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Of the variety of new computer applications, the most important is the development of decision models for media selection. This article discusses the development of decision models in general, the development of a practical media decision model which grew out of disillusionment with linear programing, the ways that this model's requirements for new data are being met, and the implications of the model for the future of the advertising business. After reading this article, read the succeeding one, "How Practical Is the Media Model?" by Joseph St. Georges (pp. 31-33). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a fitting conclusion to the preceding one, "Practical Media Decisions and the Computer," by William T. Moran. Mr. St. Georges deals with the stages by which media decision makers will realize the potential of the computerized media decision model. He raises serious questions about the requirements and potential sources of necessary data, but shows why the model eventually will enhance rather than inhibit media judgment and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationships between fertility and thirteen variables are examined in three groups of married Korean women, about 400 each from urban, rural, and semi-rural areas. Data were obtained by interview. Age at marriage and family planning practice are the strongest predictors of fertility and account for about 10 percent and 7 percent of the total variance, respectively. Other factors which accounted for lesser fractions of variability are ideal number of children, rural versus urban residence, education, aspiration for daughters, exposure to mass media, and economic status. Most of the relationships appear to be stable over time; others, which are associated with modernization, appear to be changing. The thirteen variables combined can account for a maximum of 40 percent of the variance in fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns one area of a larger study of social class differences in the life style, values and personalities of German men. The analysis phase of the research is still in progress, and for the purpose of this paper one life style area has been selected to illustrate the methodological approach and the kinds of findings the study is developing. The data for the study are approximately 300 interviews conducted in the various areas of West Germany. One form concentrated on these men's behavior in connection with secondary institutions and leisure time activity--work, church, associations and clubs, politics and government, economic behavior, mass media habits and leisure time activities at home and outside; a second interview form concerned daily routine, family relationships and friendship patterns. Respondents were asked to discuss their family life, the sharing and the division of responsibilities, to describe their wives as individuals, their wives' assets and limitations, and similarly to describe themselves, and their own assets and limitations.

The article presents information on mass media as source of public affairs, science and health knowledge. The article focuses on relation of different patterns of information-seeking to different levels of public knowledge in three areas-- public affairs, science and health. During presidential campaigns public affairs television regularly reaches all population groups fairly equally, and its coverage has increased, and evened out since 1952. Newspapers and magazines and especially the latter are more likely to be used regularly by better educated groups whites and readers in the higher income and occupational categories than by others. They are probably due to a slightly different wording of the question in that year. It is also necessary to use caution in projecting these findings to all public affairs information.

The article presents information on television and the rest of leisure in the U.S. It is commonly believed that American television is particularly suited for those groups in the population who have few resources for other leisure activities-the poor, the old, the little-educated. Hence the high rates of television viewing in these groups are seen as an indicator of a social problem: with more money, more vitality, more education, the heavy television viewers of today would become the book readers or hobbyists of tomorrow. There is a body of social science knowledge that would counter this common-sense hypothesis. This body of knowledge stems from two overlapping traditions. On the one hand, studies done on the poor, here and abroad, have shown that the poor tend to be more removed from all kinds of leisure activities and organizational activities. The leisure habits of the poor tend to be more familistic and apathetic. On the other hand, communications research has found in previous studies that the heaviest consumption of mass media comes not from the bottom groups but from the middle ones.

An illustrative example is developed from an actual application of goal programming to media planning over a period of time. These goals involve distributions of frequencies by demographic and other characteristics as well as budget and other constraining limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on educational sociology. In the teachers colleges it is customary to think in terms of educational sociology, which may be defined roughly as the application of sociology to education. The basic courses, ordinarily, are introductory sociology and social problems, or their equivalent. Comparatively few courses now carry educational sociology labels. To get a true picture of the situation, it is necessary to broaden the scope of our definition so as to include all elements primarily of a sociological nature which have a direct bearing on the educative process. What seems significant, in this connection, is that "education" courses are steadily increasing their "sociological" content, while shifting their emphasis from the study of individual differences as such to the effects of the social environment upon children as a factor in these differences. Many students are confused in their thinking about social issues by reason of the barrage of propaganda to which they are exposed through the mass media of communication. A major source of the difficulty is that professional propagandists often popularize common sense conclusions about social phenomena with the deliberate intention of misleading the public. Unless he learns to discriminate regarding his sources of information, the mentally immature student may therefore turn out to be a "social illiterate" as an adult. Since no truly intelligent thinking can take place until the facts are at hand, he needs to study propaganda analysis as a means of separating truth from falsehood, whether it be in relation to advertising, economics, or politics.

This paper is a comparative analysis of differences between 351 Negro and 272 white adolescents in their uses of the mass media as an agency of socialization. Through the use of indexes to measure two socialization behaviors--media reinforcement and media norm--acquiring--it was possible to empirically differentiate between media socializees and non-media-socializees. The data indicate that, under almost every condition considered in the analysis, more Negro than white adolescents were media socializees. The interpretation of the data suggests that many Negro adolescents are using the mass media to learn how to behave like whites (i.e., behave in a socially acceptable way). An attempt is made to explain the findings by the consideration of a Negro subcommunity which is a partially bounded subsystem within the larger community system and which is the result of three types of mechanisms of maintenance: (1) ecological and social segregation of Negro-white interactions; (2) self-conceptions of Negro children; and (3) subcultural differences between white and Negro communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outcome of an election may be viewed as the result of the interplay between a number of factors: the characteristics of candidates, the activities of the competing party organizations, the processes of communications and influence involving the mass media and informal groups, and, finally, the social and psychological characteristics of individual voters. The roles played by the social and psychological characteristics of individual voters have received the largest amount of attention in systematic research on voting behavior. Such researches have also paid some attention to the role of the mass media and personal influence. Although voting behavior research has done much to increase our understanding on the social psychological level, the effects of party organizations on the vote has been only poorly studied, To be sure, there are several excellent descriptive studies of local party organizations, particularly of those in large cities. A recent study of Elmira, New York, has provided a description of how the parties functioned in that city during the 1948 presidential campaign, although the authors were unable to relate these activities to the outcome of the election.

The article presents abstracts on topics related to the relationship between the government and marketing, including the legal aspects of media buying, the purchasing and selling actions of the government in the marketplace, and the setting of prices for timber sold by the U.S. Forest Service.

This article presents information regarding the subject of alcoholism in mass media. The Merseyside Council on Alcoholism has published a pamphlet pointing to the risk of what they call an explosion of alcoholism. One would have thought it was well known that all indirect indeces seem to foreshadow an increase in alcoholism in Great Britain in the coming years. What seems surprising however, is the surprise often expressed by the mass media if this risk is brought once more to public attention. Incidentally the problem of alcoholism in Germany, too, has been on the increase, and in recent years a number of individuals interested in the problem in Germany have participated in such international conferences. Perhaps the most prominent among them was Professor Stefan Wieser, from Bremen, and it is author's sad task to report his untimely death at the age of 56.

This article focuses on the discrepancy in the hypothesis of selective exposure to mass media. In order to study this topic and related issues, a survey was conducted following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The survey was administered to 401 students in an introduction to sociology class at Northern Illinois University on the first day of classes after King's funeral. The sample was comprised primarily of freshmen and sophomores, and divided about equally by sex. The first section of the survey assessed attitudes in regard to desegregation. The second section dealt with the mass media. Since the three attitude items correlated reliably, they were combined into an index, with higher scores indicating beliefs that desegregation is justified, has been a good thing in the United States, and has occurred too slowly. Finally, it may be noted that education, which has been a confounding factor in previous studies, was controlled within rather narrow limits in the present study.