General information

Ongoing research projects

• The Quest for Young Eyes: Exposure to and Avoidance of Television News among Adolescents and Young Adults

Promotor: Leen d’Haenens

Doctorandus: Anna Van Cauwenberge

Duration: 2009-2011

Recent international research suggests that adolescents and young adults take less and less interest in news as produced by professionals and presented by television, radio and newspapers. This diminished exposure to news in general and to television news in particular is a trend with a potentially damaging effect on the general sense of public responsibility, on social cohesion and on young people's active participation in society. This research project has a twofold objective. The first is to ascertain the degree to which the trend of diminished exposure to news produced by professionals can also be traced among Flemish and Dutch youngsters (15-34 years old). The second aim bears on the why, i.e. to find the explanations or combinations of explanations underlying this shift and developing a model of those message- and audience-specific characteristics that influence overall news attitudes and uses.

• Multimedia, interactivity and hypertext in online news: effect on objective and subjective knowledge

Promotor: Leen d’Haenens

Doctorandus: Michaël Opgenhaffen

Duration: 2006-2009

Michaël Opgenhaffen successfully defended his PhD thesis on September 29, 2009

Today, different types of online news media cover current events. Using different methods (content analysis, survey and experiments), this study investigates the production, consumption and cognitive effects of online news. First, we make a strong plead for not studying the Internet as one, homogeneous medium, but instead as a meta-medium that carries various divergent news media with specific formal and structural features. More specifically, the level of multimedia, interactivity and hypertextuality (the three main features of the internet and online journalism) is studied. We construct a typology of online news and online news features which is used as a theoretical framework for research towards the cognitive-psychological effects of online news. Next, we survey a homogeneous group of graduate students and investigate how these students make use of online news media and online features. The impact of gender, age and education is also studied. Finally, we set up some experiments to test the impact of multimedia, interactivity and hypertext on the information-processing and the knowledge outcome. Besides objective knowledge (what do people know about this news item?), also subjective knowledge (what do people think they know about this news item?) is being studied.