Orientation, Need For

The concept of a “need for orientation” (a combination of relevance and uncertainty) was first created and described by Maxwell McCombs and David Weaver in an April 1973 paper titled “Voters' Need for Orientation and Use of Mass Communication,” presented at the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Montreal, Canada. In this paper, they reasoned that every individual feels some need to be familiar with his or her surroundings, to fill in enough detail to orient himself or herself. They asserted that need for orientation (NFO) leads to media use, which in turn leads to agenda-setting effects of media. They speculated that increased relevance and uncertainty were important psychological preconditions for arousal of an NFO based on information-seeking theory, and they devised a model in which relevance preceded uncertainty in time such that a low level of relevance led directly to a low NFO, a high level of relevance coupled with low uncertainty led to a moderate level of NFO, and a high level of relevance coupled with high uncertainty led to a high level of NFO.

They predicted that use of newspapers and television for political information, and political agendasetting effects of these media, would increase monotonically as NFO increased. Using a variety of operational definitions of relevance and uncertainty, they tested these predictions with data from two surveys conducted in Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina, in the spring and summer of 1972 and found considerable support for both predictions, leading them to conclude that the sociological concept of agenda setting and the psychological concept of NFO appeared fruitful for documenting and explaining the political impact of the news media.

This concept of NFO has been tested in a variety of settings since 1973 and has been found to be a useful predictor not only of frequency of media use for political information, but also of varying levels of agendasetting effects. A careful explication and testing of the NFO concept published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research by Jorg Matthes of the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich finds that the original assumption that relevance precedes uncertainty appears to be valid—that is, when there is low relevance, NFO will be low, independent of uncertainty, but when there is high relevance, uncertainty does matter. This article also finds that another related concept, need for cognition, is a predictor of NFO along with relevance, and that there are at least three separate dimensions of NFO—toward issues, facts, and journalistic evaluations. Matthes recommends that a study be conducted that examines the relationship among these three dimensions of NFO and several levels of agenda-setting effects.