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ISSN 2576-5388 (Print) ISSN 2576-5396 (Online) 

Vol. 4, No. 4, 2021 
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Review Paper 

The Agenda Setting Process and its Potential Attitudinal Effects 
Gennadiy Chernov1* 

1 School of Journalism, University of Regina, Regina, Canada 
* Gennadiy Chernov, School of Journalism, University of Regina, Regina, Canada 

 

Received: October 5, 2021      Accepted: October 21, 2021      Online Published: October 31, 2021 

doi:10.22158/csm.v4n4p1                         URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/csm.v4n4p1 

 

Abstract 

Agenda setting is a well-documented process in the media effects tradition. It has a strong impact on 

what issues are perceived as important by the audience. However, there are indications that agenda 

setting may have an indirect effect on the attitudes. The current study tested the Elaboration Likelihood 

Model (The ELM) as a possible mechanism of attitude change that may be present in the agenda setting 

process. The experimental results did not confirm the overall impact of the ELM on attitudes, but it 

demonstrated separate attitudinal effects of ability operationalized as knowledge. Further, it was also 

argued that the agenda setting process may have an indirect effect on attitudes through the peripheral 

route of the ELM. 

Keywords 

agenda setting, The Elaboration Likelihood Model (The ELM), attitudinal effects 

 

1. Introduction 

Agenda setting has been one of the dominant theories in media effects realm for over 50 years. The 

main tenet of this approach is that the media transfers the salience of issues they cover to how 

important the public perceive these issues (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Scholars have been exploring 

different aspects of agenda setting including the psychological processes involved in it. The 

motivational determinant of agenda setting is the Need for Orientation (the NFO) (Weaver, 1977; 

Weaver, 1980). The NFO consists of two subdomains, relevance and uncertainty. The combination of 

different degrees of these two subdomains leads to different degrees of agenda setting effects (Chernov, 

Valenzuela, & McCombs, 2011). Another consequential concept for agenda setting is priming. Priming 

may be an effect and a process. Priming is sometimes understood as an impact of agenda setting on 

evaluations (Kim, Han, Choy, & Kim, 2012). It may encompass activating the concepts related to a 

primed concept leading to scanning the broader context for these concepts. Priming creates a new 

information field for subsequent evaluation (Chernov, 2018). Priming comes near to evaluation process 



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by creating context for it. However, evaluations belong to the next stage of information 

processing-attitude formation and change. The link between agenda setting and attitudes was explored, 

but these studies were peripheral to the psychological exploration of the NFO and priming. For 

example, Kiousis and McCombs (2004) found significant agenda-setting effects and a significant 

correlation between issue salience and attitude strength. Weaver (1991) tested salience of the federal 

budget deficit issue in terms of its perceived importance for the survey participants and in terms of 

attitude strength and attitude directionality. Although this test yielded significant results, the 

relationship between attitudes’ directionality and issue salience was much weaker than for attitude 

strength and perceived importance. Weaver underscored “the need for a detailed look at how an issue is 

covered by the media for making any predictions about direction of opinion. Simply looking at what is 

covered will not enable one to predict much of the direction of public opinion” (p. 61). 

That makes intuitive sense as agenda setting affects the importance of issues for the public, not the 

evaluation directionality of these issues. Attitude change is understood as a consequence of persuasive 

efforts. The intent to persuade lies beyond the scope of what agenda setting theory studies. However, 

agenda setting relates to attitude formation and change in that it may contribute to the latter in an 

indirect way. What is going on in the communicative process of agenda setting has some similarity with 

what is going on in the persuasion process described by The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). 

The ELM belongs to a family of dual-process theories in attitudes and social cognition.  

Petty and Cacioppo (1981) postulated that attitude change depends on two ways (called central and 

peripheral routes) that people process information. When individuals process a persuasive message, 

they may elaborate the central arguments of it provided they are highly involved in the issue under 

consideration, and they are able to evaluate the message’s merits (the central route of information 

processing). However, individuals may not thoroughly elaborate the message if they are not sufficiently 

involved and/or do not have enough ability to evaluate the message’s main argument (the peripheral 

route of information processing). In the latter case, the individuals may pay more attention to the source 

of the message, their feelings when they attend to the message, and to secondary elements of the 

message. Petty and Wegener (1999) confirmed that they do not identify the central route of processing 

with only the message variables, and peripheral routes with only context and the source variables. They 

contend that the characteristics of the messages can be processed when the peripheral route is used as 

well. This removed one of the obstacles on the way to using the ELM for explaining agenda-setting 

effects. 

To summarize, the ELM offers a mechanism of two ways to process information; it pays a serious 

attention to the role of the message factor in attitude change, and it embraces both motivation and 

ability of the audience to process the information. 

 



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Petty, Priester and Brinol (2002) point at the link between the agenda setting approach and the ELM. 

They maintain that “…by setting the agenda of what is important to evaluate, the media can have 

important “indirect” effects on attitude change” (p. 167). The NFO has subdomains that relate to the 

EML in a way that relevance may have some correspondence with involvement, and uncertainty may 

correspond with ability. The NFO is linked to priming as it does not include its process similar to 

elaboration. The outcome variable for agenda setting is issue importance, and for the ELM it is 

attitudinal consequence. The approaches also differ in intent- mostly to inform versus mostly to 

persuade. However, there could be a link between the two with agenda setting playing a role of 

peripheral route for information processing.  

The unpublished research on the role of the ELM in connection with agenda setting was a part of a 

larger study of agenda setting (Chernov, 2010). It will be reported in order to shed the light on the 

potential link of these two approaches, especially on the possibility the agenda setting attributes to 

serve as a peripheral route of the ELM. 

The study dealt with how different attributes and experience with the issues used in the study impact 

the agenda setting effects. At some stage the ELM was added in order to see if there is any link between 

these two approaches. 

 

2. Method 

A pre-test/post-test design was employed for the main experiment. Two hundred sixty students were 

recruited through an invitation to the Faculty of Arts students from large undergraduate classes at the 

University of Regina. The treatment materials consisted of four news stories introduced as recent 

publications in the print media. 

Independent variables included agenda setting measures such as personal experience with the issues 

and different types of message attributes as well as the ELM variables. 

Involvement was operationalized as an index of two types of measures of the construct: cognitive and 

affective. Media use, or the amount the individuals are exposed to media news, is one indication of 

involvement, while interest, an affective element, is also closely related to the amount of media use 

(Roser, 1990; Salmon, 1986).  

Previous knowledge is an indicator of the level of ability to comprehend the message content as it was 

postulated in the ELM (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), and it is operationalized according to the previous 

measures used in agenda-setting studies (Lee, 2005; Kiousis, 2004).  

Elaboration deals with “issue-relevant” thinking in the evaluation of messages (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). 

This study adopted a four-item Elaboration scale (Perse, 1990) to make multiple measures of the concept. 

Dependent variables were measures of issue of importance for agenda setting, and issue evaluation both 

taken before and after the experiment. 



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Media involvement, knowledge and elaboration were entered into the ANCOVA model as a set of the 

ELM variables to test hypotheses that the more a news article makes the reader think and reflect on an 

issue, the stronger the attitudinal effects are, and that the attitudinal effects will be stronger for 

individuals who are less knowledgeable about an issue and have less media involvement. 

H1: The more knowledge one has about an issue, the less effect any single communication will have 

on attitude favorability toward an issue. 

To test this hypothesis, the subjects were divided into three groups (high vs medium vs. low level of 

knowledge) using a median split as a medium level measure and the ones lower and higher than the 

median as high and low levels based on corresponding measures derived from the answers on 

questionnaire items related to knowledge.  

H2: The higher the level of media involvement one has, the weaker the marginal effect of 

additional media exposure on attitude change. 

To test this hypothesis, the participants were asked about the patterns of their media use, how much 

attention they pay to the news in the media, and how interested they were about the news in the media. 

The subjects were divided into two groups (high vs. low media involvement) using a median split 

based on corresponding measures derived from the answers on questionnaire items related to media 

involvement.  

H3: The more a news article makes the reader think and reflect on an issue, the stronger 

attitudinal effects and higher the perceived importance of the issue. 

To test this hypothesis, the subjects were divided into two groups (high vs. low level of elaboration) 

using a median split based on corresponding measures derived from the answers on questionnaire items 

related to elaboration.  

An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted. Two of the independent variables, media 

involvement, elaboration, had two levels: high and low. Another independent variable, knowledge, had 

three levels: high, medium and low. 

 

3. Result 

The dependent variables contained the scores on how favorable people think about different aspects of 

issue depictions. No significant effect of the ELM variables was found on attitude favourability change 

over the course of the experimental manipulations. For media involvement, ANCOVA was not 

significant, F(1,230)=.085, MSE=.173, p=.77. For elaboration, ANCOVA was not significant, 

F(1,230)=.57, MSE=1.16, p=.45. For knowledge, the ANCOVA was not significant, F(1,230)=.19, 

MSE=.39, p=.66. However, knowledge and elaboration affected the overall level of attitude. As shown 

in Table 1, the F-values for elaboration and knowledge are significant. For media involvement it is not 

significant. 



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Table 1. The Impact of Elaboration Likelihood Model’s Variables-media Involvement, 

Knowledge and Elaboration-on Attitudinal Effects 

 MS F-value Eta 

Media Involvement 24.77 .91 .004 

Knowledge 223.43 8.19 .034* 

Elaboration 477.91 17.51 .071* 

*Significance level at p<.01 

 

These results indicate that two individual covariates have effects, but because there is a .455 correlation 

between knowledge and elaboration, a theoretical reason why knowledge would be more fundamental 

than elaboration to attribute to all of the variance it can explain will be discussed elsewhere. 

When a separate effect of different levels of knowledge on attitude favourability toward an issue was 

tested, the hypothesis that the more knowledge one has about an issue, the less effect any single 

communication will have on attitude favourability toward an issue was confirmed. The analysis showed 

that there is a significant difference between participants who had different prior knowledge about an 

issue in how favorably they feel toward an issue after reading the stories (F(2,234)=7.83, p<.001). A 

post hoc Bonferroni test demonstrated that those who know less about an issue feel more favorable 

about the story describing this issue than those who know more prior to reading a story about this issue 

(mean difference=2.26, p<.001). 

 

4. Discussion 

The impact of involvement, knowledge and elaboration on attitude change. 

The study hypothesized that the ELM variables, media involvement, knowledge and elaboration, could 

have a significant effect on attitude favourability with which participants evaluated the issues after 

reading the stories about them. Petty and Cacioppo (1981), Petty and Wegener (1999) documented 

findings that when individuals attend to persuasive messages and their levels of involvement, 

processing ability and elaboration are high, and their attitudes change significantly. Agenda-setting 

effects deal with media messages that are not necessarily persuasive, but they might lead to attitude 

change as an indirect effect of exposure to the media. Each of the factors used in the ELM have also 

been investigated in media effects research, but not as a set of variables that the model explicates as its 

operational indicators. Attention, interest, issue and media involvement, depth of processing and media 

exposure were used as concepts accountable for different media effects. The results were mixed, and 

they lacked a common theoretical framework that could explain varying and not always consistent 

findings. 

 



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The analysis conducted in this study showed that the ELM variables do not affect how the participants’ 

attitudes change over the course of the experiment either directly or in conjunction with the 

experimental manipulations. 

Two possibilities are considered in the following analysis: first, certain variables could act as 

suppressors. Higher level of involvement might lead to increased attitude favourability about issues 

with which participants have more personal experience, but greater knowledge about such issues might 

lead to decreased favourability. Second, agenda setting is considered to be a process that leads to media 

effects over time. The study testing agenda setting and attitudinal effects took only one day, and the role 

of the ELM variables could be stronger if the study could be extended over time. 

As the hypotheses about the role of the ELM variables suggest, the effects of media involvement and 

elaboration, on the one hand, and knowledge on the other hand, predict effects in different directions, 

which might affect an overall impact in the ANCOVA analysis. To test this possibility, a mixed repeated 

measures the ANOVA analysis was conducted that confirmed the hypothesis that the more knowledge 

one has about an issue, the less of an effect any single communication will have on attitude 

favourability toward an issue. Prior knowledge might have a moderating effect on attitude favourability 

because higher level of knowledge is associated with a firm position an individual may hold on the 

issue, which in its turn indicates relative strength of an attitude about the issue. As Pomerantz, Chaiken, 

and Tordesillas (1995) stated, “…investigators have identified the amount of knowledge an individual 

has about an issue as a form of strength and shown that possession of ample knowledge is associated 

with greater resistance to social influence attempts” (p. 408). Overall, the participants demonstrated a 

positive shift in their attitudes, but those who knew more than the others had the smallest attitude 

change, while those who knew less had the largest increase in attitude favourability.  

The set of the ELM variables did not affect how the participants’ attitudes changed over the course of 

the experiment may lie in the fact that the ELM deals mostly with overtly persuasive messages that 

directly promote a particular position and supporting arguments in the messages that individuals attend 

to. Agenda setting studies the impact of media messages that are not intended to have a persuasive 

effect. Attitudinal effects are considered by agenda setting as indirect, and the media messages are 

thought to have effects on the audience over a certain period of time as a result of accumulated 

coverage of certain issues. 

One of the most important findings of the study was that knowledge and elaboration affect overall 

attitude favourability. The variables are correlated. Knowledge would be more fundamental than 

elaboration for a theoretical explication of the results. Petty and Cacioppo (1981) contended that 

processing ability, which was operationalized as knowledge, is one of the antecedents alongside 

involvement that determine how high the level of elaboration will be. Lee (2005) specifically explored 

the impact of two factors, how certain people are about an issue, and how much they know about an 



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issue, on effort put into processing media messages. Effort as defined by the author is similar to 

elaboration, according to the ELM. Effort made a significant contribution on agenda-setting effects, but 

knowledge was one of the factors influencing it. 

Because knowledge and elaboration are related to the pretest scores as well as the posttest scores, when 

the pretest scores are entered into the regressions as covariates in an ANCOVA design, the effects of 

these ELM variables will be attenuated. 

These findings are important because they demonstrate not only that the agenda-setting process is 

accompanied by attitude change, but also that the ELM may complement priming as a mechanism 

facilitating this change. Less knowledgeable participants had both higher perceived issue importance 

and attitude favourability of issue after reading stories about them.  

The study illuminated the role of the ELM in agenda-setting, but the results can also be interpreted as a 

reciprocal agenda-setting contribution to the ELM itself. Central routes of information processing 

characterized by higher involvement and knowledge lead to stronger attitude change than peripheral 

routes characterized by lower involvement and knowledge, according to the ELM theorists. 

Agenda-setting effects, however, are considered to be indirect and especially strong with subjects who 

are less knowledgeable and not strongly involved with issues covered by the media in the first place. 

Low processing ability does not necessarily lead to rather weak attitudinal effects. In the case of media 

effects, attitude formation and change can also be strong as they are related to societal beliefs in media 

credibility and professionalism. The ELM theorists rightly point at a relative instability of attitudes based 

on low involvement and processing ability; however, the repetitive character of many media messages 

about recurrent issues may facilitate both an attitude change and a stability for it. Agenda setting studies 

show that the media may repetitively cover some issues by often using the same attributes inside these 

issues’ coverage with such repetitions potentially becoming a peripheral route of the ELM inducing 

attitude change as an indirect effect. 

It is worth to further explore this link in the future considering the importance of the agenda setting in 

media effects, and the ELM in persuasion. 

 

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