Correlational linkage analysis (Frequently Applied Designs)

Open Access

Abstract

Correlational or second-order linkage analyses (Schulz, 2008) correlate content data points and survey data at the aggregate level. They are generally used to infer the impact of public opinion climate, the media context or media use on individual attitudes, cognitions and behaviors. Correlational linkage analyses make use of data collected at different points in time to be able to describe patterns of change and stability over time and to compensate for the reduced number of observations resulting from aggregating individual-level data. They often employ manual and automated content analysis, descriptive and inferential statistical analyses, and time series analysis. Field of application/theoretical foundation: Linkage analyses have extensively been used in the fields of political communication (Soroka, 2002), EU studies (Brosius et al., 2019a), and more recently, social media and social movements. Studies that employed second-order linkage analyses are related to theories of agenda setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), framing (Vliegenthart et al., 2008), or media bias and tone (Brosius et al., 2019b) (see chapter Content Analysis in Mixed Method approaches for a detailed account of applications and advantages of using linkage analyses). Example studies: In this data entry we describe two studies that regress survey data on media content data with additional weighs to better model news media effects. The first study (Boomgaarden & Vliegenthart, 2007) weigh media coverage of a particular topic (immigration) by issue prominence and circulation of the newspapers considered in the study. The second one (Vliegenthart et al., 2008) further introduces a publication recency moderator to account for how close in time a given news story was published from when survey data was collected and individuals may have been exposed to such piece of information. References Boomgaarden, H. G., & Vliegenthart, R. (2007). Explaining the rise of anti-immigrant parties: The role of news media content. Electoral Studies, 26(2), ...