Annenberg Faculty Research
The Annenberg School stands at the forefront of basic and applied empirical research on the institutions, processes, nature, and consequences of communication. This research is based on theories, methods, and knowledge emerging from our own discipline as well those adapted from cognate disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Many Annenberg faculty members are jointly appointed or hold secondary faculty positions in other schools and departments at Penn. Annenberg faculty and students regularly collaborate with each other and with faculty, researchers, and students from Penn’s other distinguished schools and centers.
The result of this inter- and intra-disciplinary research network is a faculty and student body with the theoretical, methodological and substantive breadth, depth, and agility to produce cutting-edge research on the most pressing communication-centered issues of the twenty-first century.
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Publication How Christians Reconcile Their Personal Political Views and the Teachings of Their Faith: Projection as a Means of Dissonance Reduction(2012-03-06) Ross, Lee D; Lelkes, Yphtach; Russell, Alexandra GThe present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to "fellowship"issues (e.g., taxation to reduce economic inequality and treatment of immigrants) and liberals acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to "morality" issues (e.g., abortion and gay marriage). However, conservatives also claimed that a contemporary Jesus would be even more conservative than themselves on the former issues whereas liberals claimed that Jesus would be even more liberal than themselves on the latter issues. Further reducing potential dissonance, liberal and conservative Christians differed markedly in the types of issues they claimed to be more central to their faith. A concluding discussion considers the relationship between individual motivational processes and more social processes that may underlie the present findings, as well as implications for contemporary social and political conflict.Publication The Voice of the Visual in Memory(2004-01-01) Zelizer, BarbieFor as long as collective memory has been an area of scholarly concern, the precise role of images as its vehicle has been asserted rather than explicated. This essay addresses the role of images in collective memory. Motivated by circumstances in which images, rather than words, emerge as the preferred way to establish and maintain shared knowledge from earlier times, it offers the heuristic of "voice" to help explain how images work across represented events from different times and places. The essay uses "voice" to elucidate how the visual becomes an effective mode of relay about the past and a key vehicle of memory.Publication Mathematical Theory of Communication(2009-01-01) Krippendorff, KlausPublication The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis(1957) Katz, ElihuThe hypothesis that "ideas often flow from radio and print to opinion leaders and from these to the less active sections of the population" has been tested in several successive studies. Each study has attempted a different solution to the problem of how to take account of interpersonal relations in the traditional design of survey research. As a result, the original hypothesis is largely corroborated and considerably refined. A former staff member of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, the author is now on leave from his post as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and is currently guest lecturer in sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.Publication Work Status, Television Exposure, and Educational Outcomes(1983) Messaris, Paul; Hornik, RobertPublication Systematic and Random Disagreement and the Reliability of Nominal Data(2008-02-10) Krippendorff, KlausReliability is an important bottleneck for content analysis and similar methods for generating analyzable data. This is because the analysis of complex qualitative phenomena such as texts, social interactions, and media images easily escape physical measurement and call for human coders to describe what they read or observe. Owing to the individuality of coders, the data they generate for subsequent analysis are prone to errors not typically found in mechanical measuring devices. However, most measures that are designed to indicate whether data are sufficiently reliable to warrant analysis do not differentiate among kinds of disagreement that prevent data from being reliable. This paper distinguishes two kinds of disagreement, systematic disagreement and random disagreement, and suggests measures of them in conjunction with the agreement coefficient α (alpha) (Krippendorff, 2004a, pp. 211-256). These measures, previously proposed for interval data (Krippendorff, 1970), are here developed for nominal data. Their importance lies in their ability to not only aid the development of reliable coding instructions but also warn researchers about two kinds of errors they face when using imperfect data.Publication Curing Television's Ills: The Portrayal of Health Care(1985-10-01) Turow, Joseph; Coe, LisaContent analysis of TV programming across day- and night-time genres shows drugs and machines as the ubiquitous modes of healing, with doctors diagnosing incorrectly only three percent of the time.Publication Star Academy as Arab Political Satire(2008-01-01) Kraidy, Marwan MPublication Computing Krippendorff's Alpha-Reliability(2011-01-25) Krippendorff, KlausKrippendorff’s alpha (α) is a reliability coefficient developed to measure the agreement among observers, coders, judges, raters, or measuring instruments drawing distinctions among typically unstructured phenomena or assign computable values to them. α emerged in content analysis but is widely applicable wherever two or more methods of generating data are applied to the same set of objects, units of analysis, or items and the question is how much the resulting data can be trusted to represent something real.Publication Cybernetics’s Reflexive Turns(2008-01-01) Krippendorff, KlausIn the history of cybernetics there have been several attempts by cyberneticians to put themselves into the circularities of their theories and designs, invoking a shift from the cybernetics of mechanisms to a cybernetics of cybernetics. The latter is the title of a book chapter by Margaret Mead (1968) and of Heinz von Foerster’s (1974) edited compilation of articles on cybernetics. Foerster introduced the concept of second-order cybernetics which may have overshadowed or sidelined other reflexivities. I am attempting to recover four reflexive turns, describe their origin, implications, and suggest ways in which they continue what Karl Müller (2007) calls an unfinished revolution. These turns are not discussed here in their historical succession but as conceptual expansions of cybernetics.