Introduction

Cultivation theory suggests that repeated exposure to television can influence the way people perceive social reality. This analysis examines whether the amount of television a person watches is related to their perception of how common certain occupations are in the United States.

The independent variable in this analysis is video, which measures the average number of hours per week that each participant spent watching television content. The dependent variable is pct, which measures the percentage of the U.S. population that participants estimated worked in law enforcement/criminal justice, medicine, or emergency response services.

Research Question

Is weekly television viewing associated with people’s estimates of the percentage of the U.S. population working in law enforcement/criminal justice, medicine, or emergency response services?

Hypothesis

I expect that participants who watch more television will estimate that a larger percentage of the U.S. population works in law enforcement/criminal justice, medicine, or emergency response services.

Analysis

A bivariate linear regression was conducted using weekly television viewing as the independent variable and participants’ estimates of occupational prevalence as the dependent variable.

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = pct ~ video, data = Cultivation)
## 
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
## -28.5917  -6.1607   0.6423   6.7433  23.8483 
## 
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept) 23.20761    2.20264   10.54   <2e-16 ***
## video        0.84400    0.06296   13.41   <2e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 9.737 on 398 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.3111, Adjusted R-squared:  0.3093 
## F-statistic: 179.7 on 1 and 398 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

The regression results show that the relationship between television viewing and participants’ estimates was statistically significant.

The coefficient for television viewing was 0.84. This means that for each additional hour of television viewing per week, the predicted estimate of the percentage of people working in the occupations described in the study changed by approximately 0.84 percentage points.

The model had an R-squared value of 0.311, meaning that television viewing explained approximately 31.1% of the variation in participants’ estimates.

Results

The scatterplot shows the relationship between participants’ weekly television viewing and their estimates of the percentage of the population working in law enforcement/criminal justice, medicine, or emergency response services. The regression line shows the overall direction of the relationship.

Conclusion

The results provide a test of the cultivation theory prediction that television exposure may be associated with people’s perceptions of social reality. The regression analysis found that the relationship between weekly television viewing and participants’ estimates was statistically significant.

The results suggest that the amount of television participants watched was associated with differences in their perceptions of how common these occupations are in the U.S. population. However, because this is an observational study, the results show an association rather than proving that television viewing causes these perceptions.