Dr. Glenn J. Hansen
Position: Associate Professor
Education: Ph.D., University of Missouri, 2004
Email: gjh@ou.edu
Phone: 405-325-1571
Office: Burton Hall 117
Office Hours: M 9:00-11:00, R 2:00-3:30
Dr. Hansen's Homepage |
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Classes Spring, 2013 semester
Comm 6373 Seminar in Mass Communication
Academic interests: My research and teaching concern theories related to political communication and media effects. I am interested in how media influences our understanding and participation in politics. However, I am also interested in mass media’s influence on such things as childhood learning and violent behavior.
More specifically, the research I do examines a group of theories associated with information acquisition (e.g., issue knowledge) in political campaigns. To this end, I examine the relationships between forms of communication such as television news, newspapers, radio, internet, and interpersonal conversations and acquired political issue information. A part of this work involves examining the content of various forms of communication, in an effort to predict issue learning.
I am particularly interested in longitudinal change in the area of information acquisition. For instance, has newspaper reading become more or less influential (among those who still read the newspaper) over the last decade? How about the internet, do people learn political facts from political blogs and other forms of internet communication? The research I do in this area is quantitative, meaning that deductive logic drives the research process and that statistics are used to test hypotheses. The specific methodologies include survey, experimental, and content analytic. I often combine both survey research and content analytic (issue covered in the news) methodologies in an effort to understand both what the mass media say and the generalized effect of what they say.
An additional area of research concerns the biased processing of news by partisans. In other words, why is it that a partisan perceives news coverage as biased against their political position? The interest here concerns factors that moderate (i.e., increase or decrease) the relationship between news consumption and biased processing. Of particular interest is how anxiety manipulates the biased processing of news. This research mostly uses experimental methodology.
Representative Publications:
Hansen, G. J., & Kim, H. (in press). A meta-analysis of the hostile media effect research. Communication Research Reports.
Hansen, G. J., & Pfau, M. (2011). Multi-Stage experimental designs in political communication research. In E. P. Bucy & R. L. Holbert (Eds.), Sourcebook for political communication research: Methods, measures, and analytical techniques (pp. 194-205). New York: Routledge.
Holbert, R. L., & Hansen, G. J. (2008). Stepping beyond message specificity in the study of affect as mediator and inter-affective associations: Fahrenheit 9/11, candidate aversion, and perceptions of debate superiority. Media Psychology, 11, 98-118. doi:10.1080/15213260701832512
Hansen, G. J., & Benoit, W. L. (2007). Communication forms as predictor of issue knowledge in presidential campaigns: A meta-analytic assessment. Mass Communication & Society, 10, 189-210. doi:10.1080/15205430701265711
Holbert, R. L., Hansen, G. J., Caplan, S. E., & Mortensen, S. (2007). Presidential debate viewing and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11: A study of affect-as-transfer and passionate reasoning. Media Psychology, 9, 673-694. doi:10.1080/15213260701283285