An Empirical Study on How the Fragmentation of the Media Environment Influences the Way People Hold Political Knowledge

Research Project

Project/Area Number	23330167
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	Sociology
Research Institution	Meiji University
Principal Investigator	TAKESHITA Toshio 明治大学, 政治経済学部, 教授 (70143526)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	SAITO Shinichi 東京女子大学, 現代教養学部, 教授 (20297435) INABA Tetsuro 一橋大学, 社会学研究科, 教授 (10242083)
Project Period (FY)	2011-04-01 – 2014-03-31
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 2013)
Budget Amount *help	¥17,680,000 (Direct Cost: ¥13,600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥4,080,000) Fiscal Year 2013: ¥10,140,000 (Direct Cost: ¥7,800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥2,340,000) Fiscal Year 2012: ¥4,550,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,050,000) Fiscal Year 2011: ¥2,990,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,300,000、Indirect Cost: ¥690,000)
Keywords	政治知識 / マスメディア / インターネット / オピニオンリーダー / 知識ギャップ / 分極化 / 選挙報道 / 議題設定 / フレーミング / テレビニュース / 内容分析
Outline of Final Research Achievements	This study is to explore how the recent changes in the media environment influence the way people hold political knowledge. We hypothesized that some types of opinion leadership scale could replace traditional measures of mass media exposure as an indicator of active information-seeking behavior across various media. The opinion polls of Tokyo voters that we conducted in 2013 confirmed this idea: the higher the respondents' level of opinion leadership, the wider range of media sources (including online ones) they were likely to make use of to obtain political information. The opinion leadership scale was found to be positively correlated with a gain in political knowledge. We also found that those with higher level of opinion leadership were likely to be immune from the influence of traditional mass media.