The "drinking-buddy" scale as a measure of para-social behavior.

Para-social behavior is a form of quasi-interpersonal behavior that results when audience members develop bonds with media personalities that can resemble interpersonal social interaction, but is not usually applied to political communication. This study tested whether the "Drinking-Buddy" Scale, a simple question frequently used in political communication, could be interpreted as a single-item measure of para-social behavior with respect to political candidates in terms of image judgments related to interpersonal attraction and perceived similarity to self. The participants were college students who had voted in the 2008 election.

Factors influencing evaluations of web site information.

This study investigated the effect of first-person and third-person perceptions of web site information. Responses from a telephone survey of 226 participants in a stratified random sample indicated that (1) most participants had higher evaluations for television news than for news received on the Internet; (2) a third-person effect was present in that most respondents generally thought that other people found the Internet easier to use than they did, and that other people were more likely to believe Internet information and trust the sources of Internet information than they would. Also, (3), evaluations of information on a particular web site could be increased by providing links to other web sites on the same topic.