Research

Political polarization is a well-documented issue in the United States, and the schism between left and right can sometimes feel impossible to overcome. But a new study from the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab (PCNL) at the Annenberg School for Communication and Beyond Conflict may offer some hope for the future.

In 2019, the World Health Organization declared vaccine hesitancy one of the top 10 threats to global health. In recent years, worldwide measles outbreaks in communities with low immunization rates have revealed gaps in the herd immunity that once protected us, including the United States’ largest measles outbreak in 20 years in 2019. The troubling trend of declining vaccination uptake is fueled by complacency and loss of confidence in the system that develops, produces, recommends, and delivers vaccines.

Since early March, New York City has suffered the most acute outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. As of the time of writing, the NYC Department of Health has recorded 171,723 cases of COVID-19 — well over ten percent of the 1,171,510 national cases reported by the CDC.

Blinking and rasping, the patient admits that it’s hard for him to breathe. He is suspected to have COVID-19 and he needs to be intubated. It’s a routine procedure that has taken on added risk because it so easily “aerosolizes” the germs that cause the disease, sending them widely into the air.

During this pandemic, there are countless voices urging Americans to engage in the kind of civic behaviors that keep us all safe, like social distancing and frequent hand washing. These voices come at the national, state, and local level. But which ones are actually getting through, making it more likely that Americans will comply with the recommendations?

Graduating Communication major Toni Walker C’20 spent 12 days in South Africa conducting research as part of her undergraduate fellowship with the Annenberg School’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. What follows is her first person account of the trip and how it informed her work.

More than 45 faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff will present research at the International Communication Association’s 70th Annual Conference, to be held virtually. The conference will be asynchronous, and the platform will be open 24 hours a day from May 20-26. Registered participants can log in, view any content, and make comments at any time during those days.

People who relied on conservative or social media in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak were more likely to be misinformed about how to prevent the virus and believe conspiracy theories about it, a study of media use and public knowledge has found.

Based on an Annenberg Science Knowledge survey fielded in early March with over a thousand adults, the study was conducted by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Annenberg researchers study everything from the ongoing crisis in journalism, to how gig workers use apps to make a living, to efforts to get smokers to quit. But no matter their area of specialty, many Annenberg faculty and students have responded to recent events by pivoting their work to address what may be the world’s most urgent problem: coronavirus, or COVID-19.