A Cumulative Proportional Odds Model to Analyze the Influence of Mass Media on Teenagers in Messina

The media are constantly evolving at a breakneck pace and mainly young people, with their flexibility of mind and their continuous curiosity, can better understand the characteristics and potential of such advances. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between teenagers and media, in order to try to better understand the habits and to conduct analysis on social interactions with young people. In order to evaluate the influence of mass media in the life of the young people, the Statisticians of Messina University decided to perform a statistical survey to evaluate the influence of the media in the life of Messina＇s teenagers. A questionnaire entitled ＂Perceptions of the influence exerted by mass media＂ was administered in some schools. From the methodological point of view, three statistical models were estimated in order to formalize the dependence of the mass media influence by the kind of TV programs, the time spent on TV viewing and computer use and the kind of most used social networks. Since the mass media influence is an ordinal variable expressed by four ordered categories （1 = nothing; 2 = low; 3 = average; 4 = high） we used the Cumulative Proportional Odds Model to formalize the dependence by the potential predictors.