This study had two broad purposes. The first was to extend the examination of the agenda-setting function of the mass media to include various levels of peoples' information holding. The second was to examine how people held the information which they were receiving from the media. Both of these purposes were carried out regarding economic issues.

Issues were conceptualized as involving information at three distinct levels: Level 1 includes general issue names. The names of major issues such as "the economy," "the political system," "government inefficiency," and "overpopulation" are level 1 information. Level 2 consists of sub-issues, including problems, causes, and proposed solutions. 1 Example of these types of information are problems such as "high food prices," " tion," and "unemployment"; causes like "Arab oil prices," and "bad weather conditions"; and proposed solutions "tax rebate," and "gas rationing." Level 3 contains specific information about sub-issues, including pro and con rationales for proposed solutions ("oil tax would be inflationary," "people are unlikely to spend the rebate on consumer goods") and people or groups connected to the proposed solutions (President Ford, Republican Congressmen, State Legislators).

Levels 2 and 3 appear to be different levels of information from Level 1 information and from each other. Palmgreen, Kline, and Clark (1974) refer to these types of information when they suggest the need to distinguish important aspects of "information-holding"proposals, actors, and actor-proposal linkagesbut in their paper, information at these two levels is grouped together. With the three-level conceptualization of information, both information presented in the media and information held by people can be examined. The first objective in the present study was to test the hypothesized agenda-setting function of the media at information Levels 2 and 3. Previous agenda-setting research has focused exclusively on what is identified here as the first level of informationissue names. The usual procedure has been to examine the correlation between the amount of space or time devoted to a few issues in the media and the percentage of respondents who name the issues as ones of importance. For this second objective, the study focused on: (1) factors differentiating people in terms of the amount of information held at the different levels, and (2) relationships among the different kinds of information held by people and the factors leading to differences in patterns of information-holding. A major purpose of this study was to determine if the agenda-setting function of the mass media, fairly well established empirically in terms of general issue-names, also appeared to hold at two sub-issue levels of information. Our findings indicate that newspapers appeared to be setting the agenda for all respondents at information Levels 2 and 3, and that television did not appear to have much impact on the public agenda at either Level 2 or 3, even for television-oriented respondents. When the unit of analysis is shifted to the individual information level in the analysis of information holding, however, communication variables were generally not related to the amount of information held by respondents, although education and the respondent's position on the proposal were.

It seems clear at this point that any future agenda-setting studies should deal with information at several levels, and that further conceptualization and more sophisticated measures of information holding, perhaps along the lines Palmgreen, Kline, and Clarke (1974) have suggested, are needed. Studying the message discrimination behaviors of people at these 3 levels of information would seem to be a logical next step.

Please re-write the information above.