النظرية الإعلامية في ضوء النظرية الإحصائية : دراسة تطبيقية على نظرية ترتيب الأولويات

Abstract EN

It is not complicated to form a conceptual theory, but it cannot be testable unless it is converted to a statistical theory.

It is assumed that mass communication theory was/is unable to meet the requirements of the statistical theory because the nature of mass communication process prevents it to move from conceptual to statistical theory.

Sender, message, medium, and receiver are the components of mass communication process and they need to belong to one set.

In another word, in order to test the relations between these components simultaneously, they have to be primitive parts in one set in order to process their data mathematically and statistically.

Also, observations of these components have to belong to one unit of analysis and theirobservations should not be independent.

Another criteria of testing a theory is statistical independence which assumes observations independence.

Its formal definition is: if two events (Α1) and (Α2) arestatistically independent, the probability of their intersection is:p(A 1∩A2)=p(A1) p(A2).

These criteria have been applied to Agenda-Setting Theory as it is the most popular theory among mass media researchers and it has been tested using full components of mass communication process: Sender, observations.

They collect individual data and process it as aggregate data and change the unit of analysis from individual audience and individual media content to aggregate data of issues.

Agenda setting data were collected from a sample of media content and people but the issue as a new unit of analysis was tested and then the results were generalized to the universe of individuals and media.

The results revealed clearly that collected data encountered interesting and subtle violation of statistical independence by changing unit of analysis.

Ranking issues based on total number of individuals or total number of media space or time makes the ranks of issues depend on the quantity and then the rank of their counter issues which made observation dependent.

Finally, the study has concluded that mass communication theory is still conceptual and far from being a statistical theory