ABSTRACT
Potentially, mass communication has an important impact not only on individuals, but on social groups ranging in size from families to entire nations and cultures. Thus, unlike more traditional academic disciplines such as psychology, media research uses a broad variety of levels of analysis. In research, a level of analysis refers to whatever a scientist studies the characteristics of. For example, psychologists generally are concerned with the behavior of individual people, whereas sociologists typically study the characteristics of groups. A media researcher studying the impact of TV violence on the aggressiveness of individual children uses a psychological level; someone studying the impact of mass communication on the economic development of entire countries works at a sociological level.
