Explores a view of audience behavior that lies between the extremes of a passive audience expected to be influenced by communication messages and an active audience expected to make rational decisions about what media content to accept and reject. (RS)

This study investigated the standards children between 9 and 12 years of age use to evaluate the quality of four types of children's programs: news, educational, dramatic, and cartoons. The quality standards children considered most important were comprehensibility and aesthetic quality. Additional standards were entertainment, involvement,…

Discusses the challenges of designing a Chinese/English Web site in Taiwan for both Chinese- and English-speaking audiences, creating a single, consistent presentation. Explores how the Web-site development team reconciled different audience responses and tackled technological, cultural, and political issues. (SR)

Systematizes the fragmented approaches to framing in political communication and integrates them into a comprehensive model. Classifies previous approaches to framing research along two dimensions: media frames versus audience frames; and the way frames are operationalized (independent variable or dependent variable). Identifies four key processes…

Presents the results of a two-wave experiment designed to examine how journalistic news frames can facilitate the communication of advocacy frames (to undergraduate students) designed to influence audience perceptions of a political issue. Discusses the implications of these results for journalism, issue advocacy, and the study of issue framing.…

Evaluations of visitors' reactions to interpretation in Australian national parks found that guided activities provided more immediate responses to visitors' questions on Aboriginal culture than on-site signs; a well-designed interpretive mural mitigated people's disappointment at visiting wetlands when no birds were present; and ranger-guided…

Parody is a form of imitation with the added elements of comedic twists, turns, and exaggerations. To create a parody of something, one has to understand it before beginning to alter it for humorous effect. Parodies are used by teachers of writing, music, and art as a method of educating and evaluating students' understanding of the styles of the…

The author discusses techniques on how to establish rapport between the choir and young audiences. According to him, one of the choir's most important assets just might be something he calls access-ability. One of Webster's definitions of "access "is" permission, liberty, or ability to enter, approach, or communicate with." When it comes to…

A method of pedagogical art criticism can be used to examine meaning in one of today's most pervasive forms of visual imagery: the advertising image. It was necessary for the art critical method to accommodate the following components of advertising imagery: (1) history; (2) purpose in a capitalist society; (3) function in society; (4) effects on…

Teachers, researchers, and performers in the field of Performance Studies often find themselves defining what it is that they do. Boundaries are often hard to draw, however. Is the work they are doing "art?" The distinction is important to funding agencies, tenure committees, and university administration. One definition of art…

Public information campaigns serve a primary role in contemporary American society to promote more active citizen involvement. When the U.S. government seeks to influence its citizens, it can use mass media to help produce systematic social change, particularly visual communication derived from rhetoric. Rhetorical criticism includes…

Scholars in the field of communication theory and research have ignored and problematized the relationship between sign and meaning. This paper discusses the relationship in order to catalogue the different positions taken and to investigate the work that gets done from these positions. In the "brute sense data" or physicalist position, the…

Paivio's Dual Coding Theory has received widespread recognition for its connection between visual and aural channels of internal information processing. The use of only two channels, however, cannot satisfactorily explain the effects witnessed every day. This paper presents a study suggesting the presence a third, kinesthetic channel, currently…

The Health, Science, and the Environment section of this collection of conference presentations contains the following 10 papers: "Telling Stories about Superfund Sites" (Sharon Dunwoody and Robert J. Griffin); "Understanding Audience Reactions to AIDS Messages: An Adaptation of the Meaning-Based Model" (Sujatha Sosale);…

Two pioneering public radio stations--WOSU-AM, licensed to the Ohio State University in Columbus, and WHA-AM, licensed to the University of Wisconsin in Madison--conducted audience research as early as the 1920s. The challenge for early education broadcasters became to adapt the existing audience research paradigm to their purposes, or to develop…