The social reality construction of attitudes toward the social roles of women and African Americans

This article explores how individuals construct various conceptions of the world, and how the mass media, especially television, influence belief structures and perceptions of reality. A structural equation model is formulated such that attitudes toward the social roles of African Americans and women (normative equality) are explained by location in the social structure (objective and perceived social class and education), media exposure (newspaper, television, magazine, and radio), and interpersonal discussion. The model allows for measurement error in the endogenous variables. The empirical patterns from within a sample of urban adults are interpreted as supporting the importance of the mass media (particularly television) and of interpersonal discussion in explaining our version of the normative equality construct.