What you See Is What you Get? Investigating how Survey Context Shapes the Association between Media Consumption and Atti
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What you See Is What you Get? Investigating how Survey Context Shapes the Association between Media Consumption and Attitudes about Crime Colleen M. Ray 1 & Lisa A. Kort-Butler 1 Received: 31 May 2019 / Accepted: 23 September 2019/ # Southern Criminal Justice Association 2019
Abstract Research on the relationship between media consumption and perceptions of or feelings about crime often relies on survey data. This research, however, rarely if ever contextualizes the content of that media within the analyses. This study explored how media type, frequency of use, and content are related to measures of beliefs about crime. Using survey data from four different years, we tested the relationship between media consumption, perceptions of the crime rate, worry about crime, and anger about crime. We used regressions to investigate what types of media are associated with public opinions on crime, and to examine how these relationships differ across years. We then contextualized our findings by highlighting both local and national news stories about crime that occurred leading up to and during the time that each of these surveys was in the field. Results indicated that local news had the most consistent effect on the three outcomes across years, and other types of media were important when high-profile cases and political debates were in the news cycle. In order to tell a fuller story about the effects of media on beliefs about crime and justice, we argue that future research should consider mixed-methods approaches to place surveys into social context. Keywords Media . Crime . Survey research . Mixed methods . Worry . Anger . Public
opinion
* Colleen M. Ray [email protected] Lisa A. Kort-Butler [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
American Journal of Criminal Justice
Media consumption has been linked to fear of crime, perceptions of the justice system, and punitive attitudes (Dolliver, Kenney, Reid, & Prohaska, 2018). However, the evidence is inconsistent and the strength of this relationship varies across studies (Chadee & Ditton, 2005; Kleck & Jackson, 2017; Shi, Roche, & McKenna, 2019). Differences in samples, types of media under study, operationalization of dependent variables, and research design explain part of the inconsistency (e.g., Custers & Van Den Bulck, 2011; Ditton, Chadee, Farrall, Gilchrist, & Bannister, 2004; Grabe & Drew, 2007; Roche, Pickett, & Gertz, 2016). Such inconsistencies have led researchers to study how the effect of the media is filtered through or muted by other, more personal factors like audience characteristics (Simmons, 2017), social networks (Kort-Butler & Habecker, 2018), and personal experiences with crime (Weitzer & Kubrin, 2004). Studies that rely on survey data suffer from another potential flaw, seldom addressed by researchers: what is trending in the media when the survey is in the field may subtly influence results (Kaminski, Koons-Witt, Thompson, & Weiss, 2010; Pickett, 2019). For example, the large m
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