RESEARCH

Research Description

My research draws from areas centering around political communication, interpersonal communication, media studies, emotion, and cognition. I ask questions about how people interact with and through mediated communication about political and politicized topics. I enjoy trying to understand how the information we consume online and through (news) media influences the way we think and the way we talk with others. My research predominantly incorporates three main areas: (1) partisan news media effects, (2) (mis)information and literacy, and (3) interpersonal and intergroup (political) communication.

Below, I will describe my dissertation project and these three main research areas. 

Dissertation

My dissertation drew from a couple of other projects that I have been working on about the way that we process political news that comes from partisan sources and when we decide to communicate that news, particularly when the news contains misinformation. I used a between-subjects experimental design to examine whether people who were shown a political news story containing a partisan lean that does not match the one associated with the lean of the source they chose to read from were more likely to detect misinformation and whether that detection extends to people who were not shown misinformation. Conversely, I also examined whether people who were shown a political news story containing a partisan lean that did match the one associated with the lean of the source they selected would detect less misinformation. The theoretical rationale that I am using for this paper draws from Spiral of Silence model (SOS; Noelle-Neumann, 1974), Media Use Model (MUM; Hoewe & Ewoldsen, 2024), and Misinformation Recognition and Response Model (MRRM; Amazeen, 2024). 

Research Area #1: Partisan News Media Effects

I study partisan news media effects primarily through experimental designs. I have been collaborating on a couple of research projects that center around news consumers' political news selection, processing, and subsequent decision-making in order to understand more about when partisan news consumers stop consuming news. We have found that coherence between consumers' expectations and the content they are presented is largely the best indicator of less metacognition, more enjoyment, and more reselection. Dissatisfying the news consumers' expectations by presenting them with a news story that contains an ideological lean that opposes that of the source they chose to read from results in more metacognition, less enjoyment, and less continued media use. 

This research has been presented at the International Communication Association's annual meeting and is under review as demonstrated below. Theoretically, literature for this research draws from social,  cognitive, and media psychology as it centers around applying connectionist and symbolic frameworks, (in)coherence, and constraint-satisfaction approaches to conceptualizing metacognition and media content interpretation (Ewoldsen et al., 2023). We have also incorporated elements of media communication literature (e.g., Reinforcing Spirals Model; Slater, 2007; selective exposure, Stroud, 2008, 2011), among other areas. 

Research Area #2: (Mis)Information & Literacy

I have been working on research pertaining to misinformation and literacy since beginning my doctoral studies. In addition to my dissertation, I have collaborated on two papers pertaining to the context of political misinformation that are currently under review and will be presented at the National Communication Association's annual conference in November 2025. Another project that I am collaborating on with a professor in Communication.

I am also collaborating on another project in its early stages that is about experimentally examining the extent to which literacy translates to sharing text-based and image-based political misinformation on-  and offline. My goal in all of these projects is to unpack the issue of m/disinformation and its effects to better understand the mechanisms associated with processing, using, and sharing m/disinformation, particularly in political contexts given recent events. 

Research Area #3: Interpersonal and Intergroup (Political) Communication

The final area of research that I enjoy investigating is the one that first attracted me to the study of communication: interpersonal communication. My early research centered around relational communication and and interpersonal communication through mediated platforms, though it has evolved to incorporate more political and politicized issues. For instance, I collaborated on a paper about collegiate athlete activism where our research team interviewed collegiate athlete activists about the channels and modalities that they used when organizing amidst social, political, and organizational constraints (Feder et al., 2023). We will be publishing another paper under the umbrella of this project about the communicative resilience that these collegiate athlete activists engage in when organizing and navigating social, political, and organizational constraints, which will apply Buzzanell's Communication Theory of Resilience (CTR; 2018).  

I also wrote a critical piece about the social, political, and technological constraints that hamper activists and other individuals affiliated with marginalized groups on social media platforms (Jackson, 2023). This paper, paired with the previous papers about athlete activism, relate to my larger interest of understanding how people's political and social identities influence the way that they interact with each other, consume information, and share information. I believe that these pieces inform ways that people with strong identities can relate to each other, even when those identities may feel diametrically opposed to one another. 

Below, you’ll find my research papers organized by publication type and year. For questions on any specific paper or project, feel free to email me.