Research

What characterizes effective messaging campaigns? What makes some people more likely to share ideas? How would we know if a campaign is working? This semester, Professor Emily Falk offered a new undergraduate course to arm an emerging generation of researchers with the skills to conduct rigorous quantitative research that would allow them to answer these questions and a wide range of others.

“We begin by acknowledging that we are gathered today on the traditional land of the Musqueam people. We would like to pay our respects to Elders past and present and thank them for their hospitality.” This statement – called a land acknowledgement – is how each session of SummerCulture 2017 began.

Led by Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication, SummerCulture is a two-week immersive research experience for Annenberg graduate students held in a different foreign country each year.

In the supermarket, foods labeled “organic” carry premium prices. Consumers generally believe that organic food is healthier, and in many cases they’re right. But what does it mean when the word “organic” is on a cigarette pack? Is smoking an organic cigarette better for your health?

Teens from collectivistic cultures also more swayed by peers than those in individualistic cultures.
 

The way things stand now, tobacco use will kill one billion people in the 21^st century. In the United States, 90% of smokers pick up the habit by age 18, making adolescence a critical time for smoking prevention efforts.

Margaret Mead. Howard Becker. Sol Worth. Erving Goffman.

They are just a few of the influential scholars whose work was published in Studies in Visual Communication (SVC). The journal, originally named Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication (SAVICOMM), was published by the Annenberg School from 1974 until 1985.

For 40 years, it was available only to scholars through hardbound archives. But thanks to a recently completed digitization process, SVC is now publicly available online.

The Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication Press (CARGC Press) is pleased to present CARGC Paper 6, “Emergent Voices and Evolving Agendas: Writing Realities in Cuba’s New Media Landscape,” by CARGC Undergraduate Fellow Mariela Morales-Suárez.

At a time when fact-checkers are proliferating around the globe and experimenting in format and tone, a new study looks at whether text or video is more effective in correcting misinformation – and whether humor helps.

The result? Both funny and non-humorous fact-checking videos were considered “more interesting and understandable” than a comparable print-based fact-checking story, according to the study published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

Anyone following forecasting polls leading up to the 2016 election likely believed Hillary Clinton would become the 45th president of the United States. Although this opinion was the consensus among most political-opinion leaders and media, something clearly went wrong with these prediction tools.

People who viewed the presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton knew more about the candidates’ positions following the debates, a new study has found. In addition, watching the post-debate television coverage enhanced viewers’ knowledge.

When someone talks about using “your network” to find a job or answer a question, most people understand that to mean the interconnected web of your friends, family, and acquaintances. But we all have another key network that shapes our life in powerful ways: our brains.

In the brain, impulses whiz from one brain region to another, helping you formulate all of your thoughts and decisions. As science continues to unlock the complexities of the brain, a group of researchers has found evidence that brain networks and social networks actually influence and inform one another.