In an effort to understand the possible ways that demographic and perceptual variables may be related to media consumption, separate independent sample t-tests were run to compare nonmedia consumers with media consumers of newspaper, radio, Internet, TV police-reality programs, TV news, and TV crime dramas for the following variables: SEX, RACE, education, AGE, Republican, COL. EFF., ATP, fear of crime, ECO. INS., and JUSTICE. Men, Whites, older individuals, and Republicans were significantly more likely to read the newspaper. Those with high fear levels and high justice concern levels were less likely to read the newspaper. Whites, those with higher education levels, older individuals, and Republicans were more likely to listen to the news on the radio. There was only one significant difference between Internet users and nonusers, with women being significantly less likely to use the Internet. Men, Whites, those with less education, and Republicans were significantly more likely to watch police-reality programs. Whites, older individuals, and Republicans were more likely to watch television news programs. And finally, women and minorities were more likely to watch television crime dramas.5 Surprisingly, except for Newspaper readership, there were no significant differences between media consumers and nonconsumers on any of the perceptual measures in this study.
Binary logistic regression was used to analyze the data. Bivariate correlations revealed a strong correlation between AGE and INCOME (.642), but the variance inflation factor scores were below 2.0, so both variables were included simultaneously in the models. Each of the television genre variables were highly correlated with one another and the variance inflation factor scores were well above 2.0 for each of these measures. Consequently, a TV Index was created that combined time spent watching police-reality programs, local and national news, newsmagazines, and crime dramas. Cronbach’s a reliability coefficient for these three measures was .71. The square root of this measure was used to correct for the negative skew of the distribution. Additionally, separate models were run that introduced police-reality programs, television news programs, and crime dramas one at a time.