Knowledge Gap Hypothesis
The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis explains that knowledge, like other forms of wealth, is often differentially distributed throughout a social system. Specifically, the hypothesis predicts that “as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, higher socioeconomic status segments tend to acquire this information faster than lower socioeconomic-status population segments so that the gap in knowledge between the two tends to increase rather than decrease” Phillip J. Tichenor, then Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, George A. Donohue, Professor of Sociology, and Clarice, N. Olien, Instructor in Sociology – three University of Minnesota researchers – first proposed the knowledge gap hypothesis in 1970.
Read more about Knowledge Gap Hypothesis: Foundations, Specification of The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis, A Formal Summary of The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis, Hypothesis Operationalization and Initial Support, Refining The Hypothesis, Narrative Review and Meta-Analytic Support, Criticism and Directions For Future Research, Competing Hypotheses
Famous quotes containing the words knowledge, gap and/or hypothesis:
“Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Here is the place; right over the hill
Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)