Media Use and Effects
At Ohio State’s School of Communication, research on media uses and effects explores how people engage with a wide spectrum of media—from television, film, news, and music to social media, streaming platforms, video games, and AI-driven technologies—for entertainment, information, and persuasion.
Faculty and students investigate the psychological, interpersonal, group, social, and cultural processes that guide media selection, processing, interpretation, and influence. Topics include the motivations for media use, audience choice among competing media and content, and the individual, community, and societal responses towards and consequences of media exposure.
This research area embraces methodological diversity, employing approaches that range from lab experiments, large-scale analyses of text (e.g., social media posts), digital trace data (e.g., phone and web use traces), longitudinal experience-sampling methods that capture media use and impacts in everyday life, and to investigate the underlying mechanisms.
OSU’s School of Communication is nationally recognized for its leadership in media psychology and psychophysiology, computational communication, media technology, health and political messaging, and children and media research, advancing understanding of how media shape individuals and society.