Masters Thesis

Effects of different media forms and text structure on attitude change and comprehension of a social issue: structural inequality in the global economy

Research has separately shown the effect of different rhetorical text structures, and visual presence within multimedia, to increase learning outcomes. However, the interaction between these two factors has not been studied. Likewise, these two factors, rhetorical text structure and visual presence, have not been studied for their effect on attitudes nor reactions on media presentation. This study aimed to examine the interaction between rhetorical text structure and visual presence on recall, attitude change, and reactions towards a media presentation. Four media presentations were created with two identical rhetorical text structures, problem-solution and narration, for the commentary, and either with visuals present or visuals absent. The resulting media forms including narration documentary, problem-solution documentary, narration podcast, and problem-solution podcast were all about a social topic: “Structural Inequality in the Global Economy.” Participants, 137 recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, were presented one media presentation. Recall was measured through a free recall task. Attitude change was assessed using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Media reactions were measured on a 5-point Likert scale for affinity of the media and other would-be behavioral actions. It was predicted that the narrative text-structure in both media forms and visuals in the documentary would have greater influence on recall, attitude change, and media reactions. Results indicated that narration was better for recall, but largely there were no other effects in these interaction analyses. However, results did indicate that there was an attitude affect across all media forms. Results also indicated that in some media presentations, recall could be predicted by one or more of these variables: prior knowledge, social dominance, intent to search for more information related to the media presentation. Thus, some of these results have practical implications in the area of educational media.

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