Concept
Riley and Riley model
The 1959 approach of John W. Riley and Matilda White Riley: sender and receiver sit inside primary and secondary groups and a wider social structure; communication is a social and institutional activity.
Riley and Riley (1959) argued that psychology-based approaches overlooked the social structure in which communication takes place, and that social groups matter for understanding it. According to Yaylagül’s account, the most important feature of the model is that it treats communication as a social and institutional activity rather than a psychological and personal process. The receiver belongs to primary groups, where face-to-face relations are formed (family, relatives, friends), and to secondary groups formed by formal organisations; these groups shape how the receiver perceives and understands the message and how he or she will react. The sender, too, sits in groups and a wide social structure. At the broadest level, the mass communication process and the social structure interact with each other.
Read side by side with Maletzke’s field schema (this reading is ours), the shared idea is that communication does not happen in a vacuum but in a social field. For a detailed drawing and page numbers one has to consult the original chapter; this course stays at the level reported by two textbooks.
Example
A person receiving a news item makes sense of it partly through the reaction of family and friends; the organisation that prepared the news is itself inside its own institutional environment.