ABSTRACT
Perceived realism has played an important role in media effects studies and in designing television literacy curricula. In these approaches, perceived realism is not an attribute of media content, but a perception about content that varies across people (Potter, 1988a). Perceived realism is important because it reflects how critical people are when they watch television and thus is a moderator of media effects. Perceived realism, however, has not been treated identically by researchers (Busselle & Greenberg, 2000). Some studies use measures that assume that realism is unidimensional (e.g., Greenberg, 1974; Rubin, 1981, see the measure profiled in Volume 1 of this series). Hawkins (1977) and Potter (1986), however, developed scales to measure perceived realism as a multidimensional construct.
