Katherine Ognyanova

Political Efficacy on the Internet: A Media System Dependency Approach

Abstract Grounded in Media System Dependency theory, this work investigates the impact of new media on political efficacy. It suggests that dependence on online resources affects people’s perceptions about the democratic potential of the Internet. Using structural equation modeling, the study tests the relationship between political attitudes and the perceived utility of the Web. The analysis employs measures that take into consideration the facilitating role of communication technologies. Results indicate that online political efficacy is associated with individual views about the comprehensiveness and credibility of new media. Efficacy is also linked to the perceived ability of online tools to aid the maintenance of ideologically homogenous social networks. The intensity of Internet dependency relations is found to be predicted by the perceived comprehensiveness – but not credibility – of online news.

Causing Ripples in Local Power Relations

Hyperlocal news operations have been considered a promising alternative to the shrinking legacy media for sustaining civic discourse and engagement in local communities. However, these operations’ meso-level influence on civic engagement has not been widely investigated. Building upon the Media System Dependency theory, this article proposed an analytical framework for assessing such influence. This framework was applied to an ethnically diverse city as a case study, and 15 interviews with city officials and legacy media reporters helped elucidate the ways in which organizational actors might respond to the entry of a non-commercial, participatory local news website. The implications of these organizational responses for shifting the power–dependency relation between the local media and political systems were discussed, and the findings pointed to both promises and barriers in materializing the democratic potential of hyperlocal news websites while calling for more research across different community contexts.

Volunteer Science: An Online Laboratory for Experiments in Social Psychology

Experimental research in traditional laboratories comes at a significant logistic and financial cost while drawing data from demographically narrow populations. The growth of online methods of research has resulted in effective means for social psychologists to collect large-scale survey-based data in a cost-effective and timely manner. However, the same advancement has not occurred for social psychologists who rely on experimentation as their primary method of data collection. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of one online laboratory for conducting experiments, Volunteer Science, and report the results of six studies that test canonical behaviors commonly captured in social psychological experiments. Our results show that the online laboratory is capable of performing a variety of studies with large numbers of diverse volunteers. We advocate for the use of the online laboratory as a valid and cost-effective way to perform social psychological experiments with large numbers of diverse subjects.

Connecting With Hyperlocal News Website: Cause or Effect of Civic Participation?

This is one of the first systematic explorations into the relationship between residents’ connection to a hyperlocal news website and civic participation. Integrating an ecological framework of civic participation and an audience-centered approach, the present study investigates whether residents’ connection to a hyperlocal news website serves as the cause or effect of community participation. Using survey data with probability sampling of ethnically diverse residents, the study identifies reciprocal influences between hyperlocal news connection and civic participation level. Findings suggest that the civic potential of hyperlocal digital news may result from both agentic use of and less intentional exposure to it.

Contextualizing connectivity: how internet connection type and parental factors influence technology use among lower-income children

ABSTRACT This project links research on digital inequality, which focuses on connection quality and its outcomes for under-connected individuals, and parental mediation, which focuses on the influence of parents on children’s technology experiences. We examine the internet connection type used by families, the technology experiences of lower-income parents, and their perceptions of opportunities that technology use offers their children. We then determine how these factors influence the frequency and scope of their school-age children’s technology use. Findings show that contextualizing children’s connectivity to account for infrastructural, socio-demographic, and relational influences provides new insights into the technology experiences of lower-income children. One set of findings suggests that direct benefit from increased connectivity is most evident for lower-income parents – those with the lowest household incomes, lowest levels of education, and whose dominant language is not English. These effects remain after controlling for other socio-demographic factors. The second set of results shows that greater connectivity increases how frequently both children and parents use the internet, but is associated only with a greater scope of internet activities for parents. Parents’ online activity scope is important for their children’s online experiences, directly predicting the scope of their online activities. High-scope parents were also significantly more likely to see digital opportunities in their children’s internet use, which in turn also predicted more frequent and broader internet use by their children. We conclude by considering the practical implications of these findings for digital equity initiatives targeting lower-income families.

Researching Community Information Needs

This chapter provides a brief overview of major theory-driven approaches contributing to the evaluation of community information needs and the extent to which those needs are met in a given context. The frameworks outlined here are grounded in: (1) communication ecology and multilevel approaches; (2) economics research, market, and audience analyses; (3) information inequality and digital exclusion; (4) mass communication and content analysis; and (5) computational social science and network analysis. While this list is by no means exhaustive, much of the relevant academic, industry, and policy research falls into one or more of those five categories.