New Student Research on How News Affects Support for Climate Adaptation

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News media are the public’s primary source about risks such as climate change, but traditional journalistic approaches to climate change have failed to build support for collective social responses. Solutions journalism, an emerging practice focused on credible stories about responses to societal problems, may offer an alternate approach. From an online experiment with a convenience sample of U.S. undergraduates (N = 348), we found that solutions journalism stories were positively associated with perceived behavioral control, which mediated support for collective action for climate change adaptation. Additionally, attribution of responsibility to individuals and government, participant hope, and eco-anxiety were associated with support for collective action. Findings extend our understanding of how risk communication affects policy support for climate change adaptation and suggest that solutions journalism may allow journalists to communicate climate change’s danger without depressing support for social action to mitigate its effects.

Thier, K. & Lin, T. (2022). How solutions journalism shapes support for collective climate change adaption. Environmental Communication. https://doi.org//10.1080/17524032.2022.2143842

Watch Fall Virtual Seminar Series on Our YouTube Channel

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The CHRC welcomed Dr. Angela Cooke-Jackson and Dr. Brian Southwell as its Fall 2022 Virtual Seminar Series speakers.

Click here to see Dr. Cooke-Jackson’s talk, “Risk Communication: Engaging Community-Based Participatory Design Models to Increase Awareness and Partnerships within Underrepresented Black and Brown Communities,” which was on October 14.

Dr. Southwell’s talk “Misinformation as a Societal Concern ” wasNovember 11. Click here to watch a recording.

Dr. Cooke-Jackson’s expertise is in Health Communication and Behavioral Science. She uses community-based participatory research and media literacy to help communities curate and design innovative, practical applications for sustainable change. She is also the co-director of the Intimate Communication Lab. She envisions her research at the nexus of culture, health disparities, and marginalized populations. Her current scholarship incorporates intimacy and reproductive health to advance agency among underserved and marginalized people of color and gender minorities. She has worked extensively with memorable messages to construct theory and build research that addresses health outcomes, especially as it relates to sexual health. Her international research aspirations have taken her to Australia, Italy, Peru and Hong Kong. Her travels to Australia were most enriching because they strengthen her understanding of the similar health disparities among indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and people of color in the United States. Her research has appeared in numerous edited books and various journals including Health Communication, Communication Teacher, Communication Studies, Journal of Human Sexuality, Sexuality & Culture, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, Media Education Research Journal and Journal of Digital and Media Literacy. Her co-authored textbook by Rowman & Littlefield is titled Communicating Intimate Health.

Dr. Brian Southwell is Senior Director of the Science in the Public Sphere Program in RTI International’s Center for Communication Science. He also is Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine with Duke University and a graduate faculty member and Adjunct Associate Professor in Health Behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Southwell has published widely on topics such as public understanding of science. He co-founded the Duke Program on Medical Misinformation to improve patient-provider conversations about misinformation, and also has published a book, Misinformation and Mass Audiences, and various articles on the topic. Southwell was recently appointed to the Advisory Committee for the Council of Medical Specialty Societies-National Academy of Medicine-World Health Organization Collaboration on Identifying Credible Sources of Health Information in Social Media. He also has organized several summits on trust in science and medical misinformation, such as the Misinformation Solutions Forum sponsored by the Rita Allen Foundation in conjunction with the Aspen Institute. In addition, Southwell created and hosts The Measure of Everyday Life, a public radio show that translates research for general audiences on WNCU 90.7 FM, which is based at North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC.

 

    

 

Spring Virtual Seminar Series Speakers Announced

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The CHRC is pleased to welcome Dr. Shawnika Hull and Dr. Emily Vraga as its Spring 2022 Virtual Seminar Series speakers.

Dr. Hull’s talk, “Masks Are the New Condoms: Health Communication, Intersectionality and Racial Equity in COVID-Times,” will be Friday, March 18, 12-1 p.m.

Dr. Vraga’s talk “Working Together: How to Correct Health Misinformation on Social Media” will be Friday, April 22, 12-1 p.m.

To attend, register here. Following your registration, we will send you the Zoom link for the seminars.

About our speakers:

Dr. Shawnika Hill (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) focuses on reducing racial inequities in HIV incidence through community-engaged, applied communication science. She develops, implements, and evaluates theoretically grounded communication interventions focused on impacting individual and social-structural barriers to HIV prevention. This research is informed by and developed in close collaboration with community partners. Her expertise includes qualitative (i.e. focus groups) and quantitative (i.e. surveys, experiments) data collection and analytical methods. Her research has been funded through various institutional, non-profit (i.e., MAC AIDS Fund) and governmental mechanisms (i.e., NIH, CDC) and published in communication and public health journals. Her rigorous, theoretically grounded, collaborative approach to research informs health communication theorizing and practice. Hull is currently a Visiting Professor in the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Emily Vraga (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin – Madison) is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Don and Carole Larson Professorship in Health Communication. Her research focuses on how individuals respond to news and information about contentious health, scientific, and political issues in digital environments. She studies how to (1) detect and correct misinformation via social media, especially on health topics, (2) use news media literacy messages to limit biased processing and improve news consumption habits, (3) encourage attention to higher quality and more diverse online content. She prioritizes using diverse and novel methodologies to better match an evolving hybrid media environment.

Virtual Seminar Series

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The CHRC is pleased to welcome Dr. Nathan Walter and Dr. Jiyoung Lee as its Fall 2021 Virtual Seminar Series speakers.

Dr. Walter’s talk, “Making it Real: The Role of Parasocial Relationships in Enhancing Perceived Susceptibility and COVID-19 Protective Behavior,” was Friday, Oct. 22, 12-1 p.m. Click here to watch a recording of his presentation.

Dr. Lee’s talk “Emotion, Misinformation, and Deepfake about Health Risks” was Friday, Dec. 3, 12-1 p.m. Click here to watch a recording of her presentation.

To attend, register here. Following your registration, we will send you the Zoom link for the seminars.

About our speakers:

Nathan Walter is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is Founder and Director of the Center of Media Psychology and Social Influence (COM-PSI) and a faculty member at the Center for Communication and Health (CCH), both at Northwestern. Walter’s research concerns the evaluation of health messages, correction of misinformation, and the role of emotion and affect in social influence. His studies have been published in a number of leading outlets, including the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, and Communication Monographs. His most recent work, which is supported by the FDA, the Delaney Family Foundation, and the Peterson Foundation focus on novel methods to debunk misinformation and reduce health-related disparities.

Jiyoung Lee (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, Department of Journalism and Creative Media. Her research is at the heart of emerging media effects on persuasion communication. She studies human-computer interaction in the context of medical/risk (mis)information, how new media affect polarization primarily through emotions, and how media literacy interventions should be designed to engage the public in accurate information about health risks. One of her main recent projects examines multimodal misinformation and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled deepfake about health-risk-related issues. She won Top Paper Award at the International Communication Association (ICA), Communication and Technology (CAT) Division in 2021.