continued: "The World in the Screen: The Impact of Character Representativeness, Society Variability, and Presentation on Audiences' Conceptualization of Cross-cultural Media Images" by Alice Hall
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References
Appendix / Tables

Results
I predicted that the perceived representativeness of the characters would influence the degree to which the characters' attributes were applied to the audience's understandings of the film society. The more representative a character is seen to be, the more likely the audience should be to construct their perceptions of the film society using the film characters as a model. Perceived character representativeness should be associated with perceptions of the film society that concord with perceptions of the characters. I also predicted that the participants who read the film summary that emphasized the films' nationality will see the portrayed society as more homogeneous and the film characters as more representative than those who read the control version. Furthermore, I predicted that the perceived variability of the society would be negatively associated with the degree to which the traits of the characters are applied to their real-world understandings of the portrayed society. Since the priming manipulation has the potential to affect measures of character representation in ways that may affect the investigation of other hypotheses, I report these results first. Then, I discuss the impact of character representativeness on the audiences' application of the character's attributes to perceptions of the characters' real-world societies.

Priming Effects
I predicted that the participants who read the priming summary would describe the film society as less variable than would those who read the control summary. Furthermore, participants who read the priming summary should see the characters as more representative than those who read the control summary.

Manipulation check. Analysis of the manipulation check in regards to the US film indicates that those who read the control summary felt they were aware of where the film was made later than those in the control condition, t(57)= -2.44, p=.02. The manipulation was successful, if not strong.

The manipulation check in relation to the Taiwanese film indicates that there is no significant difference between the primed and non-primed viewers in terms of when they found out where the film was made, t(56)=-.63, p=.53. This suggests that the summaries presented before the film clip may have been unsuccessful in activating the category structure of society membership among the participants. This result implies that the manipulation may not affect the participants' perceptions and suggests that any lack of results may be due to a failure of the manipulation.

I compared participants' evaluations of the relevance and accuracy of the priming and control summaries. There were no differences in the evaluations of the accuracy or relevance of the priming and control summaries in regard to either film. In both cases, the control and priming summaries are viewed as equally accurate and relevant.

Manipulation effects. I predicted that those in the primed condition would have greater homogeneity ratings of the films' societies than those in the control condition. Among those who evaluated the US, the overall mean of the range measure is 12.56(SD=1.54) on a scale that ranges from 0 to 15.2. The range is designed to capture the audiences' sense of the breadth of variation within the population on a set of attributes. The second measure of variability is the probability of differentiation, which represents the average probability across attributes that two randomly chosen group members will vary in terms of the attribute. The overall mean for this measure was .78(SD=.11) in relation to the US. Perceived variation is the average, across attributes, of the extent to which category members are perceived as widely dispersed about the mean of an attribute. It is basically the average of the variation of the scales constructed by the participants. The overall mean of the perceived variation measure is 2.37(SD=.49).

Although the directions of the difference in the means between the control and priming groups is in the predicted direction for all three measures of variability, the difference does not reach statistical significance for any of the measures, range, t(54)= -.22, p=.83; probability of differentiation, t(57)= -.46, p=.65; perceived variation, t(57)= -1.91, p=.06. The means within the primed and control groups for each of these measures are reported in Table 1.

I sought to determine if perceptions of the variability of the society are associated with perceptions of the representativeness of the characters. There were no direct priming effects on the perceived representativeness of either character, Beth, t(57)= -.333, p=.74; Nick, t(57)=.450, p=.65 or of the characters evaluated together, t(57)=.054, p=.96. Character representativeness is not significantly associated with perceptions of the variability of the host society.

In relation to the Taiwanese film, the overall mean the range index is 10.98(SD=2.36). The mean of the probability of differentiation measure is .774(SD= .132), and the mean of perceived variability is 2.14(SD= .59). However, the results of t-tests checking for priming effects of these measures are not significant. There were no significant differences in any of the three variability measures. The means of the two different groups on these measures are reported in Table 2. Although the difference in the range measure was in the predicted direction, measures of perceived variability and probability of differentiation were greater among the control group than the primed group. This is contrary to prediction.

The hypothesis that priming social category memberships would affect perceptions of the representativeness of the society is not supported, nor is the hypothesis that perceived variation would be associated with perceived representativeness.

Potential moderators. I sought to determine whether there were any other factors that might be moderating or masking the impact of the priming manipulation on perceptions of society variability. I tested for interaction effects between the priming manipulation and four types of control variables, 1) the participant's previous exposure to the films' cast, 2) their frequency of film viewing, 3) their reaction to the film and its characters, and 4) the demographics of the participant in relation to those of the characters.

Cast recognition and frequency of film viewing were found to be associated with perceptions of character representativeness in pretests, and so they are investigated as potential interactions here. Reactions to the film itself, such as comprehension and interest, could also have shaped the impact of the prime by influencing the audiences' degree of engagement with the film. Demographic factors are also considered because points of similarity other than society membership, including gender, age, race or ethnicity, could impact the audiences' responses to the characters. Similarity between the character and the participant in terms of these factors could impact components of interpretation such as attention and identification that may shape representativeness perceptions. The prime, therefore, may affect those who have some other connection to the characters differently than those that do not. Furthermore, if the characters are evaluated in terms of these category memberships, it could obscure any effects of the salience manipulation.

These factors were investigated through ANOVA analyses predicting the perceived representativeness of the characters that incorporated interaction terms along with the main effect variables. The representativeness of neither character in either film is predicted by the interaction of the prime and participants' interest in the film, their subjective sense of understanding of the film, their perception of the film's genre, or their sense of identification with the characters. There are no significant interaction effects between the priming manipulation and the age, race or gender of the participant, their frequency of general movie watching or the frequency of watching foreign movies or perceptions of the strength or goodness of the characters. continued

Next page: Impacts of Representativeness on Real-world Perceptions

References
Appendix / Tables