Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 118
The average hides who moved
Media effects vary with personal development and social context through different cognitive emotional and physiological responses
Premise
An average campaign effect can conceal people who respond strongly, weakly, in opposite directions, or not at all. Reporting only the mean may therefore hide the groups helped, unaffected, or harmed by the same exposure. Patti Valkenburg and Jochen Peter’s Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model makes that heterogeneity the object of analysis.
The model asks for whom, under what conditions, through which response processes, and with what later consequences media use matters. It does not identify one permanently vulnerable audience. Susceptibility depends on the content, outcome, developmental moment, social environment, and response being studied. For executives, the implication is to connect segmentation and evaluation to a plausible mechanism rather than to convenient demographic categories.
What the model is: Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainMedia, Publics & Society
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.