Project
Towards a taxonomy of (in)susceptible media users: The different roles of adolescent peer communication in media effects.
Average effects sizes in studies on the influence of media in large, heterogeneous samples are rather small, suggesting some individuals may be more susceptible to media effects than others. Yet, scholars have difficulty identifying well-defined groups of individuals who are consistently more susceptible to media effects. This raises the question whether traditional moderation analyses, focusing on a priori-derived risk factors, are sufficiently adequate to capture the potential influence of media on individual outcomes. Therefore, relying on the notion of ‘resistance’ to media influences among insusceptible media users, I aim to distinguish between 1/ vulnerable media users, who are susceptible to the adverse effects of negative media content but not affected by positive content, 2/ susceptible users, who are impacted by both the adverse effects of negative and the beneficial effects of positive content, 3/ insusceptible users, who are unaffected by media, and 4/ adaptive media users, who are susceptible to the beneficial effects of a positive but not affected by a negative media environment - with the goal of developing a taxonomy of media users that vary in their level of media effects (in)susceptibility. In doing so, I do not attempt to categorize individuals a priori in (in)susceptibility groups. Rather, I focus on differing processes underlying media effects, in particular the role of peer communication in adolescents’ processing and interpretation of media.