Agenda-Setting Effects in the Digital Age
- Refining "Need for Orientation" with "Effort Required to Attend to the
Message"


by

Chan Yun Yoo[1]

Doctoral Candidate
Department of Advertising
College of Communication
The University of Texas at Austin
[log in to unmask]


and


Gunho Lee

Doctoral Student
School of Journalism
College of Communication
The University of Texas at Austin
[log in to unmask]


The paper is submitted to the 2003 AEJMC Convention (Communication Theory
and Methodology Division) in Kansas City, MO

Key Word: Agenda-Setting, Need for Orientation
 Agenda-Setting Effects in the Digital Age
- Refining "Need for Orientation" with "Effort Required to Attend to the
Message"

ABSTRACT

This study attempted (1) to examine the agenda-setting function in the new
media environment, (2) to redefine the concept of need for orientation, and
(3) to empirically investigate the effects of need for orientation in the
agenda-setting process. By conducting an experimental study, the authors
revealed that all three new sub-dimensions of need for orientation –
personal involvement, knowledge, and effort required to attend to the
message –played a significant role in the agenda-setting process, and
especially, individual's effort required to attend to the message moderated
the agenda-setting effects.
 INTRODUCTION
        Three decades have passed since the agenda-setting hypothesis was formally
launched by McCombs and Shaw's seminal Chapel Hill study (1972). Since
then, scholars have produced more than 300 researches regarding the core
argument of the hypothesis, the transfer of issue salience among the three
main components – the public, the media and the policy makers (McCombs et
al., 2000). For those years, explaining the phenomena of issue salience
transfer and its contingent conditions for the argument successfully, the
hypothesis is believed to become a concrete theory (Lang and Lang, 1983;
Perloff, 1998; Graber 2000). Its theoretical framework has grown not only
in the original field of journalism and communications but also in other
intellectual disciplines such as sociology, politics, economics and so on
(Dearing and Rogers, 1992; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996; Blood and Phillip,
1997; Roberts, 1997; Shapiro, 1999; Sunstein 2001). And now with the
emergence of the Internet, the theory opens a new era of its application to
the new media environment along with other communication theories (Pavlik,
1994; Sikes, 1994; Aikat, 2000; Sampedro, 2000; Garrison, 2001; Pavlik,
2001; Reisch, 2001).
        Inside this theoretical development lies a very important assumption –
need for orientation, the psychological explanation of agenda-setting
theory, which has been playing a sole interpretative role to elucidate why
the media can set the audience's agenda (Weaver, 1977; Wanta, 1997;
Poindexter et al., forthcoming). The need for orientation, however, has
been received as a given without further explication after its initial
conceptualization, while dramatic changes of communication technologies and
environment took places. In other words, it has been treated as "innate"
and "unchallenged" for thirty years.
In order to fill this void of further research, this paper explores whether
the conventional concept of need for orientation can still work as a
psychological condition for explaining the agenda-setting function in this
digital era. Furthermore, by incorporating with the aspects of consumer
behavior research, this paper tries to refine the "need for orientation"
concept. At the same time, the paper tries to bring "the effort required to
attend to the message" back to its definition for better comprehension of
the agenda-setting effects in this new era.

LITERATURE REVIEW
        Agenda-Setting Effects in the Digital Age
        For the thirty years after McCombs and Shaw's seminal work (1972), the
basic tenet of agenda-setting literature has focused on examining the
transfer of salience from the media to the public. Agenda-setting theory
posits that media coverage of issues (i.e., first-level agenda-setting) or
attributes of issues (i.e., second-level agenda-setting) correspond with
public concern for those same issues or attributes. This concept was
further expanded to the inter-media agenda-setting, which suggests that one
medium can set agenda for other media (Whitney and Becker, 1982). It also
complies with other communications theories like framing (Ghanem, 1997),
priming (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Kim et al. 2002), and so on.
Originally, McCombs and Shaw (1972) explored the agenda-setting function in
newspapers, news magazines, and television news. And most of traditional
agenda-setting researches mainly focused on the effects of the traditional
media on public (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Wanta, 1997; Winter and Eyal,
1981; McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, and Llamas, 2000). However, few studies have
examined the agenda-setting function in the new media environment, where
tens of thousands of media are flooded as of today.
According to Web sites linking online news media, more than 4,000
newspapers are online in U.S. alone (NewsLink at
http://newslink.org/news.html), and more than 10,000 newspaper are listed
and linked in onlinenewspaper.com's Web page
(http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/). The public's interest in reading and
watching online media increases, too. Recently, Nielson//NetRatings
reported that around 40 million people visited 15 most popular news Web
sites including CNN.com, Yahoo! News, and NYTimes.com during a week, and
the Web news site visitors were increased up to 58 percent following week,
when the U.S. war with Iraq broke out. These numbers seem to indicate that
the new media should not be left as unvisited place by the scholars of
media effects studies like agenda-setting theory.
Based on such status quo in the media environment, it is necessary to
examine whether the agenda-setting theory is applicable to the digital age.
In order to investigate this issue, we suggested the following hypothesis
for a general agenda-setting theory – issue salience transfer from media to
the public.

H1: Issue salience in online newspapers will be transferred to audience's
issue salience.

Since it is not certain whether agenda-setting still works as a major media
effects theory in this digital era, and it is the grand theorem in which
the need for orientation that this study will mainly explore is rooted,
examining the agenda-setting effect is of great concern to further develop
theoretical discussion. Because this study is one of the first trials to
re-conceptualize the need for orientation, testing the salience transfer of
"issue," the first-level of agenda-setting function, was primarily
investigated as a necessary condition.


Contingent Conditions and Need for Orientation of Agenda-Setting Theory
There are good number of studies that have examined contingent conditions
of agenda-setting effects, which especially focus on the relationship
between the media and public agenda. Hill (1985) and Wanta (1997) showed
the influence of demographic variables on the agenda-setting function. The
role of interpersonal communication is a condition for the agenda-setting
theory in Wanta and Wu's study (1992) as well as Atwaters et al.'s work
(1985). Zucker (1978) and Demers et al. (1989) examined the degree of
obtrusiveness of issues as another contingent condition for agenda-setting.
Similarly, abstractness and concreteness of the issues also matters for
better comprehension of the agenda-setting (Yagade and Dozier, 1990). Time
needed for the agenda-setting is considered as an important factor, too
(Winter and Eyal, 1980). Evatt found the emotion-evoking content in the
news stories played a meaningful role in establishing audience agenda
salience (1997), and Iyengar and Kinder pointed out the television news
stories' affective function for arousing viewers' issue salience (1987).
Besides those various kinds of contingent conditions for agenda-setting
theory, the need for orientation provides a psychological explanation for
why people engage in information-seeking (Weaver 1977). The concept of need
for orientation assumes that each person feels some needs to be familiar
with his/her mental or physical surroundings. The idea of need for
orientation is originally derived from cognitive utilitarian theories of
motivation (Weaver 1980), which are suggested to be appropriate for
explaining political information seeking and cognitive effects because
these theories emphasize the role of information in problem solving. These
assumption and conceptualization indicate that need for orientation is an
individual-level construct rather than aggregate-level.
Individual's need for orientation is conventionally defined by two
lower-order dimensions: (1) relevance of information and (2) degree of
uncertainty concerning the subject of the message (McCombs and Weaver,
1973). In McCombs and Weaver's typology, the low relevance (regardless of
degree of uncertainty) results in a low need for orientation, high
relevance and low uncertainty result in a moderate need for orientation,
and high relevance and high uncertainty result in a high need for
orientation (1973). This basic idea became the fundamental backdrop of the
agenda-setting studies. Most agenda-setting studies have implicitly
embraced this need for orientation concept, even though they did not
clearly identify this psychological explanation for supporting their
studies' results and conclusions. Figure 1 illustrates how need for
orientation consists of in the prior studies.

Figure 1. Dimensions of Need for Orientation


The recent development of technology, however, greatly alters the media
feature (Schudson 1995), and the direction of the change is predicted too
various ways. Some believe that such a variety leads audiences' ignorance
of information, scarcity of attention (Barber, 1998; Bimber, 2003). Along
with such changes in the media environment, whether the conventional need
for orientation concept can explain agenda-setting effects in the new media
environment, where audience can lose their attention or simply disregard
the information more easily than ever (Patterson, 2000), is the focal
research attention of this study. Since the conventional need for
orientation is rooted in an assumption of individual's universal exposure
to the media message, it is also dubious if we can understand the
agenda-setting effects in this complicated media environment without
considering individual's effort required to attend  to the media content
but only with "relevance" and "uncertainty." Without clarification on this
issue, it is highly unlikely that we can explore the agenda-setting issue
further in the new media era.
Furthermore, when it comes to operationalization of need for orientation
(high need for orientation, moderate need for orientation, low need for
orientation, and no need for orientation), prior studies (McCombs and
Weaver 1973; Poindexter et al. forthcoming) have employed the ordinal-scale
categorical variable for measuring relevance of information and degree of
uncertainty concerning the subject of the message. Methodologically,
ordinal scale variables have several weaknesses. Measurements with ordinal
scales are ordered in the sense that higher numbers represent higher
values. However, the intervals between the numbers are not necessarily
equal. Thus, values measured on an ordinal scale contain information about
their relationship to other values only in terms of whether they are
"greater than" or "less than" other values but not in terms of "how much
greater" or "how much smaller." This indicates that we are not able to know
how much greater need for orientation a high need for orientation group has
than a low need for orientation group. Thus, the drawbacks of employing
this ordinal scale measure prevent researchers from using complicated but
necessary statistical analysis methods.
The above discussion points that there is a great opportunity for
researcher to re-conceptualize and re-operationalize the concept of need
for orientation in the new media environment. Because need for orientation
is rooted in cognitive utilitarian theories of motivation and information
processing frameworks, researches done in this area from the consumer
perspective will be helpful to refine the concept. In the following
section, we try to develop and refine the concept of the need for
orientation by incorporating it with some of the important constructs in
the area of consumer behavior research.

Toward Refining the Concept of Need for Orientation
An attempt in this paper to refine the concept of need for orientation
suggests the following three components as new dimensions of need for
orientation: (1) personal involvement, (2) knowledge, and (3) effort
required to attend to the message. Each of sub-dimensions of need for
orientation is further discussed.
Personal Involvement
The cognitive theories of motivation suggest that there are at least seven
kinds of motivation (i.e., consistency, attribution, categorization,
objectification, autonomy, stimulation, and teleological) (Weaver 1977).
However, all kinds of the motivation cannot be included in conceptualizing
need for orientation, because some of them are irrelevant to the concept in
the framework of agenda-setting research, which focuses on the transfer of
salience. In consumer behavior research, motivation to process information
has been frequently conceptualized as personal involvement with the
informational stimuli (Cohen 1983; Zaichkowsky 1985). Adopting this point
of view, we are able to conceptualize motivation as involvement as well as
bridge the discussion to the need for orientation concept.
In the first-level agenda-setting research which focuses on the transfer of
issues salience, such issue transfer can be based on "personal involvement
with the issue," while in the second-level agenda-setting research which
concentrates on the transfer of attribute salience, it can be rooted in
"personal involvement with the attribute." In this way, we can also
encompass the previous conceptualization of need for orientation, because
perceived personal relevance is considered to be the essential
characteristic of involvement, and defined as felt involvement (Celsi and
Olson 1988). That is, an individual's level of involvement with an issue,
or attribute, is determined by the degree to which s/he perceives the
concept to be personally relevant.
Furthermore, in the context of agenda-setting research, McCombs (1999) have
investigated the personal involvement, and found the high degree of
consistency in personal involvement with the issue (i.e., economy) salience
transfer. The results further supported the possibility of including
personal involvement as one of sub-dimensions of need for orientation.
Based on the above discussion, "personal involvement" is employed as a new
conceptualization for "relevance" of the original need for orientation
concept in this study. Prior studies in need for orientation expect that
higher relevance of media information will generate higher need for
orientation, which in turn, produce greater agenda-setting effects (Weaver
1980). Thus, the following hypothesis is suggested:

H2a: Individuals with higher personal involvement with the issue will show
greater agenda-setting effects than those with lower personal involvement.

Knowledge
In the consumer behavior research, ability to process is largely a function
of the amount and type of knowledge that a person has acquired through
experience (Celsi and Olson, 1988). To the extent that relevant knowledge
can be retrieved from memory in a given situation, individuals have the
ability to process the information in their environments.
One of the key findings in consumer behavior research is that knowledgeable
consumers, or "experts," are better able to think deeply about information
than equally motivated but less knowledgeable consumers, or "novices" (Alba
and Hutchinson 1987). Furthermore, experts were able to process information
when it was stated in terms of its attributes, whereas novices could do so
only when the information was stated in terms of its benefit. Thus, more
knowledgeable individual have less uncertainty concerning the subject of
the message while less knowledgeable individual have greater uncertainty on
the same message.
Prior studies revealed that higher uncertainty leads to higher need for
orientation, which in turn, generates greater agenda-setting effects
(McCombs and Weaver 1973; Weaver 1980). Thus, we suggest the following
hypothesis.

H2b: Individuals with higher degree of knowledge will show smaller
agenda-setting effects than those with lower degree of knowledge.

Effort Required to Attend to the Message
Weaver's (1977) assumption on the universal availability of news media and
McCombs and Weaver's (1973) failure to incorporating the third factor
(i.e., the degree of "effort required to attend to the message") with
conceptualizing the need for orientation may produce some theoretical
drawbacks. McCombs and Weaver's assumption on the highly proliferated
political information could be the phenomena in 1970s, or, at least, the
era before the Internet. In the epoch of information abundance after the
emergence of the Internet, however, we cannot easily expect that the
political information is as much attractive as in 1970s. The information
abundance may distract the people's collective interest in any one subject,
because it creates the problem of scattered attention or attention scarcity
individually (Goldhaber, 1997; Dimaggio et al., 2001). The political
information cannot be the exception (Barber, 1998). Scholars now show
"concerns about fragmentation and the loss of the common public sphere"
(Bimber, 2003, p. 20) because of the information abundance. These arguments
imply that it is hard to take the "effort required to attend to the
message" as a given, when we talk about the need for orientation in the new
media environment. Furthermore, news media are not always available to
general public in some developing or underdeveloped countries. Thus,
disregarding the third factor, effort required to attend the message, in
the conceptualization of need for orientation may hamper the application of
the concept to a new media or a cross-national agenda-setting study.
Based on the above discussion, the following hypotheses for the roles of
effort required to attend to the message are suggested.

H2c: Effort required to attend the message will play a moderating role in
the agenda-setting effects.

H2d: Individuals with higher effort required to attend to the message will
show greater agenda-setting effects than those with lower effort required
to attend to the message.

We also assumed that if three sub-dimensions of need for orientation
affected the issue salience transfer, there would be some relations among
the three sub-dimensions. To explore such potential relations and to get
broader understanding about the agenda-setting effects of the media, we
suggested the following research question.
RQ: How does each sub-dimension of need for orientation relate to other
dimensions?

METHODS
Traditional agenda-setting researchers have generally ignored the critical
question of causality in their research methods by incorporating the
content analysis and survey. In those studies, it is taken for granted that
news coverage is the driving force of media effects and that agenda-setting
is a unidirectional process (Behr and Iyengar 1985). In order to explore
the casual relationship between media and public agenda, this study
employed an experimental design. The study featured a 2 (control vs.
economy) x 2 (high vs. low effort) factorial design with pre- and
post-experimental measures. The in-depth interviews with graduate students
of a major southwestern university preceded the experiment to choose the
proper issues to be used in the study. 'Economy' was selected as the main
issue for the study, based on the results of in-depth interviews and prior
literature.
Issue Selection Procedures.  Two principal considerations guided the
selection of the issue to be used in the study: The issue should 1)
demonstrate an appearance in the current media coverage and prior
agenda-setting literature, and 2) be appropriate for use as a stimulus for
a population of available subjects, college students. Ten graduate students
participated in the interviews and were asked five important problems or
issues facing this country today. Among various issues, the war with Iraq,
education, economy, crime, and drug were identified as important issues.
During the period we conducted the in-depth interviews, the war with Iraq
was too imminent and most students considered the war with Iraq as the most
important national problem. However, for the experimental purpose, the
issue of the war was avoided to remove the ceiling effect. The "economy"
was chosen as the target issue for the experiment, since it is 'not'
generally believed to lead strong media effect (Soroka, 2002; Jasperson et
al. 1998). That is, the media is not the main player to lead the public to
think such issues are important. Based on this argument, if the media
coverage on economy issue in our experiment led the subjects' issue
salience, it could be a strong evidence of agenda-setting effects. The
'education' issue was left out because the available subjects might
generally be alert highly on that issue, because of their status as
students. Neither crime nor drug was considered, because they are
"sensational issues," which directly relates to the media impact (Soroka,
2002; Ghanem, 1997). In short, the experiment used the least possible media
agenda-setting factor, by assuming that using such issue could give
stronger evidence for the effects than using other issues. However, for the
control and the hypothesis testing purpose, the three other issues – drug,
crime and education – were also used as the sub-issues of the experiment.
Stimulus Materials.  A critical feature of the experiment design was the
creation of realistic online newspapers. Two different online newspapers
(control vs. experiment) were prepared by a professional Web designer (see
Appendix). Each newspaper was designed to have one main story with a
picture and five other stories with an identical layout as well as the same
number and size of advertisements. We manipulated the online newspapers'
agenda by placing different news stories. By experimentally manipulating
the media agenda, we could decisively test the basic principle of the
agenda-setting theory that salient issues in the media would become salient
in the minds of the public. For the experimental condition, we put six
economic news - 'Northwest to lay off 4,900,' 'Nation's unemployment rate
climbs to highest mark since 9/11,' 'Deadline calls for budget cut
strategies,' 'One town, two worlds: Gap between rich, poor hits close to
home,' 'Global economy: Singapore,' and 'Local economy: Fraud charge to
former attorney general.' For the control condition, six different news
stories,– 'War's start sparks worldwide protest,' 'For military families,
first battle is pride vs. fear,' 'Accused hacker charged,' 'New charges
handed down in drug ring case,' 'Soul snatcher: Their child was abducted by
drug addiction,' and 'States cutting school funding' – were placed in the
newspaper Web site. All 12 stories were retrieved from online news search
engine 'Google news (http://news.google.com/)' for one week prior to the
experimental sessions. Each news story on the online newspapers was
clickable to find the full story.
Sampling and General Experimental Procedures.  The pre-experimental
questionnaire was administered one week before the experiment as a form of
online survey, and the post-experimental questionnaire was completed
immediately after the experiment. Originally, 67 male and female
undergraduates were recruited to participate in the study to earn an extra
credit. They received the invitation e-mail from the authors. By
clicking-through the URL link in the e-mail, they were led to the online
survey questionnaires which asked their issue importance on the four issues
– economy, drug, crime and education.
One week later, they were invited to take part in the experiment. Seven
students were not able to attend the experimental sessions, so 60 students
were left in our data pool. Subjects' ages ranged from 19 to 28, with a
mean age of 21.6. Subjects (24 male and 36 female) were randomly assigned
to each of the four – 2 (control vs. economy) x 2 (high vs. low effort) –
conditions, and they participated in the experiments held in two small
computer laboratories. The subjects were isolated from each other so that
they could complete the experiment independently.
Upon arriving at the laboratories, subjects were asked to read the
experiment instruction. It covered the computer monitor screen where one of
the stimulus newspaper Web sites (control or experimental) was on. The
instruction asked subjects to write down the times when they started and
finished experimental tasks. Two experiment instruction sheets were
prepared for the manipulation of an individual's "effort required to attend
to the message." For the high effort group, they were asked to read all six
news stories on the Web sites and summarize each article in one or two
paragraphs. On the contrary, those in the low effort group were asked to
evaluate the design of the newspaper Web sites in freestyle and write their
evaluation in five paragraphs. Once completing the experimental tasks,
subjects were asked to go to the survey questionnaire site by
clicking-through the link at the bottom of the newspaper Web sites. The
post-experimental questionnaire consisted of subjects' evaluation on the
stimulus Web site, their time spent on the site, their beliefs about the
importance of the four national issues, their personal involvement on and
knowledge about each issue. Finally, subjects answered questions germane to
demographic information, and then were thanked for their participation.

Measures
The study used previously-developed scales, modified when necessary, to
measure the variables of primary interest: issue importance, personal
involvement, knowledge, effort, and attitude toward the Website (i.e.,
evaluation of the design). In order to overcome the drawbacks of prior
operationalization of need for orientation – the ordinal-scale categorical
variable, this study employed the measures in continuous scales.
Dependent Measure. In order to test the agenda-setting hypothesis, we
measured subjects' beliefs about the importance of four national issues in
the pre- and post-experimental questionnaires. On both occasions, subject
judged the importance of each of four national problems, indicated their
media attention for each, the extent to which each was deserving of
additional government action, and the frequency with which they talked
about each in everyday conversation (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987) by using
7-point scales. The internal consistency reliability scores for these four
measures were satisfactory across all the issues (economy: a = .81, drug: a
= .80, education: a = .84, drug: a = .86), so they were summed together to
form an index score of the issue importance.
Personal involvement. We borrowed the involvement measures from the
Personal Involvement Inventory (Zaichkowski 1985). Specifically, it was
measured by a five-item, seven-point semantic differential scale. The items
were anchored by "of no concern to me/of concern to me," "irrelevant to
me/relevant tome," "matters to me/doesn't matter to me," "significant to
me/insignificant to me," and "essential to me/non-essential to me." The
scores of the five items were summed to obtain an index score of personal
involvement (a = .95).
Knowledge. The self-reported measures of knowledge included four different
measures of knowledge that have been used in the consumer behavior
literature: "How much do you know about the ______ issue?" (7-point scale
anchored by "I know nothing about it" and "I know a lot about it"; see
Moore and Lehmann 1980), "I am confident that I know enough about the
______ issue in this country." (7-point Likert scale anchored by "Strongly
Disagree" and "Strongly Agree"; see Mitchell and Dacin 1986), "How much are
you familiar with the ______ issue in this country?" (7-point scale
anchored by "Not familiar at all" and "Extremely familiar"; see Raju 1977)
and "How would you rate your knowledge about the ______ issue in this
country relative to the rest of the population?" (7-point scale anchored by
"One of Most Knowledge Person" and "One of Least Knowledgeable Person"; see
Johnson and Russo 1984). The scores of the four items were summed to obtain
an index score of individual knowledge on the issue (a = .87).
Effort. Cognitive effort was frequently measured by examining time spent
completing the task (Betteman, Johnson, and Payne 1990). For the study,
individual's effort required to attend the message was assessed by the time
spent on the newspaper Web site. Each subject was asked to write down a
total time he or she spent in completing the experimental task (i.e.,
surfing the Web sites) by minutes.
Attitude toward the Website. Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) viewed the attitude
as comprising solely an evaluative or affective response to the object.
Thus, for the study, to assess the evaluation of the newspaper Web site, we
used the concept of attitude toward the Web site, which was measured on a
four-item, seven-point semantic differential scale, which was borrowed from
the prior research studies (see Mackenzie, Lutz, and Belch 1986; Mackenzie
and Lutz 1989; Homer 1990).  The items were anchored by
"pleasant/unpleasant," "good/bad," "favorable/unfavorable," and
"likable/unlikable."  The scores of the four items were summed to generate
an index score of attitude toward the Website (a = .93).

RESULTS
Manipulation Checks
To assess the success of the manipulations, two ANOVAs were conducted with
the measures of attitude toward the newspaper Web site and time spent on
the site as dependent variables. No difference was found in subjects'
evaluation for the two newspaper Web sites, F (1, 58) = .01, p = .95. Thus,
the news stories (i.e., manipulation) in the stimulus Web sites mainly
contributed to subjects' changes on the issue importance in pre- to
post-exposure. Furthermore, those who summarized the article on the Web
newspaper (M=34.63, S.D = 10.83) spent more time surfing the Web site
(i.e., more effort) than did those who evaluated the Web newspaper design
(M=18.33, S.D. = 7.68), F (1, 58) = 45.26, p < .01. The results showed that
the manipulations of the newspaper Web sites and the level of an individual
effort appeared successful.

Hypotheses Testing
In order to test the hypotheses, a series of ANOVAs, two-way ANOVA and the
simple and multiple regression analysis were conducted with the
individual's score change on the issue importance in pre- to post-exposure
as the dependent variable.
H1: Agenda-Setting Effect.  The critical test of agenda-setting simply
entails observation of change in the perceived issue importance over the
experiment. As shown in Table 1, subjects in the experimental condition
where the newspaper Web site underscored the economy issues, became more
concerned about the issue of the economy (M = 1.90, S.D. = 2.59) than those
in the control condition (M = .70, S.D. = 2.26), F (1, 58) = 4.14, p < .05.
However, for three other issues, i.e., drug, education, and crime, no
significant differences were found between control and experimental groups
on the changes in subjects' issue importance. The results strongly support
the H1, i.e., agenda-setting effect, which indicates that the salience of
the economy issue on the newspaper Web site was transferred to the
subjects' salience of the economy issue.

Table 1. Changes in Issue Importance


Issue
Control
Experiment

d.f.

F
N = 30
N = 30
Mean (S.D.)
Mean (S.D.)
Economy
  .70 (2.26)
1.90 (2.59)
1
   4.14**
Drug
1.27 (3.69)
1.17 (3.07)
1
.91
Education
  .17 (1.72)
  .80 (2.94)
1
.31
Crime
-.38 (2.83)
-.20 (3.53)
1
.83
                 ** p < .05

H2a: Effects of Personal Involvement on Agenda-Setting Effect. Hypothesis
2a predicts that the level of personal involvement with the issue will be
positively related to the agenda-setting effect. For the hypothesis
testing, we divided the subjects in the experimental condition into two
groups (high vs. low personal involvement groups) using median split.
Consistent with the hypothesis, the result showed that subjects with higher
personal involvement with the economic issue (N = 14, M = 2.75, S.D. =
2.57) had greater changes on their issue importance after being exposed to
the economic issue-salient Web site than those with lower personal
involvement (N = 16, M = .93, S.D. = 2.34), F (1, 28) = 4.09, p < .05.
H2b: Effects of Knowledge on Agenda-Setting Effect. Hypothesis 2b expects
that less knowledgeable subjects on the issue will have greater
agenda-setting effects than those with higher knowledge. Using the median
split, subjects in the experimental condition were divided into two groups
(high vs. low knowledge group). Consistent with the hypothesis, the results
indicates the degree of individual's knowledge affects agenda-setting
effect, F (1, 28) = 3.36, p < .10. Specifically, less knowledgeable
subjects (N = 15, M = 2.74, S.D. = 2.40) had greater changes on the
economic issue importance after being exposed to the newspaper Website than
those with higher knowledge (N = 15, M = 1.07, S.D. = 2.58).

Table 2. Effects of Personal Involvement and Knowledge on Agenda-Setting Effect


High
Low

d.f.

F
Mean (S.D.)
Mean (S.D.)
Personal Involvement
2.75 (2.57)
  .93 (2.34)
1
   4.09**
Knowledge
1.07 (2.58)
2.74 (2.40)
1
3.36*
                * p < .10, ** p <.05



H2c: Moderating Role of Efforts Required to Attend to the Message on
Agenda-Setting Effect.  Hypothesis 2c predicts that the efforts required to
attend the message will moderate the effects of media issue salience on
public's issue salience. Two-way ANOVA was conducted with the changes of
economic issue importance in pre- to post-experiment. As shown in Table 3,
the results revealed that there is a significant interaction effect between
media issue salience and efforts required to attend to the message on
agenda-setting effects, F (1, 56) = 4.14, p < .05. Specifically, the media
issue salience had a significant agenda-setting effect only under
high-effort condition, F (1, 28) = 7.81, p < .01, but not under low-effort
condition, F (1, 28) < 1 (see Figure 2). The hypothesis 2c was strongly
supported.
Figure 2. Moderating Role of Efforts on Agenda-Setting Effects

H2d: Effects of Efforts Required to Attend to the Message on Agenda-Setting
Effect. Hypothesis 2d expects that subjects with higher effort will have
greater agenda-setting effect than those with lower effort. There was a
significant main effect of efforts on agenda-setting effects, F (1, 56) =
5.64, p < .05. Consistent with the hypothesis, the result showed that the
subjects with higher effort (N = 30, M = 2.00, S.D. = 2.61) had a
statistically significant score changes on the economy issue importance
than those with lower effort (N = 30, M = .60, S.D. = 2.17).
 Table 3. Agenda-Setting Effects by Media Issue Salience and Effort

Source
Sum of Squares
df
F-test
Significance
Media Issue Salience
21.60
1
4.14
.047
Effort
29.40
1
5.64
.021
Interaction
21.60
1
4.14
.047
Low-Effort
High-Effort
Mean (S.D.)
N
Mean (S.D.)
N
Control Group
.60 (2.16)
15
.80 (2.61)
15
Experimental Group
.60 (2.26)
15
3.20 (2.27)
15


In order to further explore the relative importance of each sub-dimension
of the need for orientation, we conducted the multiple regression analysis.
As shown in Table 5, the R2 for the regression model is .44 (p < .05), and
indicates that 44 % of the variation in the changes of the economic issue
importance in pre- to post-experiment (i.e., agenda-setting effect) can be
explained by three dimensions of the need for orientation. Two significant
variables (i.e., personal involvement and effort) and one marginally
significant variable (i.e., knowledge) were identified in the analysis. The
results show that the absolute value of the beta coefficient of personal
involvement (.533) is greater than two other variables, which indicates
that personal involvement has the greatest impact on the agenda-setting
effect, followed by efforts (.527) and knowledge (-.284).

Table 4. Need for Orientation and Agenda-Setting Effects

B
S.E
ί
t-value
Constant
-6.99
2.02
  -3.46**
Personal Involvement
  2.72
   .83
  .53
   3.29**
Knowledge
-1.45
   .75
-.28
-1.92*
Effort
   .09
   .03
  .53
   3.28**
R2 = .44, F (1, 28) = 6.78, p <.01
          * p < .10, ** p < .05

To explore the potential causal relationships between three sub-dimensions
of need for orientation, a series of simple regression analysis was
conducted. Since the level of personal involvement was appeared as the most
important predictor of agenda-setting effects, any causal relationship from
personal involvement to two other sub-dimensions were first examined.
Furthermore, whether there are any relationship between knowledge and the
effort required to attend to the message was also observed. As shown in
Table 5, some of the relations were statistically significant (personal
involvement _ knowledge; personal involvement _ effort). The results
provided a strong support on the original conceptualization of the need for
orientation (McCombs and Weaver 1977), in which relevance of information
(i.e., personal involvement) affect the uncertainty (i.e., knowledge) in
the agenda-setting process. Furthermore, the results indicated that
personal involvement directly affects individual's knowledge and the level
of effort to pay attention to the media message. However, we were not able
to identify any significant relations between individual knowledge and the
effort required to attend the message.

Table 5. Causal Relationships between Sub-Dimensions of Need for Orientation

Relationships
B
S.E.
ί
t-value
Personal Involvement _ Knowledge
.43
.12
.57
    3.62**
Personal Involvement _ Effort
- 1.22
.50
-.42
   -2.43**
Knowledge _ Effort
-.62
.71
-.16
-.87
Effort _ Knowledge
-.04
.05
-.16
-.88
         ** p < .05

DISCUSSION
This study attempted (1) to examine the agenda-setting function in the new
media environment, (2) to redefine the concept of need for orientation, and
(3) to empirically investigate the effects of need for orientation in the
agenda-setting process. The findings supported the fundamental principle of
agenda-setting theory in the digital era, which is that the online
newspaper's issue salience was transferred to subjects' issue salience.
Some of the conceptual drawbacks of the conventional 'need for orientation'
was refined by incorporating with the important constructs in other
academic disciplines as well as by bringing the original factor suggested
by Weaver (1977), i.e., the degree of effort required to attend to the
message, back to the conceptualization. Furthermore, methodologically, this
study measured all sub-dimensions of newly-defined need for orientation in
continuous scales, which allowed us to employ more sophisticated
statistical analyses. The results indicated that each sub-dimension of need
for orientation played a significant role in the agenda-setting process,
and especially, individual's effort required to attend to the message
moderated the agenda-setting effects. Among the sub-dimensions of need for
orientation, personal involvement significantly affected individual's
knowledge and his or her effort to attend to the media message.
The refined need for orientation, as a whole, explained a significant
proportion (44 percent) of the agenda-setting effects. However, still a lot
of variation was not explained by only the need for orientation concept.
Some of the contingent conditions such as demographic variables (Hill 1985;
Wanta 1997), the level of interpersonal communication (Wanta and Wu 1992),
and the nature of the issue (Zucker 1978; Yagade and Dozier 1990) may
explain the rest of the variation of the agenda-setting effects. Thus,
future research needs to examine the agenda-setting effects with need for
orientation and other contingent conditions together in order to better
understand the agenda-setting process.
Regarding "effort required to attend to the message," old but newly
refreshed as one of the sub-dimensions of the refined need for orientation
in this study, we can further develop this idea with other theoretical
frames in communication studies in digital age. Individual's personal
inclination to the media content, which can be directly related to the
efforts to pay attention to the media message, can have close connection to
other theoretical frames. For instance, regarding the active engagement in
information seeking, the "effort required to attend the message" can be
studied not only in the context of the need for orientation of
agenda-setting, but also in the context of uses and gratification, since
the latter also posits the people's active learning from the media content
by seeking for the meaning for themselves (Blumler and McQuail, 1969;
McQuail et al., 1972; Katz et al., 1973; Katz et al., 1974; Zillmann and
Bryant, 1985; Katz, 1996).
In particular, the information abundance in the digital age seems to
highlight the information seeking aspects of the uses and gratification
theory. By quoting Benschop about "particularities of the Internet,"
Angleman wrote "The times that count in Cyberspace are highly accelerated
and strongly individualized" (2001 Conclusion). She also mentioned that the
future of the Internet can be totally depend on the way of people's
reaction to and realization of their "own" needs in cyberspace. We
witnessed such possibility rooted in the flooding number of online media,
and arguments of prominent media scholars (Goldhaber, 1997;Barber, 1998;
Patterson, 2000; Dimaggio et al., 2001; Bimber, 2003). Additionally, seeing
that the discussion over the reason of information seeking in the digital
era between the agenda-setting theorists and uses and gratification
scholars is on the way (Newhagen and Rafaeli 1996), we hope such discussion
among various theoretical approaches help build the knowledge about the
psychological aspects of media effects in a constructive way.

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 APPENDIX

1. Control Group Newspaper Web Site


   [--- ???  Graphic Goes Here  ---]



   [--- ???  Graphic Goes Here  ---]






2. Experimental Group Newspaper Web Site


   [--- ???  Graphic Goes Here  ---]



   [--- ???  Graphic Goes Here  ---]






[1]  Department of Advertising, College of Communication, the University of
Texas at Austin, CMA 7.142, Austin, Texas 78712-1092.