Retention of the Murdaugh Trial: Impact of Media Platforms and Visuals on Retention

Mackenzie Hansen

TV or Tiktok?

• In a recent study “Participants with shorter attention spans have more social media accounts, prefer episodic social media applications and have a high frequency of use of their social media accounts from a mobile device or computer. Lukinova, Myagkov, and Shishkin (2014)”
• The growth of new media is changing how news organizations publish their work, and the explosion of social networks is changing the way news consumers of all ages share information.

Retention

• Construct definition
  • Retention is the act of retaining information.
• Operational definition
  • Retention was measured through a survey of questions on comprehension of a video summary of the Murdaugh trial.
    
  • However many questions they got right determines the level of retention.

News Source

• Construct definition
  • A news source is an outlet in which people receive information about current events.
• Operational definition
  • The source of news was manipulated by randomly assigning participants to watch either a News Channel clip or a Tiktok summarizing the Murdaugh trial.

Presence of Visuals

• Construct definition
  • Visuals are images or videos of the Murdaugh trial.
• Operational definition
  • The presence of visuals was manipulated by randomly assigning videos that included or did not include visuals of the trial to each participants.

Hypotheses

Results

Mean Retention Scores

Discussion

• Limitation: -generalization: convenience sampling -weak external validity

• Strength: -construct validity: reliable scale of retention

• Implication -Understanding of how people retain information. -News platforms can decide to use or not use visuals.

Different news platforms will provide the same ability to viewers’ retention ability.

• Although there is rapidly growing media platforms, people should be able to gain the same amount of information.