Sandra Ball-Rokeach

Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach (born 1941) is an American sociologist and communications scholar. She is professor emerita at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the department of sociology at the University of Southern California (USC). Ball-Rokeach is best known for developing media system dependency theory with Melvin Defleur.

Life

Sandra Jean Ball was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1941. She gained a BA in sociology from the University of Washington in 1963, and her PhD in sociology there in 1968.

In 1967 Ball became an assistant professor at the University of Alberta. In 1968-69 she was co-director of a National Mass Media and Violence Task Force. In 1969 she married the social psychologist Milton Rokeach.

In 1970 Ball-Rokeach moved to Michigan State University, and in 1972 to Washington State University (WSU). She started the first gender studies program at WSU. In 1986 she moved to the University of Southern California, where she stayed until retirement.

She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), and has served as Chair of the ICA. She is on the editorial board of several communication studies journals, including the Journal of Communication, Communication Studies and International Journal of Communication.

Works

Books

• (with Robert K. Baker) Mass media and violence; a report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969.
• (with Milton Rokeach & Joel W. Grube) The Great American Values Test: Influencing Belief and Behavior through Television. Free Press, 1984.
• (ed. with Muriel Cantor) Media, Audience and Social Structure. SAGE, 1986.
• (with Melvin Defleur) Theories of Mass Communication. Pearson, 1989.
• (ed.) Paradoxes of Youth and Sport. SUNY, 2002.
• (ed. with Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas) Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies. Temple University Press, 2004.
• (with Matthew D. Matsaganis and Vikki S. Katz) Understanding Ethnic Media: Producers, Consumers, and Societies. SAGE, 2010.

Selected articles

• (with Melvin Defleur) 'A Dependency Model of Mass-Media Effects'. Communication Research, 3 (1), 3. 1976. doi: 10.1177/009365027600300101
• (with Gerald J. Power, K. Kendall Guthrie and H. Ross Waring) 'Value-framing abortion in the United States: an application of media system dependency theory. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 3, 249-273. 1990.
• 'A theory of media power and a theory of media use: Different stories, questions, and ways of thinking'. Mass Communication & Society, 1(1), 5-40. 1998.
• 'Media System Dependency Theory'. In Wolfgang Donsbach, ed., The Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.