Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to make a general assessment by studying the fields actively studied in the media effects and political communication literature and, in particular, the new research methods used for big data. Thus, it is intended to identify the field-related innovations and target the researchers who are interested in the subject. The agenda determination theory, which is one of the strongest theories in political communication studies (Kaid, 2004) and has been written over hundreds of articles for 50 years, has passed through various stages over the years. These stages can be summarized in the form of the first, second and third stages of agenda determination, the effects of these stages on public behavior, ideas and attitudes, the concept of how the agenda determination effect is formed and the need for orientation to discuss the power of influence, the effect of the agenda determination that occurs between the media organizations and ultimately the concept of the agenda unification (McCombs, etc., 2014). Three of these stages cover the fields currently produced in the academic summer; (1) the third stage, known as the agenda determination (Guo & McCombs, 2011a; 2011b), (2) the orientation need, which is considered the psychological dimension of media effects (McCombs & Weaver, 1973; Weaver, 1977), (3) the media’s civil agenda, personal opinions and experiences, which represent how we combine the reference points we see valuable (Shaw & Weaver, 2014; Vargo, etc., 2014). The current study aimed at evaluating the development of these three fields and new studies with large data samples and drawing a road map for future research. As a result, 9 of the 16 articles produced over the last 10 years, in other words, more than half (56%) were found to be based on big data analysis. These studies have found that the universes, the data collection tools and methods are multiple. Therefore, it has been found that the field is not only subject-based, but also methodically rapidly developing and becoming competitive.