ABSTRACT
Initial agenda-setting studies indicated the special role of the media in providing hierarchies of significance. The theory's founders have highlighted a grand array of agenda-setting applications in the context of journalism and political communication. In the early 1990s, agenda-setting researchers coined the term "object" to deal with expanded possibilities for research on various symbolic structures that different stakeholders promote in media content. This theoretical evolution added to agendas of "issues", originally introduced by McCombs and Shaw in the 1970s. At the turn of the twenty-first century, agenda-setting research expanded toward different directions. Researchers often describe this trend with two terms: "a centrifugal trend, expanding to domains beyond the original focus on public affairs", and "a centripetal trend of research, further explicating agenda-setting theory's core concepts". One of the goals of leisure studies research is to assess the degree of relevance of certain experiences for specific public segments, while different experiences may be totally irrelevant for the same group.
