Use of Message Stimuli in Mass Communication Experiments: A Methodological Assessment and Discussion

Abstract

Using six major mass communication research journals, including Journalism Quarterly, this article examines current practices in mass communication research with respect to message experiment design, analysis, and inference, and provides a logically consistent framework for mass communication researchers to make experimental design and data analysis decisions. The proposed conceptual framework is outlined in the context of recent controversies about such experiments, including the challenge of when to treat message stimuli as random versus fixed effects.