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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

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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.

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Notes

  1. Data for 2014, 2015, and 2016 use the “next birthday” method to maintain a probability sample (Dillman, Smyth, & Christian, 2014). The 2011 NASIS, however, incorporated an experiment into their probability sample selection, and different groups were given instructions based on age or birthday indicating who should fill out the survey.

  2. Given Enns’s (2016) argument about the association between crime rates and crime reporting, a real-time assessment of crime statistics leading into and during the survey periods – mirroring our qualitative analysis – would have been a meaningful statistical control. However, the only readily available measures were year-end crime rates in the Uniform Crime Reports, which mute within-year patterns. Future researchers may seek crime rate data that better approximates within-year fluctuations (Chiricos et al., 2000).

  3. It was not our intention to perform a full content analysis of the nature of coverage. Rather, we were interested – post hoc – if trigger events occurred while surveys were in the field and what the events were. As we advocate in the discussion section, in the future, more robust studies should monitor the news in real time.

  4. Data are not available, or at least readily accessible at the current time, to determine what streaming shows or podcasts were popular in the state in a given time period.

  5. The item did not distinguish among source (e.g., social media, traditional news website, alternative news website) or type (e.g., news article, video, blog), and variation among respondents may blunt the effect (Roche et al., 2016). Future studies should consider gathering more detailed information about Internet news consumption.

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Acknowledgements

Partial support for this work provided by University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Arts & Sciences and the Department of Sociology. The authors thank Lyndsey Witt-Swanson and the staff at the UNL Bureau of Sociological Research for their assistance.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588, USA

    Colleen M. Ray & Lisa A. Kort-Butler

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  1. Colleen M. Ray
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  2. Lisa A. Kort-Butler
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Correspondence to Colleen M. Ray.

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Ray, C.M., Kort-Butler, L.A. What you See Is What you Get? Investigating how Survey Context Shapes the Association between Media Consumption and Attitudes about Crime. Am J Crim Just 45, 914–932 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-019-09502-7

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