Most previous studies on agenda setting have analyzed the media effect at the aggregate level, but the media effect varies from one individual to another. The current study proposes the concept perceived agenda setting effect (the perception or awareness of agenda setting effects of the individual audience) to fill this void.
We employed text mining and regression methods to evaluate the impacts of audience-specific personality characteristics on PASE, and the posts of top 100 official media accounts of Sina micro-blog for 1 year (from July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019) were crawled. Perceived agenda setting effect was measured as the responses of audiences toward certain news posts (eg. Like, relay, comment). Personality traits are operationalized in the following ways: firstly, the Chinese psychological analysis system for word processing “Text Mind” was employed to generate the function words. Secondly, those function words are matched to the Big-Five traits according to a systematic rule.
The paper indicates that personality traits affect the perceived agenda setting effect directly. The openness trait and conscientiousness trait have positive influences on the PASE, whereas the neuroticism trait has a negative influence. Media exposure mediates the effect, in which individuals with openness and conscientiousness attributes are more likely to have access to the media than those with neuroticism attributes, and PASE for those with openness and conscientiousness attributes is stronger. Cognitive processing moderates the effect of mediated media usage, and the PASE is stronger for the posts about the issues relevant to the audience.
This study makes a significant contribution to contemporary scholarly literature. Firstly, individual level analyses are done through the perception of people, in which a specific source for media information is matched against a particular person's exposure level to that outlet. Consequently, those detailed process of media agenda setting effects towards the audience is presented completely. Secondly, the causality between the media agenda and audience agenda is achieved through the form-oriented perceived media agenda effect, which is also strengthened by the cognitive mechanisms in people greatly.