Sunday, May 5, 2013
Project Synopsis: Julia Jang & Caitlin Friess
Our final project examined perceptions of media credibility among students aged 18-25. Research shows that there are a number of factors that may contribute to how credible news is thought to be perceived including how it is presented and from whom it is presented. We distributed a survey which gathered some basic news consumption habits of respondents, then presented them with a series of news clippings from various sources. Half of the clippings were presented without any source citation, while the others were presented with a source attached. Our hypothesis was that the presence/absence of a source would cause a change in perceived credibility. We also suggested that heavy news consumers would have perceptions that were noticeably different from light news consumers. We found that the presence of a source does in fact change perceptions of credibility (e.g. - articles from The Onion are thought to be more credible without a source, while articles from the BBC are almost unanimously voted credible with a source). However, factors such as amount of news consumption age, etc. did not seem to have any effect on how credibly a respondent viewed an item of news media.
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Matiss Batarags
ReplyDeleteMy project aimed to discover how women react to men with accents. I used two groups of 5 women to test how their view of appearance, education and trustworthiness changed when presented with an accented man. We used English, French, Italian, South American and Australian accents for this project, and only English and Australian seemed to have any real effect on the women. The first group was the control and they rated men who had 'normal' accents. The second group rated the same photos but a different clip accompanied the photo. Each photo had a different accent, and the women were asked to rate the men on a 1-10 scale. My hypothesis was that women would tend to rate men with accents as being more handsome or educated. English accents seem to have that effect, but the results cannot be generalizable.