媒体启动效应产生了更有力的推论，并提供了一套新的研究方法，可用于对媒体启动效应做出更有力的推论。实验测试研究了不同测量策略的后果及其对实质性文献的影响。该项目的更广泛影响是双重的。首先，研究结果将完善该领域对现代运动中媒体启动效应的性质和程度的认识。特别是，结果将影响竞选活动如何、何时以及为何影响候选人评估和政策观点。其次，所提出的方法将在政治科学和心理学的其他领域得到广泛的应用，这些领域的研究人员在替代测量策略和实验设计方面面临着类似的困境。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Media priming has been established as one of the most important ways in which the information environment of electoral campaigns affects public opinion. By changing the criteria citizens use to evaluate policies and politicians, the media conditionally affect mass preferences. Over the past two decades, dozens of studies have demonstrated media priming effects via a wide variety of media content. Recently, however, concerns have been raised about the measurement and identification strategies used to demonstrate media priming effects. A critical decision for researchers involves the timing of the measurement of the primed dimension relative to exposure to media messages. Two alternative strategies are used in the literature: pre-test versus post-test designs. Under the pre-test design the primed attitude is measured before the administration of stimuli, while under the post-test design the measurement is taken after the treatment is given. The importance of this design choice is highlighted in a recent debate about the effects of implicit racial cues, where some find no significant priming effects under the pre-test design, contradicting the empirical evidence previously obtained under the post-test design. The goal of the proposed research is to shed light on this general measurement issue as well as related substantive findings of media priming studies. The PIs demonstrate mathematically that neither pre-test nor post-test design alone is sufficient to identify media priming effects. Existing studies that employ the post-test design risk overestimating media priming effects, while recent studies employing the pre-test design may find no effects even when priming has occurred. To overcome this identification problem, this project combines the two designs in a creative way. This strategy produces more powerful inferences about the media priming effect and offers a new set of research methods that can be used to make stronger inferences about media priming. Experimental tests investigate the consequences of different measurement strategies and their implications for the substantive literature. The broader impacts of this project are twofold. First, the findings will refine the field?s knowledge about the nature and extent of media priming effects in modern campaigns. In particular, results will bear on how, when, and why campaigns affect candidate evaluations and policy opinion. Second, the proposed methods will have a wide array of applications in other areas of political science and psychology where researchers face a similar dilemma about alternative measurement strategies and experimental designs.