Community structure theory: Difference between revisions

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Community structure theory provides a powerful framework for analyzing society’s influence on media coverage. It has been identified by Funk and McCombs as the “conceptual inverse” of agenda-setting<ref>{{cite (journal|last1=Funk|first1=M.J.|last2=McCombs|first2=M.|title=Strangers on a theoretical train: Inter-media agenda setting, community structure, and local news coverage|journal=Journalism Studies|date=2015)|page=1-21\}}</ref>, focusing on demographic characteristics of communities shaping news instead of news as a driver of public perception. For example, Community Structure Theory has found repeated links between indicators of vulnerability (such as unemployment levels, poverty levels, crime rate, etc.) and favorable coverage of critical US national issues such as immigration reform or universal health care (Pollock, 2007, 2013a, 2015). Further, in cross-national studies comparing national characteristics and reporting on human trafficking, HIV/AIDS treatment access, water handling/contamination, and child labor, media coverage varied significantly with levels of "female empowerment"— female literacy rate, female child life expectancy, and female school life expectancy (Pollock, 2015).

== Early Influences ==

The modern community structure model originated with the work of University of Chicago’s Robert Park, who in “The Immigrant Press and Its Control” (1922) first suggested society could influence media. Morris Janowitz (1952) later introduced the concept that press coverage could serve as an index of the social structure and values of distinct communities. Janowitz employed multiple methodologies for his research, including reader surveys, in-depth interviews with journalists, and content analysis of 82 different community newspapers in the Chicago area.

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With the introduction of digital tools for analyzing media texts, the community structure model was successfully expanded, tested, and used to study systematic news reports of critical events in communities across the nation and throughout the world by John Pollock, who began identifying this work as “Community Structure” research (Pollock, 2007; Pollock, 2013a; Pollock, 2013b; Pollock, 2015; Pollock, 2017).

== Contemporary Applications ==

Pollock (2007, 2013a, 2017) and coauthors made three key contributions to Community Structure Theory. First, they conducted among the first US nationwide and cross-national studies using the community structure model, comparing multiple large metropolitan areas and countries, expanding study sample sizes beyond a focus on one or two cities. Second, Pollock et al. also evolved the theory to include a Media Vector methodological tool for measuring both content direction and editorial prominence of articles, then combining them into a single score, thereby adding a way to consider editorial evaluation as well as article content. Third, Pollock and coauthor findings often challenged the traditional “guard dog” hypothesis by concluding that media can often reflect the interests of more vulnerable stakeholders (Pollock, 2007, 2014, 2015). Community structure studies are related to work focusing on the roles of social capital (in political science and sociology literatures) and social determinants of health (in health communication and public health literatures). In 2013, Pollock authored an authoritative annotated bibliography on Community Structure scholarship for Oxford Bibliographies Online.