Operationalization of Variables

Foreign and Domestic Media Credibility

As Gunther (1992) pointed out, the perception of media credibility can be situational for a person given different themes, times and platforms. Thus, the current dissertation decides to anchor such perception at a given theme and moment and adopt a multi-item measurement for different types of media platforms. The questions will ask respondents in China to evaluate the media credibility in terms of news about air quality in China.

Before asking the questions, the respondents will first read a definition of foreign media: which is defined as internationally well-known media organizations (newspapers, magazines, TV or radio companies, online news websites, and international news

agencies such as AP, AFP, Reuters) that are not headquartered in mainland China, but in countries and regions such as US, UK, Japan, etc. Then they will answer eight questions

try to manipulate local opinion) was forbidden by censorship officers from the Chinese survey platform. Thus, believability was measured only using the remaining four items. All five items measuring affiliation were used.

Then the respondents will answer nine similar questions again, but in relation to domestic media, whose definition will be shown to the respondents: domestic media means media organizations that are headquartered inside mainland China (newspapers, magazines, TV or radio companies/stations) at both the national, provincial or municipal level.

Foreign and Domestic Media Accessibility

This variable is conceptualized as policy accessibility of a given media, and the rationale for this has been explained in chapter III. Although much literature is available on how to measure exposure, media use or reliance to foreign media in the Chinese context, little research has been done in Chin directly asking respondents for their perceptions about foreign media accessibility. Because of this, the current study focused on the Chinese public’s perception of how easily they and other citizens can access foreign media, how available these foreign media contents are, and whether the person’s social environment facilitates foreign media access. All of these items are conceptualized to ensure that governmental policy can have strong impact on the respondents’ answers. The actual scale can be seen in Appendix A.

Media System Dependency for Understanding

Survey measurements of media system dependencies at the individual level were developed and consolidated by Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur (1976) and Grant (1991, 1996). The original 18 items measure three established components of media

dependency: understanding, orientation and play. Each of these represents a media function that the individuals depend on in their daily lives. For the current dissertation, one of the focuses is on how public diplomacy influences the way people understand the society and then react to it with such understanding. Thus, currently only the

understanding and the orientation facets of media dependency is used. This composite, namely “media dependency for understanding and orientation”, is measured using the twelve corresponding items in previous works. For simplicity, it will be termed as just dependency or media dependency hereafter. The items are statements of daily tasks of media functions, and the respondents are asked to rate how much they rely on foreign or domestic media by selecting the degree of helpfulness (1= not at all, 7= extremely). Thus, in total there are two composites measured: dependency on foreign media and

dependency on domestic media, each containing six items.

Antecedent Variables of Communicative Actions

The previous three variable sets focus on the relationship between governmental interference (accessibility), perception of media credibility, and people’s dependence on foreign and domestic media. The next step is to connect these psychological traits with psychological antecedents of people’s communicative actions. This is because this dissertation hopes to find out whether relationship with foreign and domestic media, under the influence of governmental policies, could influence how people communicate about important social problems (in this case air quality in China).

and Grunig (2011) have discussed extensively how problem recognition, constraint recognition and involvement recognition influence people’s communicative behavior about a social problem.

After consulting the proposers of the STOPS model, our measures of these three constructs (problem recognition, constraint recognition and involvement recognition) were adopted from the 2010 Kim’s study (Kim, Grunig, & Ni, 2010) and 2011 Kim & Grunig’s study (Kim & Grunig, 2011). Measurement items were carefully selected from the original list of items obtained in order to: 1. Ensure that the items are unambiguous and easy to comprehend and 2. avoid multiple negatives, double-barreled sentences, ambiguous pronoun references, and misplaced modifiers (Netemeyer, Bearden, & Sharma, 2003). For example, under constraint recognition, more government-related items were selected in order to generate more face validity. The questionnaire used a unidimensional 7-point scale in all items of STOPS model: this is in line with most of the STOPS studies and most importantly, with the proposers of the STOPS models (see Kim 2010 for more explication on the choice). Every item asked respondents to indicate their level of agreement from absence of agreement (Not at all) to full agreement (absolutely). The finalized items can be seen in Appendix A.

Translation of Questionnaire

As mentioned above, the questionnaire includes survey questions to represent the operationalized variables. This questionnaire (shown in Appendix A) was created in English, and were translated into Mandarin Chinese (simplified). The translation process was done by the author, who worked as a professionally trained translator and interpreter. After translation, the translated questionnaire was examined by five native Mandarin

speakers who currently reside in China to check for any grammatical error or inappropriate use of words and phrases. The finalized Chinese version of the questionnaire can be seen in Appendix B.