Explain cultivation theory and provide examples of predictions made by the theory and examples of research that has been conducted using the theory

Please provide the best answer for the best statement.

Answer: Cultivation theory proposes that long-term immersion in a media environment leads to “cultivation,” or enculturation, into shared beliefs about the world. Unlike other approaches that focus on specific media messages, television programs, movies, or other kinds of text, cultivation analysis is concerned with the more general and pervasive consequences of cumulative exposure to cultural media. Moreover, this theory argues that media coverage shapes attitudes about one’s own society and the issues it faces. For example, although crime rates have gone down overall in recent years, many U.S. Americans feel more insecure than ever. In their study on fear of crime, Daniel Romer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Sean Aday (2003) surveyed 2,300 Philadelphia residents. Within that population group, they found a relationship between the widespread belief that crime is a significant problem and the amount of local television news coverage of crimes. The point of the study is that Philadelphia media coverage cultivates attitudes and beliefs that shape everyday life in the city, with a key element of daily life being an exaggerated fear of crime. In a recent cultivation study, Jeff Niederdeppe and his colleagues (2010) studied the ways that local television news covers cancer prevention. Niederdeppe and colleagues developed three hypotheses comparing local television news coverage with local newspaper coverage of various cancer issues, and their fourth hypothesis focused on the relationship between local TV news viewing and fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention. They found that this relationship creates the fatalistic sense that nothing can be done to avoid cancer.