Research Group Participation

Mass Communication Research Center - Media & Politics

The Mass Communication Research Center - or MCRC as it is commonly called - has been a vital part of graduate student research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for over 50 years. MCRC provides a practical, hands-on approach to graduate students interested in learning how to do experimental research. Each year, the student leader of the group works with the faculty mentors and the other graduate students to design and field a study, as well as work in groups to develop papers. Our wiki provides more information about MCRC's past projects, including this year's current emphasis.

I have been a member of MCRC since 2005, including serving as the student leader last year, from Fall 2009 to Summer 2010. Last year, under my leadership, MCRC's project focused on how moderator style - correspondent, comic, or combatant - interacted with guest tone - civil or uncivil - to influenc perceptions of a political debate show and the government. Two papers won awards at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication 2010 in Denver, Colorado, based off this research study.

My work in MCRC has remained focused on examining the underpinnings of framing effects, how social identity influences response to guest incivility, and how credibility perceptions are influenced depending on the role adopted by the moderator and the tone of the invited guests on a political debate show.

Social Media and Democracy Research Group

The Social Media and Democracy Research Group - a.k.a. SMAD - was formed during the Fall of 2006. Focusing generally on issues of new media, SMAD is also a student-driven research group. In the past four years, we have performed studies examining the motivations of blog readers using a purposive sample of readers of the top political blogs, the intersection of blog content and news content online, and a content analysis of the content posted on YouTube.com, including videos, comments, and news coverage around the Proposition 8 debate in California. I served as interim student leader in this group in Fall of 2009, while our student leader was unable to attend meetings.

My research in the group has focused on examining the pathways that encourage blog readers to participate politically, comparing perceptions of credibility for news vs. blogs when the blog takes an uncivil, attacking tone, and examining how audience motivations to process affects source identification from blog and news content when the two are intermingled.

Political Elections and Communication Effects

The Political Elections and Communication Effects Research Group - PEACE - works under the leadership of Professor Dhavan Shah. Together, we have successfully applied for grants and fielded several national surveys during the 2008 presidential election. Specifically, we collaborated with other universities, including the Universities of Missouri, Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, and Michigan, and collected a three-wave panel dataset of adolescents ages 12-17 and their parents around the 2008 election. My research based off this project has investigated how teens are socialized into the news use habits and their use of Facebook for political purposes.

The group also participated in a second data collection. We used national panel data collected by YouGov/Polimetrix’s 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP), which provided a national random sample of American adults with six waves of panel data collected during the 2008 election. My work with this dataset has focused on understanding how people's preferences for punditry and entertainment have influences their media diet, as well as predicting learning during the course of the campaign.