Investigating the Cultivation Effects of Television Advertisements and Agricultural Knowledge Gaps on College Students’ Perceptions of Modern Dairy Husbandry Practices Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Annie Ruth Specht, B. Graduate Program in Agricultural & Extension Education The Ohio State University 2010 Thesis Committee: Emily B. Susie Whittington Copyrighted by Annie Ruth Specht 2010 Abstract The unrealistic images of American agricultural practices generated by commodity television advertising, coupled with a dearth of agricultural knowledge in modern society, may promote misunderstandings of modern agriculture based on cultivation and knowledge-gap theory. This study investigated the possible effects of the “Happy Cows Come from California” television campaign on college students’ perceptions of dairy husbandry practices, compared affective responses to those advertisements to fact-based video content, and correlated these responses with agricultural awareness and television consumption habits.
No significant relationship between perceptions of dairy farm practices, awareness, and TV consumption was found, but participants reported a more positive response to the informational videos. The researchers recommend a movement away from purely entertaining advertising content for agricultural products in favor of more realistic, fact-based promotions. ii Dedication This work is dedicated to a proud farm family. iii Acknowledgements The author would like to thank her advisor, Dr.
Emily Rhoades, and Dr. Susie Whittington for their wisdom and support. Thanks also go to the rest of her Buckeye family in the Department of Human & Community Resource Development. They have been an instrumental and invaluable part of the research process.
iv Vita May 2004 ……………………….………… Dover High School June 2008 ………………………………. Humanities, Magna Cum Laude, The Ohio State University September 2009 to present ………………… Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Human & Community Resource Development, The Ohio State University August 2010 ………………………………. Agriculture, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Agricultural & Extension Education, Agricultural Communication v Table of Contents Abstract. v List of Tables.
vii List of Figures. viii Chapter 1: Introduction. 1 Chapter 2: Review of the Literature. 60 Chapter 5: Conclusions and Recommendations.
96 Appendix A: Survey Instrument. 112 Appendix B: IRB Materials. 122 vi List of Tables Table 1. A categorization of advertising uses and gratifications.
Sample questionnaire items for uses and gratifications. Sample questionnaire items for advertising uses and gratifications. Percent of content viewed by platform. Uses of television viewership.
Uses of advertising viewership. Descriptive statistics for “Happy Cows”. Descriptive statistics for farm-tour videos. T-test for differences in scale results.
Correlations between awareness and “Happy Cows” characteristics. Correlations between awareness and farm-tour video characteristics. Correlations between hometown and farm-tour video characteristics. Correlations between TV viewership and “Happy Cows” characteristics.
Correlations between TV viewership and farm-tour video characteristics. Correlations between advertising uses and “Happy Cows” characteristics. 77 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Frequency of respondent hometown types.
Frequency of respondent academic programs by college. Respondent television viewing in hours per day. Respondent agricultural knowledge. Respondent agricultural awareness.
Respondent agricultural familiarity. Importance of agriculture to respondents. Frequency of respondent visits to farm or agricultural operation. Frequency of respondent work on farm or agricultural operation.
Frequency of respondent attendance at fair or agricultural event. Frequency of respondent interaction with agriculturalists. Respondents’ choice for most accurate portrayal of dairy practices. Respondents’ choice for portrayal of preferred dairy practices.
75 viii Chapter 1: Introduction In November 2008, California voters overwhelmingly passed the “Standards for Confining Farm Animals” initiative, or Proposition (“Prop”) 2, a piece of legislation that restricts the use of animal husbandry tools such as veal and sow gestation crates and battery cages for hens (Goll, 2008). Prop 2 was backed with financial and grassroots- membership support from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), an animal- welfare lobbying organization that had successfully instituted ballot initiatives in several other states (Birnbaum, 2007). Encouraged by HSUS’s media campaign, a majority of voters in California, which is the sixth-largest egg-producing state in the nation, passed the initiative despite warnings that “a potential ban on battery cages could be…disruptive to California's egg industry” (“HSUS lands,” 2008, p. Such a ban could cause egg prices to rise and thus increase outsourcing of poultry production to other states and countries such as Mexico, where food-quality standards are notoriously low (Schmit, 2008).
The tactics utilized by agricultural organizations and commodity groups to raise concerns about food security and rising prices were no match for the images of injured chickens packed four-deep into small cages and veal calves struggling against short tethers collected by the Humane Society of the United States and disseminated across television screens and on the World Wide Web. 1 These photographs and videos were all the more damaging to agriculture’s image because they violated long-held societal perceptions of the industry and how it functions (Fraser, 2001; Wachenheim & Rathge, 2000). The modern operation—with its reliance on science and technology—hardly resembles the pastoral ideal proliferated by a growing disconnect between agricultural producers and consumers (Holloway, 2004). This gulf between agriculture’s reality and America’s farm fantasy bears investigation: Who (or what) is responsible for the public’s expectations of agriculture and for propagating the “American agrarian ideal” (Fraser, 2001)? Cultivation Theory One possibility lies in an oft-cited theory (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994): cultivation.
Cultivation theory was introduced as opposition to the one-shot “hypodermic needle” or “magic bullet” theories of media effects that resulted from propaganda studies in the 1930s (Shanahan & Morgan, 1999). Its principle authors used the term “cultivation” to build on “the assumption that the major impacts of television materialize by means of the way it exposes people to the same images and metaphors over and over again” (Shanahan & Morgan, 1999, p. Heavy television viewers, cultivation theorists argue, will find that television replaces other sources of information, reinforcing the idea that the real world is similar to the world portrayed on television and thus influencing both attitudes and behavior (Shrum, Wyer, & O’Guinn, 1998; Gerbner, et al. Several characteristics of television contribute to its ability to cultivate certain world-views.
It is ubiquitous—most households boast at least one television set, and viewers watch 151 hours of television content every month, or more than five hours each day (Gandossy, 2009) —and its 2 effects are invisible. Television is capable of revealing to audiences unfamiliar images, accounts, and stories of life, and it is largely homogenous, with highly stylized and formulaic content. Perhaps most significant to this argument, television presents a reality that is discrepant from “objective reality” but not disparate enough to be dissonant. This blurring effect “is very significant because consumers may passively accept as real those television representations that are somewhat, or even significantly, skewed” (O’Guinn & Shrum, 1997, p.
The acceptance of this reality as truth could have major societal consequences. Gerbner and his colleagues suggest that heavy viewers of violent television “may begin to believe that the world is as mean and dangerous in real life as it appears on television,” a phenomenon called “mean world syndrome” (Murray, 1995, p. 9; Gerbner, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1993). Studies have shown that regular viewers of crime dramas tend to overstate the number of Americans employed in law enforcement, and television viewership may contribute heavily to identity formation and expectations of social norms, such as gender roles (Harris, 2004).
Research exploring cultivation’s influence on perceptions of agrarian reality, however, has been largely neglected. Television Advertising and Visual Imagery Only a small percentage of television programming is devoted to agriculture or related professions (Harris, 2004), which begs the question: With little opportunity for exposure to agricultural content, how can audiences form perceptions of the industry? The researchers posit that the answer may lie not in television programming, but in its advertisements. The effects of television advertising on issues like perceived violence, female body image, and product sales have been studied extensively since the early 1980s 3 (Moschis & Moore, 1982; Lodish, Abraham, Livelsberger, Lubetkin, Richardson, & Stevens, 1995; Botta, 1999). One may reasonably assume that, lacking other sources of agricultural knowledge, audiences will turn to the limited resources available, including televised commercial advertisements.
One aspect of television advertising that contributes to attitude formation is visual imagery. Many scholars theorize that visual communication in advertising impacts the way people perceive reality. While many agree that advertising images are often unrealistic, it must be noted that advertising “does not claim to picture reality as it is but reality as it should be” (Richins, 1991, p. While television represents homogeneity of thoughts, ideas, and information, advertising “is a force toward the homogenization of imagery” (Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, & Sasson, 1992).
Advertising imagery influences attitudinal and behavioral judgments because information processed with a combination of images and semantics comes to mind most readily when making judgments (Bone & Ellen, 1992). Bone and Ellen identified two aspects of media imagery that stimulate processing: focal character and plausibility. The impact of an advertisement’s focal character is theoretically greatest when the audience perceives some level of self-relation to that character, making the image more vivid and more likely to be processed and stored (Bone & Ellen, 1992). Plausibility refers to the extent to which the audience perceives the image’s context as realistic; the less dissonant the situation, the more evocative.
The anthropomorphism or humanization of animals, too, plays a part in advertising; as Lerner and Kalof (1999) note, “animals are of substantial symbolic importance in human society” (p. Anthropomorphized creatures exhibit human 4 behavior, such as wearing clothes; and humanized characters act like animals but possess human attributes like speech and cognitive thought (Lerner & Kalof, 1999). Aggarwal and McGill (2007) posit that anthropomorphism works most effectively through a system of schema congruity: Humanizing non-human figures is most effective when their characteristics fit neatly into the audience’s contextual schema, or frameworks of cognitive knowledge that represent information about topics, concepts, or particular stimuli, such as their attributes and the relations among those attributes (Aggarwal & McGill, 2007; Fiske & Linville, 1980). Schema come equipped with networks of associations that allow inferences to be made based on little substantive information, and many people have difficulty distinguishing between inferred and observed information in cases where schema are well-developed (Crockett, 1988).
Schema can be both facilitated and constrained by belief systems, which aid in processing, storing, and organizing information acquired from the social environment (Allen, Dawson, & Brown, 1989). Knowledge Gap Theory Another contributing factor is the growing information divide between farmers and consumers. According to Tichenor and his colleagues, so-called “knowledge gaps” are created when mass media information into a social system increases and segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status acquire information faster than those of lower socioeconomic status (Ettema, Brown, & Luepker, 1983; Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1970). While socioeconomic status is considered the primary variable in knowledge-gap-development studies, other factors, such as audience motivation, may contribute to the formation of informational divides among social groups (Ettema & Kline, 1977).
5 Knowledge gap theory is pertinent to the study of social perceptions of agriculture due to the dwindling farming population and increasing generational movement away from subsistence agriculture. In 2007, 993,881 American farm operators reported that farming was their primary source of employment, the second-lowest total in a thirty-year span (USDA, 2009a). The average age of farmers has been on a steady climb over that same time period, according to United States Department of Agriculture census data: In 1978, principal farm operators averaged 50.3 years of age; in 2007, that number had risen to 57. The statistics indicate that fewer young people are becoming actively involved in production agriculture, contributing to a lack of knowledge in the general population as well as a potential dearth of motivation to attend to agricultural information.