Jessica Birthisel | Nov. 16, 2009
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| Photo by Jessica Haney |
| Assistant professor Lesa Hatley Major is conducting research to find out how framing health news affects news consumers’ attitudes. She received an OVPR grant to support the work. |
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The grant was awarded through the 2008-2009 Faculty Research Support Program (FRSP). According to Donna Carter, program administrator, Hatley Major was the first journalism applicant for the grant, which seeks to support development, expansion and enhancement of research by faculty at Indiana University Bloomington, and to improve the faculty’s ability to garner external funding.
With the assistance of research assistant and doctoral student Stacie Meihaus Jankowski and additional financial assistance from the School of Journalism, Hatley Major will conduct a series of experiments throughout the 2009-2010 academic year. She says she anticipates holding one experiment this semester and two in the spring semester.
Using adult volunteers from a multi-county region, Hatley Major’s experiments will explore the ways that the presentation of news (referred to in research as the “framing” of news) influences the ways audience members think about health problem causes and solutions. She will create Web sites that present healthcare news stories about obesity and lung cancer using different types of language (“frames”) and then see how her subjects’ attitudes about who is responsible for the health problems are affected by the specific stories they read.
The study will include 140 subjects in the first experiment and twice as many in the second and third experiments. Participants will come to Ernie Pyle Hall to read the stories and answer the questions, a process Hatley Major anticipates will take approximately one hour to complete.
“This research is taking it to the next level,” said Hatley Major, not only because of the study of emotion (or affect, as it’s often referred to in research), but also because of a focus on policy-level outcomes. As she wrote in her proposal, “[It] is groundbreaking because it expands theory in mass communication and social psychology.”
In order to consider the policy implications of health communication, Hatley Major is collaborating with Robert Goidel, professor and director of public policy and research in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Goidel and Hatley Major began working together on this topic during Hatley Major’s dissertation work at LSU.
“Some health practitioners say we need to not only focus on individual intervention for health care problems, but also look at the larger picture of public health,” said Hatley Major. “That’s why this research is also looking at outcomes at the policy level.”
School of Journalism Dean Brad Hamm said the FRSP grant is seed money. This is the university’s way of saying that the project has potential for external funding, he said.
“This leads to the professor’s ability to attract external research funding in the future,” said Hamm, explaining that IU is dependent on external funding. “It’s an endorsement of faith that there’s potential there.”
These initial three experiments are only the beginning of a set of research initiatives outlined in Hatley Major’s proposal. Based on the findings of these experiments, Hatley Major said she plans to generate two publications in peer-reviewed journals, to give two presentations at national communication conferences, and to write two grant proposals for additional external funding in order to more closely examine physiological responses to combined news frames.
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