Professional Documents
Culture Documents
•In fact, the Lasswell’s Formula consists of five major components as illustrated in
the figure below.
Lasswell defined each of the five elements representing his model and the areas
of research that investigate each of them:
“Who” refers to the research area called “Control Analysis”.
“Says what” refers to “Content Analysis”
“In which channel” refers to “Media Analysis”
“To whom” refers to “Audience Analysis”
“With what effect” refers to “Effect Analysis”
1. Who:
It refers to the communicator or the person who formulates the message. Many
communication specialists refer to the communicator as source or transmitter or the
sender of the message.
•Control Analysis:
This element of communication has to be studied through “control analysis”. It
investigates things such as:
-Which company owns a certain TV channel or newspaper?
-What is its ideology? Its aims?
-What are its political allegiances?
2. What:
It refers to the content of the message.
•Content Analysis:
Being concerned with the mass media, Lasswell was particularly interested in the
messages present in the media. It is related to an area of study known as “content
research” that takes in charge counting the number of occurrences of a particular
representation of concrete persons or situations in the media and comparing that
with some kind of objective measure like official statistics.
E.g: -How are Blacks represented in TV?
-How is a given society represented in the movies?
-How are women represented in TV?
→If one common representation of women is the housewives that clean the house
and take care of children, we would have to compare the percentage of that kind of
women in TV to the real or objective percentage.
3. Channel:
It is the medium by which the message is being communicated/ transmitted or what
carries the message. Messages can be sent in channels corresponding to humans’
five senses.
. E.g: When a person speaks, his/her words are carried via the channel of air waves
“auditory channel.
The radio news is carried by both air waves radio waves. A message tapped out on the
back of one’s head in Morse code “tactile channel”.
•Media Analysis:
“Media Analysis” investigates the choice of the suitable channel or medium , among
other possibilities, to use to carry a particular message, depending on the content,
the purpose of the message, the target audience, etc. It asks questions such as:
-Is the medium appropriate to the message/audience?
-Can it explain what we want to explain?
E.g: Advertising agencies decide what is the most appropriate magazine, newspaper
or TV channel to reach their audience.
4.Whom:
It refers to the person(s) who receive the message or the audience or the
readership of mass communication. This element of audience is of vital importance
for a communication situation to be successful .
• Audience Analysis:
“Audience Analysis” attempts to know everything about the target public of a
given message, from gender and age to social status and tastes. The mass media
find it crucial to know as much as possible about their audiences
E.g: In the USA, advertisers in the print media use information from the Gallup
organization to know what their audiences are like.
5.Effects:
Lasswell was especially concerned by the outcomes or consequences of messages
by mass communication on people. He says that people do not communicate in a
vacuum rather so as to achieve something.
• Effect Analysis:
It endeavours to know whether the media (mass communication) have any effect or
not, if so, how they affect their audiences.
Advantages of Lasswell’s Model:
•It is useful, easy and simple.
.
•It suits for almost all types of communication.
Although Lasswell’s model was intended to deal with mass communication, it is
suitable and useful for different categories of communication including
“Interpersonal Communication” that is everyday communication/interaction with
family, friends, etc.