Five Challenges for the Future of Media-Effects - Essay Example

Through the research of Peter and Valkenburg, it is vivid that the effect of media on individuals is evident. But at this point, they both have managed to show that these effects show a slight or major difference when compared to other disciplines.“Five Challenges for the Future of Media-Effects Research” shows that the changes in cognition, emotional and behavioral attitude of individuals attributable to the media effects are different from other social and behavioral sciences.

They have presented a number of figures and statistics that point out this difference. They have gathered the results of different experiments performed by different experts to show the deviations. These surveys of different experiments helped them to construct their argument that will further be strengthened by the drawbacks and solutions. They completely agree with the fact that the media effects are inevitable and they affect every individual. But the impact of this effect depends on age, gender and taste that is often overlooked while experimenting or collecting data.

The authors then present five major challenges that need not be overlooked while carrying out an experiment that determines the effect of a certain act on individuals. They travel from micro level to macro keeping in mind the minute details that shall not be overlooked. The first challenge is the Improvement of Media Exposure Measures that includes the risk of self-reported data in which an individual might feel uncomfortable while revealing intimate information due to public pressure so this will give an opinion shaped by social pressure, not by the personal opinion which will affect the results.

To avoid this we should divide the genres and then ask the willing and able candidates to provide information. This will help in collecting pure opinions. The second challenge is More Attention to Conditional Media Effects.