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

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。媒体启动已被确定为选举活动的信息环境影响公众舆论的最重要方式之一。通过改变公民用来评价政策和政治家的标准，媒体有条件地影响了大众的偏好。在过去的二十年里，数十项研究已经通过各种各样的媒体内容证明了媒体启动效应。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关注。研究人员的一个关键决策涉及到与媒体信息暴露相关的启动维度的测量时间。文献中使用了两种替代策略：前测试与后测试设计。前测设计在刺激前测量被试的启动态度，后测设计在刺激后测量被试的启动态度。这种设计选择的重要性在最近关于内隐种族线索影响的辩论中得到了突出体现，其中一些人发现在前测试设计下没有显著的启动效应，这与之前在后测试设计下获得的经验证据相矛盾。本研究的目的是阐明这一普遍的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，单独的前测和后测设计都不足以确定媒体启动效应。现有的研究采用后测设计有高估媒体启动效应的风险，而最近的研究采用前测设计可能发现即使启动已经发生也没有效应。为了克服这个识别问题，这个项目以一种创造性的方式将两种设计结合起来。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进行更有力的推论。实验测试调查了不同测量策略的后果及其对实质性文献的影响。这个项目的广泛影响是双重的。首先，这些发现将完善这一领域。关于现代竞选中媒体启动效应的性质和程度的知识。具体而言，结果将涉及竞选活动如何、何时以及为何影响候选人的评价和政策意见。其次，所提出的方法将在政治学和心理学的其他领域得到广泛的应用，在这些领域，研究人员面临着关于替代测量策略和实验设计的类似困境。

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.