In persuasion and message effects research, involvement is simultaneously one of the most theoretically and empirically useful concepts, and among the most problematic. Involvement is typically invoked to characterize audience members' relationship to the content of a message as well as to explain how that relationship influences their processing of that message, thereby determining message effects. The problem of audience members' relationship to message content and its processing consequences is here recast in terms of the active audience. Audience members are assumed to be goal-directed in exposing themselves to and in processing messages. Six typical goals and associated message-processing strategies —patterns of response to various elements of message presentation and content, source attributes, and persuasive intent—are described, and their implications for predicting message effects and persuasion outcomes are illustrated. The utility of this approach for integrating audience-centered perspectives with empirical persuasion and message effects research and for integrating persuasion research with other message and media effects research contexts is discussed.
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