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Opinion Leaders and the Mass Media in Rural Egypt: A Reconsideration of the Two-Step Flow of Communications Hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Iliya F. Harik
Iliya F. Harik*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

This study is based on a survey conducted by the author in a rural community in Egypt (a) to determine how mass media messages reach the population, (b) to identify opinion leaders, and (c) to assess the relation between mass media exposure and political awareness.

The data from this survey were used to test the two-step flow of communications hypothesis of Lazarsfeld and colleagues and to compare the effects of the mass media and opinion leaders on the public. Analysis of the data did not support the two-step flow of communications hypothesis; instead it was noted that the greater the exposure to the mass media, the more direct is the flow of communications.

Opinion leaders reached a smaller and less educated section of the population and were found to be the elected and official representatives of the village organizations rather than shopkeepers, teachers, and clergy. Finally, it was found that opinion leaders were specialized, each conveying policy information relevant to his role in the community. The flow of communications was found to be functional and organized rather than casual and haphazard as is usually the case in transmitting non-functional information.

The last part of this article deals with the relation between exposure to the mass media and political awareness. Indices were constructed to give each respondent a score on the degree of exposure to the mass media and another on his level of political awareness. Analysis showed that mass media exposure and political awareness are directly related (r = .53). It was also found that those who had direct access to the mass media were more sensitized to political news than those who had no such access, thus underlining the politicization role of the mass media.

Finally, the article compares the degree of correlation between mass media exposure and political awareness with similar correlations obtained in rural areas in Latin America.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , September 1971 , pp. 731 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1971

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Footnotes

1

I am indebted for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper to my colleagues Charles H. McCall and George J. Stolnitz. I am also grateful to the American Research Center in Egypt and the International Development Research Center at Indiana University for financial support which made this study possible.

References

2 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Beielson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign (2nd. ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1948)Google Scholar.

3 See the three studies on which Katz, Elihu reports in his article, “The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 21 (Spring, 1957), 61–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merton, Robert K., “Patterns of Influence: A Study of Inter-Personal Influence and of Communications Behavior in a Local Community,” in Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Stanton, Frank N., eds., Communications Research: 1948–1949 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), pp. 180–219 Google Scholar. Katz, Elihu and Lazarsfeld, Paul, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1955)Google Scholar. It is interesting to note that these last two studies focus on how individuals are influenced to act on certain matters by various forces including the mass media, rather than on the flow of mass communications. Other studies influenced by the opinion leaders hypothesis are S. N. Eisenstadt, “Communication Processes among Immigrants in Israel,” and Stycos, J. Mayone, “Patterns of Communication in a Rural Greek Village,” both in Public Opinion Quarterly, 16 (Spring, 1952), 42–58, 58–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The first of these two articles does not deal with mass media but with personal communication, and the second with a community which had practically no access to the mass media; they can hardly, therefore, serve to confirm the two-step flow of communication hypothesis.

4 Lazarsfeld et al., op. cit., p. 151 (italics theirs).

5 Lazarsfeld et al., op. cit., p. xxiii (italics mine).

6 See Pool, Ithiel de Sola, “The Mass Media and Politics in the Modernization Process,” in Communications and Political Development, edited by Pye, Lucian W. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 244 Google Scholar; and Pye, Lucian W., Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building; Burma's Search for Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 20–21 Google Scholar.

7 An exception is the recent work by Rogers, Everett M., Modernization Among Peasants: The Impact of Communications (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)Google Scholar.

8 A fictitious name is used to honor confidences and protect informants.

9 The remaining 15 percent were not aware of these policies.

10 A negligible number of respondents mentioned both the mass media and news mediators as their sources of information on a particular policy item. These numbered 3, 9, and 5 for savings, family planning and socialism respectively. All these cases were included in the mass media group because we were testing for outreach of the mass media; anyone indicating the media as a source of information in effect became a member of the mass media audience regardless of other sources he mentioned.

11 Chi-square test shows significance beyond the .05 level. See below for an account of other background factors.

12 Tetrachoric correlation coefficient was developed by Pearson as an estimate of the product-moment correlation for dichotomous variables.

13 Television did not turn out to be a major source of news comparable to the radio and newspaper, perhaps because it was not privately used in the village, and free access and choice of programs were limited.

14 Analysis of data on those who read the paper more often has not revealed a significant difference in the manner in which communications flowed. This is perhaps due to the fact that the time span between them was not markedly different.

15 Column 3, the unawares, was not included in the test because it is not relevant to the argument and because the incidence of two cells with frequencies below 5 makes the computation of chi-square problematic; however, including the column in the Table is necessary to make it complete.

16 For definition of index, see below.

17 See Table 7 below.

18 Lazarsfeld et al., op. cit., p. 127.

19 Katz, op. cit., p. 61.

20 See for instance, Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, (Glencoe: Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar, Chapter I. Also Stycos, op. cit., pp. 59–60, and his other article, “The Potential Role of Turkish Village Opinion Leaders in a Program of Family Planning,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 29 (Spring, 1965), 124 Google Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, “The Mass Media and Egyptian Village Life,” Social Forces, 142 (October 1963) 97–104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a systematic and very informative article, James N. Mosel finds that shopkeepers play an important role in disseminating information, but he also identifies officials of the government as playing a similar role in a most interesting discussion of personal mediation of news in Thailand; see James N. Mosel, “Communication Patterns and Political Socialization in Transitional Thailand,” in Pye (ed.), op. cit., pp. 200–206.

21 Remaining nonowners did not listen to radio.

22 This figure represents a mean score for the frequencies on the three policies.

23 See below Tables 6 and 8.

24 46 percent.

25 Respondents tended to mention an organization as such by name or refer to an officer by personal name or office be holds. References to officers by personal name or office were coded under the name of his organization.

26 In a survey conducted in rural Turkey on attitudes toward family planning, specialization of opinion leaders was also noted: “professional sources and authoritative mass media channels are rated as much more influential on family planning than are local religious or political leaders.” See Stycos, op. cit., pp. 128–129. In an article entitled “Communication Systems and Social Systems: A Statistical Exploration in History and Policy,” reprinted in Finkle, Jason L. and Gable, Richard W., eds., Political Development and Social Change (New York: John Wiley, 1966), p. 196 Google Scholar. Lerner wrote that in “the modal type … messages usually emanate from sources authorized to speak by their place in the social hierarchy, i.e., by status rather than skill criteria.” The emphasis on social status has not been supported by the facts in this study, and the separation between skill and position of news mediators does not seem to take into account modernizing rural communities where skill determines position.

27 Abu-Lughod. op. cit.

28 Abu-Lughod, op. cit., p. 99.

29 Abu-Lughod, op. cit., p. 103.

30 Further evidence on this point is being developed as part of the author's forthcoming book on politics and development in rural Egypt.

31 The seven questions on which the index is based are: knowledge of the Five Year Plan, savings policy, family planning, socialism, the name of the prime minister, the names of four socialist countries, and the names of four “reactionary” Arab states. The last category was clearly defined by the Nasser regime; awareness of it was indicative of the respondent's knowledge of his nation's attitude toward other nations.

32 Significant beyond the .001 level.

33 The incidence of 22 cases in cell 1, row 2 and only 15 cases in cell 1, row 1 is not inconsistent with the reading of the table made above because total cases in the second row are more than twice the total cases in the first row.

34 Scores for High, Medium, and Low are respectively: 67–100, 34–66.9, and 0.33.9.

35 See columns 3 and 4.

36 Almost everyone has traveled to Damanhur. With respect to the two metropolitan cities of Cairo and Alexandria, 58 percent of the mass media group and 55 percent of the oral reception group have traveled to these places. Difference of percentage test is insignificant (Z = .244).

37 Chi-square test shows significance beyond the .05 level.

38 The chi-square test did not show that occupation and reception of news are significant.

39 In view of the demonstrably greater impact of the radio on villagers, Professor Lerner's emphasis on literacy as a pivotal variable in the modernization of an individual's social orientation becomes insufficient. See Lerner, “Communication Systems and Social Systems,” in Finkle and Gable (eds.) op. cit., pp. 202–203. Levels of education, it may be suggested, should be taken into account in Lerner's theory of communications.

40 For complex reasons that need not be entered into here, the exposure index assigns equal weight to each of the three media and thus does not reflect the educational difference in favor of the press.

41 Rogers, Everett M., “Mass Media Exposure and Modernization Among Colombian Peasants,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 29 (Winter, 1965–1966), 621 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In an article on “Socialization to National Identification Among Turkish Peasants,” The Journal of Politics, 30 (11, 1968), 951 Google Scholar, Frederick W. Frey confirms the positive association between exposure to the mass media and awareness but provides no specific value for the association.

42 McCleod, Jack M. et al., “The Mass Media and Political Information in Quito, Ecuador,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 32 (Winter, 1968–1969), 583 Google Scholar.

43 McCleod et al., op. cit., p. 585.

44 McCleod et al., op. cit., pp. 582, 583 and 578.

45 It also suggests that the index of mass media exposure in the Quito study was too general (see McCleod, et al., op. cit., p. 578), otherwise the association identified for those who possessed media at home would not have been so different (difference is significant beyond the .01 level).

46 See particularly pages 52–54.

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