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The effect of television on perceptions and views.
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The central research questions of this Ph.D. project (2003-2007) are: “How much are medicine and health represented on television?” and “What is the impact of these images on the perception of the viewers?”. More specifically this Ph.D. project studies the frequency and types of television programmes in which the images concerning medical roles illness and death are shown by using a quantitative content analysis. Using the results of this content analysis several cultivation variables are constructed based on images that are shown disproportionally on television. These cultivation variables are used in a longitudinal panel study on 2500 Flemish adolescents in order to investigate the impact of television viewing on the students’ perceptions on health and medicine. The results of the cultivation analysis that studies the impact show that watching television has a significant influence on the perceptions of the viewers. In a second part of the Ph.D. project new measures of exposure are constructed. These measures are based of the respondents’ specific individual exposure to images concerning medicine and health. The cultivation analyses using these specific measures show that they predict the perceptions better than the total television viewing volume. This conclusion is also a theoretical confirmation of the cultivation theory: the cultivation impact of television clearly correlates with the specific exposure to certain television images. In a final part the impact of watching television on two important attitudes concerning health and medicine (fear of illness and trust in medicine) is being studied. However the resulting models suggest that the exposure to specific images of medical roles and illness and death has no or just a slight impact on the respondents’ attitudes. Furthermore the data show that there is also no significant relation between the perceptions and the attitudes. The estimation of the number of ill people is not related to the respondents’ own fear of illness. Watching television has a clearly significant influence on the respondents’ perceptions but not on their attitudes.
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Project number:
3H050309
Duration of the project:
01.10.2003 - 01.10.2007
Funded research
Nederlands
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