Media Influence on Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence: A Study of 60 Developing Countries

• In Event: 485 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Gender Inequality and Development

Abstract

With the world population accessing mass media at an ever-increasing rate, the question of media influence has become exceptionally important. Though it is generally agreed that the media influences individual attitudes, the mechanisms by which it does so remain vague. Do individuals simply download and adopt the information personally accessed in the media, or must these scripts first reverberate through social interactions? The aim of this study is to investigate these questions by exploring the role of access to media on attitudes toward intimate partner violence (IPV). With data from over 1.6 million individuals across 60 low- and middle-income countries between 1999 and 2014, we propose to implement multilevel logit models to test competing theories of how the media has affected attitudes toward IPV. We will also test alternative explanations related to functional and modernization theories of ideational change, such as economic growth, international trade, foreign aid and direct investment, and women in leadership and the labor force. Our preliminary results corroborate previous research by suggesting that access to the media is a significant explanatory factor of attitudes toward IPV. Importantly however, we find that the national average of access to mass media is explanatory well above and beyond individual access. These findings support prior notions of how cultural scripts spread through social interaction and invite future studies of media influence to pay greater attention to the communities within which individuals are embedded.

Authors

• Taylor Whitten Brown, University of North Carolina - Chapel HIll

• Jeffrey Swindle, University of Michigan