Widespread acknowledgement of the weaknesses of null hypothesis significance testing has led to correspondingly greater appreciation of the central role of effect size estimation in social-scientific research. But in the context of message effects research, it is easy to confuse an effect size—a quantitative representation of the effect of a variable on an outcome—with the size of the effect of a message on an outcome. Illustrations of this misunderstanding are offered, its unhappy consequences specified, and remedies discussed.
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Daniel J. O’Keefe (2017) studied this question.
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