Measuring Exposure Opportunities: Using Exogenous Measures in Assessing Effects of Media Exposure on Smoking Outcomes

ABSTRACT

Measurement of exposure has long been one of the most central and fundamental issues in communication research. While self-reported measures remain dominant in the field, alternative approaches such as exogenous or hybrid measures have received increasing scholarly attention and been employed in various contexts for the estimation of media exposure; however, systematic scrutiny of such measures is thin. This study aims to address the gap by systematically reviewing the studies which utilized exogenous or hybrid exposure measures for examining the effects of media exposure on tobacco-related outcomes. We then proceed to discuss the strengths and weaknesses, current developments in this class of measurement, drawing some implications for the appropriate utilization of exogenous and hybrid measures.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Laura Gibson, Leigh Cressman, Emily Brennan, Andy Tan, Kirsten Lochbuehler, Alisa Padon, Stella Lee, Michelle Jeong, Danielle Naugle, Elissa Kranzler, and Allyson Volinsky for their great support and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also wish to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable suggestions for improving this article.

Notes

¹ Logically, assessing exposure based on assignment to condition is similar to the forms of exogenous measurement described in detail below, subject to the primary advantages and disadvantages (i.e., independence from outcome measures, but the risk that assignment and actual exposure are not closely related). Nonetheless, this form of exposure measurement belongs to a different tradition of exposure measurement, and we do not address it in detail here.

² We excluded several studies that examined the impacts of the overall tobacco control funding. These should not be deemed as clean measures of media exposure considering that tobacco control programs usually consist of a variety of components, such as interventions, grant programs, media campaigns, education programs etc. (e.g., Chattopadhyay & Pieper, 2012; Farrelly, Pechacek, & Chaloupka, 2003; Lightwood & Glantz, 2011, 2013; Max, Sung, & Lightwood, 2012; Pierce et al., 1998).

³ Our research group has such a study underway. Funded by the US Food and Drug Administration, it is gathering time-series data over 42 months from multiple online sources to assess changes in what is being said about tobacco in the public communication environment, and simultaneously doing matched monthly sample surveys of a US national population of youth and young adults to assess outcomes.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and FDA Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) under Award Number P50CA179546. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).