Cultivation Theory - Three Parts of Research

Three Parts of Research

Gerbner created the cultivation theory as one part of a three part research strategy, called Cultural Indicators. The concept of a cultural "indicator" was developed by Gerbner in order to be a common concept of a social indicator.

Institutional Process Analysis

The first part of this strategy is known as the institutional process analysis. This investigates how the flow of media messages is produced and managed, how decisions are made, and how media organizations function. Ultimately, is asked: What are the processes, pressures, and constraints that influence and underline the production of mass media content? "The second part of this strategy is known as message system analysis, which has been used since 1967 to track the most stable and recurrent images in media content. This part of research deals with scholars’ concern for the reasons why media produce the messages they do. Scholars who do this type of research penetrate behind the scenes of media organizations in an effort to understand what policies or practices might be lurking there. Since violence is cheap to produce and speaks in a language that is universally understood, studios adopt policies that call for their shows to include lots of violent content." "

Message System Analysis

This is in terms of violence, race & ethnicity, gender, and occupation and the important fact that Gerbner conceived mass communication specifically to be the transporter of messages. It asked: What are the dominant patterns of images, messages, and facts, values and lessons, expressed in media messages? "Based on message system analyses, cultivation researchers develop hypotheses about what people would think about various aspects of ‘‘reality’’ if everything they knew about some issue or phenomenon were derived from television's dominant portrayals." " This message analysis was supposed to "‘investigates broad structures and consistent patterns in large bodies of those messages in the aggregate (as opposed to in any particular program or genre, and apart from issues of 'quality' or aesthetic value)". "For more than two decades, Gerbner's team of researchers randomly selected a week during the fall season and videotaped every prime-time (8 to 11 p.m.) network show. They also recorded programming for children on Saturday and Sunday (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) After counting up the incidents that fit their description, they gauged the overall level of violence with a formula that included the ratio of programs that scripted violence, the rate of violence in those programs, and the percentage of characters involved in physical harm and killing. They found that the annual index was both remarkably stable and alarmingly high." "

Gerbner analyzed a specific type of violence portrayed in media: dramatic violence. Dramatic violence is the expression of physical force that threatens pain or death against one’s will as part of the storyline. While this does not include verbal abuse, threats, or slap-stick comedy, it does include cartoon violence, such as Pokémon or the coyote and roadrunner.

Another facet of message system analysis Gerbner discovered was something Griffin called “equal violence, unequal risk.” The research Gerbner conducted showed that the amount of violence portrayed in media stayed consistent, but the distribution of that violence was never equal. The children and the elderly, for example, are more common recipients of violence than young or middle-aged adults. Gerbner often discovered trends in violence towards minority groups, such as African Americans and Hispanics being recipients of violence more often than Caucasians. Two other demographics that experience similar inequality are women and blue-collar workers. The ironic result of this tendency is that the demographics shown, inaccurately, to be more in danger of violence than the rest are the demographics that will walk away from the media more afraid of violence. "

Cultivation analysis

The final part of the research study is the cultivation analysis. "Cultivation deals with how TV's content might affect viewers—particularly the viewers who spend lots of time glued to the tube. This is where most of the action takes place in the theory. "