Opinion Leadership - Demographic Characteristics

Few generalizations can be made about the demographics of opinion leaders (1, p. 433); however, opinion leaders tend to be similar to their followers in terms of education, social status, and beliefs (i.e. homophilous, rather than heterophilous). Possessing similarities provides the opinion leader with "referent power," and although the opinion leader may be slightly higher in terms of status and educational attainment, they are rarely in a different social class (24, p. 355). The tendency towards similarity of the influential-influencee results in a homogeneity in terms of demographic characteristics. People seek advice from peers - from individuals possessing common backgrounds, interests and values. The flow of information, then, is more often horizontal than vertical, as previously suggested by the "trickle-down model" of communication (27, p. 88).

Numerous studies have been conducted attempting to define opinion leaders in terms of socio-demographic terms. The most significant finding from this stream of research is that profiling opinion leaders across areas and domains is an extremely difficult task, if not impossible (27, p. 85). Myers and Robertson studied the dimensions of opinion leadership across twelve different domains, and concluded: "In general, correlations of demographic variables (age, income, wive's education, husband's education, time at present address, ages of children, and number living at home) with opinion leadership in each topic area were low." The study concluded that opinion leaders cannot accurately be identified by demographic variables alone (27, p. 86).