| Abstract: | As media options continue to expand in both quantity and variety and move to new media platforms, consumers’ media diets are becoming increasingly varied and complex. This complexity calls for a more nuanced method of quantifying media consumption that goes beyond the binary like-minded or cross-cutting categories currently used in studies of selective exposure. We develop a measure that captures the full diversity of content in an individual’s media diet, the media diet imbalance score, by adapting Brader, Tucker, and Therriault’s (2014) measure of sociodemographic cross-pressures. Our method allows for research on important aspects of the current media environment that are impossible with existing measures, and it is less labor intensive than previous strategies for measuring selective exposure. |
