News by Popular Demand: Ideological Congruence, Issue Salience, and Media Reputation in News Sharing

2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122110570
Author(s):  
Natalia Aruguete ◽  
Ernesto Calvo ◽  
Tiago Ventura

Social media news sharing has become a central subject of scholarly research in communication studies. To test current theories, it is of an utmost importance to estimate the meaningful parameters of news sharing behavior from observational data. In this article, we retrieve measures of ideological congruence, issue salience, and media reputation to explain news sharing in social media. We describe how the proposed statistical model connects to different strands of the news sharing literature. We then exemplify the usefulness of the model with an analysis of the relationship between ideological congruence and issue salience. Results show that if ideology and salience correlate with each other, the preferences of ideologues (i.e., users who give higher weight to ideological congruence) will be overrepresented in observational data. This will result in the heightened perceptions of polarization. We test the performance of the model using data from Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 410-410
Author(s):  
Xin Yao Lin ◽  
Margie Lachman

Abstract Social media platforms allow people to connect and share content online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter). Although older adults are becoming more frequent users of social media, there continue to be mixed views on whether social media positively or negatively impacts well-being. Past studies have mainly focused on cross-sectional analyses for individual differences. However, both the time spent on social media and one’s affect can fluctuate on a daily basis. Thus, it is important to understand how the relationship between daily social media usage and affect varies within individuals from day to day. The current study adds to the literature by examining whether daily variations in time spent with social media are related to daily positive and negative affect and whether there are age differences in these relationships. The current study used an eight-day daily diary from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Refresher dataset for 782 participants (ages 25-75). Multilevel modeling results revealed that age moderated the relationship between daily time spent on social media and negative affect: for younger adults, on days when they spent more time on social media, they had more negative affect. For older adults, on days when they spent more time on social media, they had less negative affect. Surprisingly, daily time spent on social media was not related to daily positive affect, nor did this relationship differ by age. Implications for future research are discussed with a focus on how social media usage can contribute to daily well-being for adults of different ages.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Argenyi ◽  
Poorna Kushalnagar

BACKGROUND About 46% of US adults obtain recommended HIV screening at least once during their lifetime. There is little knowledge of screening rates among deaf and hard-of-hearing adults who primarily use American Sign Language (ASL), or of social media as a potentially efficacious route for HIV prevention outreach, despite lower HIV/AIDS-specific health literacy and potentially higher HIV seropositivity rates than hearing peers. OBJECTIVE We investigated both the likelihood of HIV screening uptake among deaf adults in the past year and over one year ago, and the relationship between social media use and HIV screening uptake among deaf adult ASL users. METHODS The Health Information National Trends Survey in ASL was administered to 1340 deaf US adults between 2015-2018. Modified Poisson with robust standard errors was used to assess the relationship between social media usage as a predictor and HIV screening as an outcome (screened more than one year ago, screened within the past year, and never been screened), after adjusting for sociodemographics and sexually transmitted disease (STD) covariates. RESULTS The estimated lifetime prevalence of HIV screening uptake among our sample was 54% (719/1340), with 32% (429/1340) in the past year. Being of younger age, male gender, black, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer, or having some college education or a prior STD were associated with HIV screening uptake. Adjusting for correlates, social media use was significantly associated with HIV screening in the past year, compared to either lifetime or never. CONCLUSIONS Screening falls well short of universal screening targets, with gaps among heterosexual, female, Caucasian, or older deaf adults. HIV screening outreach may not be effective because of technological or linguistic inaccessibility, rendering ASL users an underrecognized minority group. However, social media is still a powerful tool, particularly among younger deaf adults at risk for HIV.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511879772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Barnidge

The perception of political disagreement is more prevalent on social media than it is in face-to-face communication, and it may be associated with negative affect toward others. This research investigates the relationship between interpersonal evaluations (i.e., perceived similarity, liking, and closeness) and perceived political disagreement in social media versus face-to-face settings. Relying on a representative survey of adult internet users in the United States ( N = 489), the study first examines the differences between social media and face-to-face settings in terms of interpersonal evaluations and relates them to parallel differences in perceived disagreement. Results are discussed in light of important, ongoing scholarly conversations about political disagreement, tolerance toward the other side in politics, and the “affective turn” in public communication about politics.


Author(s):  
Judith Owens ◽  
Monica Ordway

This chapter focuses on the developmental issues that impact sleep during infancy and childhood and link to adult sleep. For example, it examines differences in sleep across childhood as well as the relationship of pediatric and adult sleep health and specific issues such as mother–child bedsharing. The chapter discusses the social determinants of sleep for children—for example, increasing screen time and social media involvement, impact of bedtime routines, the mismatch of school hours to the biology of sleep in teenagers (e.g., highlighting that a reason that high schools start at 8 AM in the United States is so that parents can drop them off before they take off on their long commutes to work).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sagit Bar-Gill ◽  
Yael Inbar ◽  
Shachar Reichman

The digitization of news markets has created a key role for online referring channels. This research combines field and laboratory experiments and analysis of large-scale clickstream data to study the effects of social versus nonsocial referral sources on news consumption in a referred news website visit. We theorize that referrer-specific browsing modes and referrer-induced news consumption thresholds interact to impact news consumption in referred visits to an online newspaper and that news sharing motivations invoked by the referral source impact sharing behavior in these referred visits. We find that social media referrals promote directed news consumption—visits with fewer articles, shorter durations, yet higher reading completion rates—compared with nonsocial referrals. Furthermore, social referrals invoke weaker informational sharing motivations relative to nonsocial referrals, thus leading to a lower news sharing propensity relative to nonsocial referrals. The results highlight how news consumption changes when an increasing amount of traffic is referred by social media, provide insights applicable to news outlets’ strategies, and speak to ongoing debates regarding biases arising from social media’s growing importance as an avenue for news consumption. This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-250
Author(s):  
David Weakliem

AbstractTocqueville said that Americans combined a general belief in God with a lack of interest in denominational differences. Although this outlook may be particularly prevalent in the United States, it is also visible in other Western societies, although combined with lower levels of religious belief. This paper investigates the possibility of a relationship between a belief that there is truth in many religions and modernization, using data from the Gallup International Millenium Survey. The belief that there is truth in many religions is more prevalent in more affluent nations. Moreover, this belief does not seem to be merely an intermediate stage in a move away from religion. The relationship is about equally strong among people of all religious backgrounds. The tendency for modernization to lead to “religious concord” may help to explain the relationship between modernization and democracy noticed by Lipset.


2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAMKEE G. CHOI ◽  
RITA JING-ANN CHOU

ABSTRACTUsing data from the first and second waves of the Survey of Midlife Development in the United States – MIDUS1 1995–1996 and MIDUS2 2004–2006, this paper examines the relationship between the extent of time and money volunteering among people aged 55 or more years at baseline and those of the same age nine years later. Following an analysis of the changes and stability in volunteering status, the paper examines the relationships between change or stability in volunteering and various socio-demographic attributes of the respondents and measures of their human capital, cultural capital and social capital. A majority of older volunteers of time and/or money were repeat volunteers, and the extent of volunteering at the start of the studied period was one of the most significant predictors of the extent of volunteering nine years later. The level of education was a consistent predictor of the extent of both time and money volunteering and of new engagement and stability in volunteering. Social network size, or social connectedness, represented by the number of various meetings attended, was a significant predictor not only of the hours of time volunteering, but also of new engagement and stability in both time and money volunteering. A high degree of religious identification also appeared to be a motivation for money volunteering and to affect the value of donations. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for the recruitment and retention of volunteers.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ran Xu ◽  
David Cavallo

BACKGROUND Obesity is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors including hypertension and type II diabetes. Although numerous weight-loss interventions have demonstrated efficacy, there is considerably less evidence about the theoretical mechanisms through which they work. Delivering lifestyle behavior change interventions via social media provides unique opportunities for understanding mechanisms of intervention effects. Server data collected directly from online platforms can provide detailed, real-time behavioral information over the course of intervention programs that can be used to understand how interventions work. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to demonstrate how social network analysis can facilitate our understanding of the mechanisms underlying a social-media based weight loss intervention. METHODS This study performed secondary analysis using data from a pilot study that delivered a dietary and physical activity intervention to a group of low-SES participants via Facebook. We mapped out participants’ interaction networks over the 12-week intervention period, and linked participants’ network characteristics (e.g. in-degree, out-degree and network constraint) to participants’ changes in theoretical mediators (i.e. dietary knowledge, perceived social support, self-efficacy) and weight loss using regression analysis. This study also performed mediation analyses to explore how the effects of social network measures on weight loss could be mediated by the aforementioned theoretical mediators. RESULTS 47 participants from two waves completed the study and were included in the analysis. We found that participants creating posts, comments and reactions predicted weight-loss (β=-.94, P=.042); receiving comments positively predicted changes in self-efficacy (β=7.81, P=.009); the degree to which one’s network neighbors are tightly connected with each other weakly predicted changes in perceived social support (β=7.70, P=.08). In addition, change in self-efficacy mediated the relationship between receiving comments and weight-loss (Indirect effect=-.89, P=.017). CONCLUSIONS Our analyses using data from this pilot study have linked participants’ network characteristics with changes in several important study outcomes of interest, such as self-efficacy, social support and weight. Our results point to the potential of using social network analysis to understand the social processes and mechanisms through which online behavioral interventions affects participants’ psychological and behavioral outcomes. Future studies are warranted to validate our results and further explore the relationship between network dynamics and study outcomes in similar and larger trials.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S591-S591
Author(s):  
Grace A Noppert

Abstract There is compelling evidence to suggest that educational disparities in health differ by both race and gender. This study examines the relationship between respondents’ education and six health outcomes related to cardiometabolic and inflammatory outcomes using data from Wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (ages 24-32 years; N = 13,458). We used logistic regression models to examine the relationship between education and the odds of each health outcome. Models were stratified by race and gender. We found that the association between education and each health outcome differed by race/ethnicity and gender. While among whites we observed an association between education and each health outcome, for blacks we observed no such associations. It may be that the benefits of education are particularly salient for those in more structurally advantaged positions, pointing to the continued need to address structural inequalities by both gender and race.


Teknokultura ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
George Julian Hendrix

In the United States, “populist” is a controversial and often misunderstood signifier in common discourse. In addition, the current state of mass media and introduction of social networking tools has created a hyper-partisan spectacle of politics – especially during presidential campaign seasons. Through the review of literature on populism, traditional and social media, and presidential campaigning in the United States, this article constructs a new view on the relationship between these three topics in the 21st century. Important steps in this article’s process include defining populism and its place within campaigning and media; presenting social media as a political tool and a dynamic personalized informer; and analyzing the US presidential elections since 2008.  Resultantly, because the trends of online activity, on the part of both the citizen and the candidate, impact social media users’ self-informing and political engagement, the process of selecting a new US president has become more susceptible to various populist practices in this century than before.  


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