Two-Step Flow Of Communication Research Paper

1. The Emergence Of The Concept

Beginning with The People’s Choice, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues were occupied with a series of panel studies on the role of mass communication in the making of decisions in various areas (voting, consumption, public issues and others). The researchers focused on the impact of campaigns in the media and were surprised to find that interpersonal communication had a stronger impact on individual attitudes than the mass media alone. Moreover, they found that certain individuals were more central and influential in their groups, often acting as intermediaries between the mass media and the public. In comparison with the rest of the population, these individuals were found to be more exposed to the mass media. Thus, if personal influence was so important and if it was executed mainly by certain individuals who were more exposed to the mass media than the people they influenced, then it could be postulated that there was a two-step flow process from the media to the opinion leaders and from them to their followers. These intermediaries, called Opinion Leaders, could allow messages to pass through (backing them with their own personal authority), strengthen or weaken them, or block their passage entirely. This became the ‘two-step flow of communication’ model.

The most thorough and systematic examination of the two-step flow model and the notion of opinion leaders was the Decatur Study (after the community in which it was conducted). The study’s procedures and findings were published in Personal Influence and represented one of the most impressive early documentations of the opinion leadership concept (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). The research focused on four areas of decision making in daily life: marketing, fashion, public affairs, and movie selection. By isolating specific changes of opinion and identifying the influences that allegedly produced them, the researchers located the individuals who were mentioned most frequently as the source of influence. As this was a pioneering study, Katz and Lazarsfeld applied various methods and measures to locate and identify the opinion leaders. Briefly, there are two ways to locate opinion leaders in specific areas of influence. One is through the testimony of those whom they have influenced. The other is through a self-designation procedure in which respondents themselves are asked about their influence on others. To verify the ‘self-designating’ answers, the researchers requested the confirmation of the persons mentioned as advice-seekers. Two-thirds confirmed the contact and the topic. Although the researchers were satisfied with this ‘validation,’ it is far from being an acceptable measure of validity and indeed attracted later criticism.

The early studies on personal influence and opinion leadership resulted in several attributes related to opinion leaders (Katz 1957). Let us briefly review the main ones: (a) Opinion leaders are found at every social level and in most areas of decision making, influence people from the same social level. (b) Opinion leaders are found in both of the sexes, all professions, all social classes, and all age groups. (c) Opinion leaders tend to be more involved in various social activities and social organizations and occupy central positions in their personal networks. (d) Opinion leaders are considered to be experts in their field, but this is informal recognition by close friends, relatives, co-workers, colleagues, and acquaintances. (e) Opinion leaders are more exposed to the mass media than nonleaders. (f) Opinion leaders are more interested, involved, and updated in the field in which they are influential. (g) Opinion leaders tend to be monomorphous, that is, they are usually experts in one area but rarely in various areas (i.e., polymorphous). (h) Opinion leaders manifest a specific communication behavior insofar as they are more involved in formal and informal personal communication than nonleaders. (i) Opinion leaders are usually well aware that they serve as sources of information and influence for others.

Since the introduction of the two-step flow model and the opinion leadership concept, numerous studies have sought to advance both the understanding and applicability of these ideas. Already by the early 1970s several hundred of these studies were available and the number has continued to grow steadily (for a review of almost 1,400 of these studies, see Weimann 1994). Thus, the 1960s and 1970s may be considered as the ‘Golden Age’ of the research on opinion leaders, yielding convincing empirical evidence of the opinion leaders concept in various areas: marketing and consumer behavior, fashion, politics and voting, family planning, science and scientific innovations, agriculture, and health care.

2. Criticism Of The Model

The model’s theoretical and practical appeal crossed the boundaries of disciplines, societies, and cultures. It attracted researchers from medicine to politics, marketing to family planning, AIDS prevention to clothing fashion, and agriculture to birth control. However, the concept has been a subject of growing criticism. The weaknesses and shortcomings of the original conceptualization of opinion leadership, and especially that of the two-step flow model, were exposed by several studies which combined theoretical, ideological, and methodological aspects (for a review, see Katz 1987).

2.1 Theoretical-Ideological Criticism

The media, according to the Columbia research tradition, were not as powerful as was assumed, once the public was found to be more active, less lonely, and less vulnerable. Defended by their selective consumption of the media and by the selective mediating function of the opinion leaders, people could fend off media influences and protect their attitudes, preferences, and values. The limited effects of the media as a central element in the opinion leadership and two-step flow concept became the main source for the theoretical-ideological criticism directed at this paradigm. Gitlin (1978), for example, rejected the two-step flow model and the functions related to the opinion leaders. The opinion leader is celebrated, he argued, because administrative researchers study proximate causes which are accessible to their patrons, the media organizations themselves, and the dominant values of the capitalist society. The ideological-theoretical bias of the two-step model, according to this criticism, is manifested in a set of assumptions: (a) Commensur-ability of modes of influence: the impact of the mass media was presumed to be comparable to personal influence, with the two ‘forms of influence’ regarded as functionally equivalent. (b) Power as distinct occasions: the measurement of influence by studying discrete incidents in a ‘behaviorization of power.’ (c) Commensurability of buying and politics: the areas of marketing, politics, fashion, and movie-going were perceived as comparable within a single theory and measurable by a single method. (d) ‘Change’ as the sole dependent variable: influence was identified by the occurrence of ‘attitude change,’ disregarding the case of reinforcement as an effect or the prevention of change as an effect. The latent power of the media to prevent changes and maintain the status quo should not be regarded as a residual category, but as a major function and a powerful effect.

2.2 Empirical-Methodological Criticism

The empirical-methodological weaknesses cited (see Weimann 1982) include the following aspects: (a) Ignoring the evidence of direct flow from the media to the public. (b) Ignoring horizontal flow among leaders or among followers. (c) Ignoring the more-than-two-step flow, or ‘longer chains of influence.’ (d) The use of a crude dichotomy between leaders and nonleaders instead of applying continuous measures of leadership. (e) Standardization of measurement for information flow and influence flow. (f) Standardization of measurement across domains, disregarding the variance across domains of decision making. (g) The use of short timeframes, far from reflecting the long-term, cumulative impact of media messages.

3. The Paradigm’s Fight For Survival

The wave of criticism led to a decline in the popularity and attraction of the original concept and almost to its total collapse. However, the paradigm’s ‘fight for survival,’ through a dynamic exchange of arguments, criticism, response, and debate, resulted in several modifications of the original model.

The first amendment to the two-step flow of communication was the introduction of multistep rather than two-step flow. This allowed the inclusion of other optional directions of flow, such as horizontal (among leaders, among followers) and vertical (leaders to followers, active to inactive); direct (linking two actors directly) and indirect (linking actors through a third party or a chain of intermediaries); and down-ward (leaders to followers, media to public) and upward (from opinion leaders to media, followers to influentials, marginals to centrals). Another important modification was the introduction of continuous measures of opinion leadership and their validation (e.g., Noelle-Neumann and Csikszentmihalyi 1992, Weimann 1991, 1994).

Finally, the most promising development is the merging of the model with modern network analysis (Weimann 1989). The developing theory and methodology of network analysis, combined with modern technologies of data processing, namely high-speed computers, special programs for sociometric data analysis, and such sophisticated mathematical procedures as matrix algebra and sociometric topology, has facilitated the study of large communities. It has also contributed to ‘modernizing’ the concepts of personal flow of media messages, opinion leadership, and flow of influence. Sheingold (1973) called for the use of social networks data as a ‘resurrection’ of the Columbia research agenda, and indeed much research on social networks in recent decades has focused on the role of influentials or ‘centrals,’ applying various structural measures taken from the network analysis procedure. These new developments have linked the two-step flow model with other theories and concepts, such as the Agenda-Setting process (e.g., is there a two-step flow of agenda setting?; see Weimann and Brosius 1994, Brosius and Weimann 1996) and have thus contributed to revitalizing some of the notions of the two-step flow model.

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