Media coverage of the 9-11 attacks and public opinion. The terrorist attacks of September 11,2001, and related events (e.g., the war in Iraq) have, and continue to receive, much media coverage. How has this coverage influenced the American public’s concern about terrorism? This was the topic of research conducted by journalism professors at the University of Missouri (International Journal of Public Opinion, Winter 2004). Using random-digit dialing, they conducted a telephone survey of 235 Americans. Each person was asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 5, his or her level of concern about each of eight topics: a long war, future terrorist attacks, the effect on the economy, the Is-rael-Palestine conflict, biological threats, air travel safety, war protests, and Afghan civilian deaths. The eight scores were summed to obtain a “public agenda” score. The respondents were also asked how many days per week they read the newspaper, watch the local television news, and watch national television news. The responses to these three questions were also summed to obtain a “media agenda” score. The researchers hypothesized that the public agenda score would be positively related to the media agenda score.
a. Spearman’s rank correlation between the two scores was computed to be rs = .643. Give a practical interpretation of this value.
b. The researchers removed the “length of war” question from the data and recomputed the “public agenda” score. Spearman’s rank correlation between the public agenda and media agenda scores was then calculated as rs = .714. Interpret this result.
c. Refer to part b. Conduct Spearman’s test for positive rank correlation at α = .01.
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