Culture And Credibility

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Media, Culture and Credibility: A Theoretical Framework Culture plays a significant part in our daily life from birth to death, so human beings can’t be studied without invoking cultural dimensions of human life. The current research methods treat culture as autonomous individual characteristics that are isolated from daily living and from broader social, economic, and political contexts. Researchers sometimes, assume that concepts are universal across cultural by relying on standard measures to collect data without consideration of their original developmental basis. (Kao Hsueh-fen S et al,2004) Bercovitch and Elgström offer the first systematic analysis of how cultural differences and similarities between society influence credibility: Similar …show more content…

Early research in persuasion operated under the assumption that communicators that are perceived as similar to their audiences are considered more credible, and thus, more likely to persuade. In communication research, there are three areas of study that highlight similarities as influencing factors in credibility judgments: homophile, involvement, and identification. Research has found a relationship between these factors and credibility, sometimes perceived similarities facilitate higher credibility perceptions, other results reveal that identification may result in distrust towards media. Babiker and colleagues developed an index that measured the perceived similarities between two cultures based on the following characteristics: “climate, food, language, religion, educational level, material comfort, family life, marriage and intergroup conflict”. One of the most popular applications of cultural proximity is attributed to Geert Hofstede’s cultural index. It involves five dimensions: individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and Confucian dynamism. (Arora …show more content…

Its primary objective is to understand how specific cultural and environmental variations are related to individual judgments of communication credibility and to determine the main components of the proposed cultural context credibility model. The processes of globalization have led to a search for media credibility frameworks that can be applicable across cultures. Until now the bulk of scholarship devoted to the quest for universal media credibility measures has come from the West. These frameworks can’t be applied to non-western contexts, and local cultures, sociopolitical issues and histories must be taken into account. (Wasserman Herman,2004). Analyzing cultural aspects requires considering the intensive interaction of cultures that is experienced these days because of the extremely dynamic development and spread of communication technologies. (Demetrovics Zsolt,2012) I propose a final working model of cultural dimensions’ model of media credibility between and within societies, including all the empirical and theoretical dimensions extracted from several cultural and media studies. As previously mentioned, this paper aims to add knowledge to the existing literature regarding media credibility research, which suggest paths for future research and confirm the vital role of the qualitative approach in research

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