Nhung Nguyen

Key scholars

• Paul Lazarsfeld
• Elihu Katz
• Bernard Berelson
• Hazel Gaudet
• Herta Herzog

Seminal reading(s)

• Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). The people’s choice: How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. New York, NY: Duell. Sloan & Pearce. 
• Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. (1955). Personal influence. New York, NY: The Free Press. 
• Katz, E. (1957). “The two-step flow of communication: An up-to-date report on a hypothesis.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 21(1): 61–78.

Key concepts 

• Opinion leaders
• Opinion followers
• Social influence
• Word-of-Mouth
• Electronic-Word-of-Mouth
• KOL(Key Opinion Leaders)/Influencers 

Main premises

The two-step flow theorizes how the effects of the media happen to audiences. It’s one of the significant minimal media effects theoretical arguments.

According to this theory, the media do not have the power to sway people’s opinions directly because information does not go straight from the news to the public. Instead, it flows to the “mass audience” through two steps. In the first step, it reaches opinion leaders. In the second step, information is passed on from opinion leaders to the general public. So, here’s where we see the effects of what Lazarsfeld and colleagues called: “personal influence.”

Putting it in context, the theory was created at a time when access to news was limited. Although popular radio at the time was not accessible to everyone. The central theoretical arguments of two-step flow were in contrast with how media effects were previously understood. Specifically, the hypodermic or magic bullet theory presented an all-powerful media with strong effects. The theory suggests that media information has direct, immediate, and uniform effects on those who are exposed to it. Two-step flows marked a new stage in mass communication research, which scholars termed “minimal effects.”

Common methods

• Interview (traditional)
• Survey (traditional)
• Follower/following; sharing, retweeting (digital)

Limitations

• Assuming that information is circulated linearly
• Difficult to operationalize key concepts. For example, who should be considered as opinion leaders and who are opinion followers

Developments

The original arguments were concerned with political opinions in relation to voters’ choosing candidates in presidential campaigns. However, over time, the theory has been expanded to other areas including technology adoption, health communication, and consumer behaviors. It is more popular in strategic communication. For example, marketers look to elevate social influence in their sales/social marketing strategies.

Because of its limitations, the theory was not widely used in mass communication, compared to later frameworks like agenda-setting or framing. The proliferation of TV news and an expanding media industry in the 1960s led to the return of the powerful media effects argument and the dormancy of two-step flow.

Two-step flow has recently reemerged as new ways of interaction on digital platforms allow researchers to reconceptualize the concepts of opinion leaders and opinion followers. New methods of analyzing online data (e.g., network analysis) have also contributed to a clearer distinction between the relationships between these two subjects and easier identification of “social influence.”

Typical research questions

• Who are the opinion leaders? Identifying general characteristics of opinion leaders. Basically, attempting to identify “influence.”
• What influence do they have? What are the results of such “influence”?
• Through what mechanism does such influence happen? In other words, what message elements would trigger more reactions on social media like sharing or retweeting?

*This is the series of theories from KU’s Jour801 Course- Communication Theories- taught by Dr. Hong Vu