A Comparative Analysis of the Social and Cognitive Conditions for Communication Behaviors.

Abstract

A major problem facing communication researchers has to do with identifying the social and cognitive conditions leading to communication behaviors. There have been few instances where researchers have had the opportunity to compare directly the variance in communication behaviors that can be explained by such social conditions as an individual's evaluation of the knowledge of referent others, against cognitive conditions such as an individual's own evaluation of the importance of a particular topic. A survey of adolescents in Flint, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio was conducted to determine adolescent communication behaviors with regard to topics like job opportunities, family planning, and drug and alcohol use. This study affords the opportunity to answer the question: Do social or cognitive conditions for communication consistently relate more strongly to communication behaviors, when these two sets of conditions are placed "in competition" with each other in terms of explaining variance in those communication behaviors? Three types of communication behaviors were studied: mass media message discrimination, information seeking, and interpersonal communication between an adolescent and both parents. The social conditions included measures of the number of individuals named by an adolescent as people who talked to the adolescent about a particular topic, and the adolescent's perception of the amount of knowledge about a topic held by peers and parents. The cognitive conditions included three measures of the adolescent's own knowledge about a topic, and the perceived personal importance of the topic to the adolescent. Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) was used to determine the relationship of each social and cognitive condition with a communication behavior, controlling for the impact of all other conditions entered into the analysis. The test for consistency of relationships between conditions and communication behaviors is based on this statistical analysis conducted over four topics for a particular communication behavior, and over the three communication behaviors mentioned above for the same topic. Measures for conditions and communication behaviors were operationalized in the same manner across topics. Findings suggest that social conditions, particularly the perception of the number of people in the social environment who are talking about a topic, consistently explain more variance in all types of communication behaviors across all topics. Cognitive conditions come into play mainly in relation to mass media message discrimination about potentially "sensitive" topics of discussion like drug use or family planning. There is, therefore, a strong rationale, based on these data, for the inclusion of "social context" measures in studies of communication behaviors to further test for the existence of this basic relationship across other populations (adults) and other topics.