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The Communication Effects Gap andthe Consequences of DiffusionMost past communication research, including most diffusion studies,attempted to determine what effects a particular source, channel, message, or combination of such elements has on an audience. Thisresearch on the first dimension of communication effects mainly pursuesthe question: "What are the effects of a communicationactivity?" Effects are indexed mainly as the average change in theknowledge, attitudes, or overt behavior of a set of individuals.The nature of research on the second dimension of communicationeffects is quite different. Here one asks: "Has the communicationactivity had a greater, or different, effect on certain individuals,rather than others?" Here the communication scholar seeks to ascertain the equality of effects of communication, not just how much effectoccurred on the average (or in the aggregate).About the time that diffusion researchers began to turn to this seconddimension, dealing with the equality issue, Tichenor et al (1970)proposed a useful research paradigm for studying gaps, implying thatdata should be gathered at two or more points in time, both beforeand after a communication activity. The measure of effects should benot just the average amount of behavior change in the audience (thefirst dimension), but whether gaps in socioeconomic status and/or inknowledge of information increased or decreased (this is the seconddimension of effects). In essence, Tichenor et al (1970) suggested thatwe should look at who in an audience was affected most, and wholeast. Figures 11-4a and 11-4b depict this research approach to investigatingthe equality dimension of communication effects, aresearch paradigm that was found to be useful by diffusion scholarsstudying the equality of consequences of innovation.One of the main implications of the communication effects gapparadigm, inspired by Tichenor et al (1970) and carried forward instudies by McNelly and Molina (1972), Katzman (1974), and Cook etal (1975), was to look within an audience to determine whether certainsegments were more affected than other segments by a communicationintervention. This analytic approach to looking also for differentialeffects, rather than just for average effects or aggregate effects onthe entire audience, took communication scholars in the direction offocusing upon equality issues in the effects of communication. Equalityof effects became the second dimension of communication effectsresearch (Figure 11-4b).Diffusion scholars thus began to analyze their data in order to investigatethe degree to which a diffusion program widened or narrowedgaps among the members of a social system. The categorizationof the total audience into two or more segments ("ups" and"downs") might be on the basis of socioeconomic status (for example,larger versus smaller farmers in a village), adopter category (forinstance, earlier adopters versus later adopters), or the level of informationpossessed (the information-rich versus the information-poor).Almost no matter how the "ups" and downs" were classified,* certainregularities about equality in the consequences of diffusion werefound.
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