Sharon Dunwoody
Biographic Data
| ID | 229045 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sharon Dunwoody |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sharon |
| FAMILY NAME | Dunwoody |
| SIGNATURE | DUNWOODY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 44 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Science Journalism and Pandemic Uncertainty
Novel risks generate copious amounts of uncertainty, which in turn can confuse and mislead publics. This commentary explores those issues through the lens of information seeking and processing, with a focus on social media and the potential effectiveness of science journalism
Testing Links Among Uncertainty, Affect, and Attitude Toward a Health Behavior
This study examines the conceptual linkages between individuals’ uncertainty judgments and affective reactions (worry and anger) within the context of an environmental health risk. It uses data from a longitudinal study of people’s reactions to the risks of eating contaminated fish from the Great Lakes that employed the risk information seeking and processing model and incorporates a set of variables from the full model, which includes preventive…
YouTube, Social Norms and Perceived Salience of Climate Change in the American Mind
This online experiment explored how contextual information embedded in new media channels such as YouTube may serve as normative social cues to users. Specifically, we examined whether the number of views listed under a YouTube video about climate change would elicit inferences regarding how “others” feel about the climate issue and, consequently, might influence perceptions of issue salience. Participants in this experiment were exposed to a You…
Using Weight-of-Experts Messaging to Communicate Accurately About Contested Science
Research indicates that balanced news coverage of opposing scientific claims can result in heightened uncertainty among audiences about what is true. In this study, we test the ability of a weight-of-experts statement to enhance individuals’ ability to distinguish between more versus less valid claims. An experiment found that the weight-of-experts narrative led participants to greater certainty about what scientists judged to be true, which made…
Scientific uncertainty in media content
This introduction sets the stage for the special issue on the public communication of scientific uncertainty that follows by sketching the wider landscape of issues related to the communication of uncertainty and showing how the individual contributions fit into that landscape. The first part of the introduction discusses the creation of media content as a process involving journalists, scientific sources, stakeholders, and the responsive audienc…
The influence of weight-of-evidence strategies on audience perceptions of (un)certainty when media cover contested science
Controversy in science news accounts attracts audiences and draws attention to important science issues. But sometimes covering multiple sides of a science issue does the audience a disservice. Counterbalancing a truth claim backed by strong scientific support with a poorly backed argument can unnecessarily heighten audience perceptions of uncertainty. At the same time, journalistic norms often constrain reporters to “get both sides of the story”…
Mapping Neuroscientists’ Perceptions of the Nature and Effects of Public Visibility
How do neuroscientists “make sense” of public visibility in the context of their scientific work? Hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analyses of 24 in-depth interviews with U.S. neuroscientists produced word groups and concept maps related to possible “medialization” processes. Findings suggest that scientists are factoring new communication channels into their public visibility calculus, although one legacy medium, The Ne…
Chair support, faculty entrepreneurship, and the teaching of statistical reasoning to journalism undergraduates in the United States
Statistical reasoning is not the same as doing calculations. Instead, it involves cognitive skills such as the ability to think critically and systematically with data, skills important for everyday news work and essential for the era of data journalism. Twin surveys of the chairs of undergraduate journalism programs in the United States, conducted 11 years apart, revealed that those who perceived benefits from statistical reasoning instruction w…
Global Journalism in Decision-Making Moments
Climate change is a phenomenon with global causes but local effects, and thus global climate change decision-making moments provide ideal opportunities to examine how local and global discourses work together—or do not—through global journalism. This case study investigates the globally focused vs. culturally bound frames used in television news coverage, in Canada and the USA, of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. I…
Linking Risk Messages to Information Seeking and Processing
In an effort to better understand the ways in which risk messages can indirectly affect risk-related behaviors, this review explores the links between such messages and information seeking and processing. The narrative first offers a brief look at the literature that shores up salient concepts, and then moves to a model of risk information seeking and processing (RISP), constructed by Griffin, Dun-woody, and Neuwirth (1999), which seeks to organi…
Medialized Science
Because the neurosciences affect many areas of society and culture, they receive much public attention. Brain research and other focuses of neuroscience are regularly featured in the mass media, calling on neuroscientists to serve as sources. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with neuroscientists in the United States and Germany, this article analyzes neuroscientists' motivations to interact with journalists, their perception of problems wit…
Statistical Reasoning in Journalism Education
Surveys of journalism department heads in 1997 and 2008 showed general support for the need for journalism students to reason with statistical information. Stronger support was associated, in particular, with the perception that this cognitive skill would give students an advantage in the journalism job market. However, many chairs also perceived constraints to learning, such as student inability and/or unwillingness to focus on this material and…
Communicating Uncertainty
Exploring the interactions that swirl around scientific uncertainty and its coverage by the mass media, this volume breaks new ground by looking at these issues from three different perspectives: that of communication scholars who have studied uncertainty in a number of ways; that of science journalists who have covered these issues; and that of scientists who have been actively involved in researching uncertain science and talking to reporters a…
Herzog Karl Alexander von Wurttemberg und die Landschaft (1733 bis 1737)
Journal Article Herzog Karl Alexander von Württemberg und die Landschaft (1733 bis 1737): Katholische Konfession, Kaisertreue und Absolutismus Get access Herzog Karl Alexander von Württemberg und die Landschaft (1733 bis 1737): Katholische Konfession, Kaisertreue und Absolutismus. By Joachim Brüser. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag. 2010. xlviii + 272 pp. €28.00 (hardback). Sean Dunwoody Sean Dunwoody University of Chicago Search for other works b…
Interactions with the Mass Media
Science-Media Interface
An international mail survey of 1,354 biomedical researchers in five countries has revealed that interaction with the media is widespread among this group and that this interaction is largely perceived in a positive light. Possible reasons are offered as to why the perception persists that the scientist-journalist relationship remains troubled, despite the apparent reality. This reality may have negative as well as positive implications; the pote…
After the Flood
In an effort to understand what motivates people to attend to information about flood risks, this study applies the Risk Information Seeking and Processing model to explore how local residents responded to damaging river flooding in the Milwaukee area. The results indicate that anger at managing agencies was associated with the desire for information and active information seeking and processing, as well as with greater risk judgment of harm from…
Exploring lay uncertainty about an environmental health risk
How do laypeople perceive uncertainties about environmental health risks? How do risk-related cognitions and emotions influence these uncertainties, and what roles do sociodemographic and contextual factors, risk judgments, and information exposures play? This study explores these questions using secondary analyses of survey data. Results suggest that uncertainty reflects individual-level emotions and cognitions, but may also be shaped by a varie…
Creating a Climate for Change
The need for effective communication, public outreach and education to increase support for policy, collective action and behaviour change is ever present, and is perhaps most pressing in the context of anthropogenic climate change. This book is the first to take a comprehensive look at communication and social change specifically targeted to climate change. It is a unique collection of ideas examining the challenges associated with communicating…
Seeking and Processing Information about Impersonal Risk
Attempts to model risk response tend to focus on risks that pose a direct personal threat. This study examined the applicability of one risk response model to impersonal risks—risks that threaten something other than the self, in this case, the environment. This study utilized a section of the Griffin et al. risk-information seeking and processing model, which depicts relationships between informational subjective norms and information seeking an…
Information Sufficiency and Risk Communication
In an effort to better understand individuals' use of information in risky situations, in this article we propose a new variable, information sufficiency, as an important component of people's information-seeking behaviors. We surveyed residents of 2 Great Lakes cities to test the ability of a group of factors often employed in risk communication studies to predict information sufficiency, defined as a person's sense of how much information he or…
Predicting Knowledge Complexity in the Wake of an Environmental Risk
In 1993, the parasite cryptosporidium infested the Milwaukee-area drinking supply and sickened some 400,000 people. This study uses survey data gathered from 610 residents in the wake of that outbreak to look at predictors of the complexity of people’s understanding of two causal components of the outbreak: (1) how the parasite got into the water and (2) how it caused illness in the human body. Analysis of open-ended data indicated that, consiste…
How valuable is formal science training to science journalists
The science writing community in the United States increasingly privileges formal science training as part of a science journalist's 'tool kit.' This article asks if existing research supports the argument that such formal training offers attributes critical to a science writer's work and finds that the answer is no. In studies of journalists generally, as well as a very small number of studies of science writers specifically, newsroom socializat…
Studying Heuristic‐Systematic Processing of Risk Communication
Using a model of risk information seeking and processing developed by Griffin, Dunwoody, and Neuwirth (1999) , this study looks at predictors of the processing strategies that people apply to health risk information. Specifically, this article focuses on one relationship within the model—the relationship between perceived amount of information needed to deal with a risk and heuristic‐systematic processing. Perceived amount of information needed r…
An Investigation of Elaboration and Selective Scanning as Mediators of Learning From the Web Versus Print
Recent studies suggest that Web delivery may produce less learning than traditional print. Left unanswered are questions of the process through which differences are produced. Using 2 theories user control and structural isomorphism-we proposed 2 mediators of the influence of medium on learning. Path analysis of experimental data varying medium while holding content constant suggested that the Web increases learning through increased elaboration,…
After the Flood
In an effort to understand what motivates people to attend to information about flood risks, this study applies the Risk Information Seeking and Processing model to explore how local residents responded to damaging river flooding in the Milwaukee area. The results indicate that anger at managing agencies was associated with the desire for information and active information seeking and processing, as well as with greater risk judgment of harm from…
Seeking and Processing Information about Impersonal Risk
Attempts to model risk response tend to focus on risks that pose a direct personal threat. This study examined the applicability of one risk response model to impersonal risks—risks that threaten something other than the self, in this case, the environment. This study utilized a section of the Griffin et al. risk-information seeking and processing model, which depicts relationships between informational subjective norms and information seeking an…
Community Structure and Science Framing of News About Local Environmental Risks
When newspapers cover stories about environmental pollution, the nature of the community they serve can indirectly influence the contents of that coverage. This article describes research showing that newspapers in pluralistic (i.e., usually larger) communities are more likely than papers in homogeneous (i.e., usually smaller) communities to interpret the pollution as a science story. Framing a pollution incident as a science story makes it more …
Science-Media Interface
An international mail survey of 1,354 biomedical researchers in five countries has revealed that interaction with the media is widespread among this group and that this interaction is largely perceived in a positive light. Possible reasons are offered as to why the perception persists that the scientist-journalist relationship remains troubled, despite the apparent reality. This reality may have negative as well as positive implications; the pote…
Linking Risk Messages to Information Seeking and Processing
In an effort to better understand the ways in which risk messages can indirectly affect risk-related behaviors, this review explores the links between such messages and information seeking and processing. The narrative first offers a brief look at the literature that shores up salient concepts, and then moves to a model of risk information seeking and processing (RISP), constructed by Griffin, Dun-woody, and Neuwirth (1999), which seeks to organi…
Using Weight-of-Experts Messaging to Communicate Accurately About Contested Science
Research indicates that balanced news coverage of opposing scientific claims can result in heightened uncertainty among audiences about what is true. In this study, we test the ability of a weight-of-experts statement to enhance individuals’ ability to distinguish between more versus less valid claims. An experiment found that the weight-of-experts narrative led participants to greater certainty about what scientists judged to be true, which made…
Chair support, faculty entrepreneurship, and the teaching of statistical reasoning to journalism undergraduates in the United States
Statistical reasoning is not the same as doing calculations. Instead, it involves cognitive skills such as the ability to think critically and systematically with data, skills important for everyday news work and essential for the era of data journalism. Twin surveys of the chairs of undergraduate journalism programs in the United States, conducted 11 years apart, revealed that those who perceived benefits from statistical reasoning instruction w…
Testing Links Among Uncertainty, Affect, and Attitude Toward a Health Behavior
This study examines the conceptual linkages between individuals’ uncertainty judgments and affective reactions (worry and anger) within the context of an environmental health risk. It uses data from a longitudinal study of people’s reactions to the risks of eating contaminated fish from the Great Lakes that employed the risk information seeking and processing model and incorporates a set of variables from the full model, which includes preventive…
Medialized Science
Because the neurosciences affect many areas of society and culture, they receive much public attention. Brain research and other focuses of neuroscience are regularly featured in the mass media, calling on neuroscientists to serve as sources. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with neuroscientists in the United States and Germany, this article analyzes neuroscientists' motivations to interact with journalists, their perception of problems wit…
Interactivity, Information Processing, and Learning on the World Wide Web
This study examines the role of interactivity in the presentation of science news on the World Wide Web. The authors propose and test a model of interactive information processing that suggests a relationship between interactivity, cognitive elaboration, and learning. A think-aloud method was employed to provide insight into study participants' mental processes during Web use
Journalists, Cognition, and the Presentation of an Epidemiologic Study
Cognitive processes can inform an understanding of newswork. In this case study, the authors examine a growing literature relating cognitive theories to newsmaking and then apply some of the principles in that literature to media coverage of EPA-mandated reformulated gasoline in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In an analysis of how local Milwaukee television news presented an epidemiologic study answering health complaints associated with the gasoline addi…
Predicting Knowledge Complexity in the Wake of an Environmental Risk
In 1993, the parasite cryptosporidium infested the Milwaukee-area drinking supply and sickened some 400,000 people. This study uses survey data gathered from 610 residents in the wake of that outbreak to look at predictors of the complexity of people’s understanding of two causal components of the outbreak: (1) how the parasite got into the water and (2) how it caused illness in the human body. Analysis of open-ended data indicated that, consiste…
Mapping Neuroscientists’ Perceptions of the Nature and Effects of Public Visibility
How do neuroscientists “make sense” of public visibility in the context of their scientific work? Hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analyses of 24 in-depth interviews with U.S. neuroscientists produced word groups and concept maps related to possible “medialization” processes. Findings suggest that scientists are factoring new communication channels into their public visibility calculus, although one legacy medium, The Ne…
Statistical Reasoning in Journalism Education
Surveys of journalism department heads in 1997 and 2008 showed general support for the need for journalism students to reason with statistical information. Stronger support was associated, in particular, with the perception that this cognitive skill would give students an advantage in the journalism job market. However, many chairs also perceived constraints to learning, such as student inability and/or unwillingness to focus on this material and…
Applying Research on the Uses and Cognitive Effects of Hypermedia to the Study of the World Wide Web
This article situates the technological and historical origins of the World Wide Web in hypermedia systems that were conceptualized during the World War II era and first developed decades before the Web. The article then reviews the cross-disciplinary literature on hypermedia, which has developed over the past decade or so in education and educational technology, computer science, library and information science, psychology, and even geography. T…
Social Science in the Mass Media
Journals in Technology
Technology and Culture Official publication of the Society for the History of Technology. University of Chicago Press. Science, Technology, & Human Values Cosponsored by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society. John Wiley and Sons. Research in Philosophy and Technology Official publication of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. JAI Press
Mass media coverage of the Social Sciences
Little is known about how the media cover the social sciences. Some basic questions about social science coverage in particular, are answered in this article. Empirical examinations of media coverage of social science are, according to the author, non-existent. Case studies and commentary on media coverage of social sciences were alternatively studied. The basis of the study rests on three data sets and provides some preliminary answers to the qu…
Scientific Barriers to the Popularization of Science in the Mass Media
Sharon Dunwoody, Michael Ryan; Scientific Barriers to the Popularization of Science in the Mass Media, Journal of Communication, Volume 35, Issue 1, 1 Marc
The challenge for scholars of popularized science communication
Mass media coverage of technological and environmental risks
Research on media communication of risks has become a reasonably well funded and popular domain for scholars around the world. Although one can find a great deal of collaboration among these scholars within countries, cross-cultural collaborations are far more rare. In this article, an American and a German scholar attempt to bring results from studies in both their countries to bear on some of the more popular questions being asked by risk commu…
The Media and Public Perceptions of Risk
The Impact of Risk Message Content and Construction on Comments about Risks Embedded in 'Letters to Friends
In an effort to examine the ways in which content and framing components of mediated risk messages influence individuals' cognitive and affective responses, this study asked university students to read and respond to two risk stories that varied along four dimensions: level of risk expressed, severity of health symptoms experienced as a result of the risk, presence/absence of 'risk' in the headline, and vividness of story lead. Subjects, after re…
Using the Theory of Reasoned Action to Examine the Impact of Health Risk Messages
Results from a laboratory experiment indicate that information about risk probability affects the belief that drinking parasite-infested tap water leads to personal illness. In line with Fishbein and Ajzen's theory of reasoned action, this behavioral belief combined with other components of cognitive structure to affect subjects' attitudes toward the act of drinking the water. These attitudes, along with subjective norms and perceived behavioral …
Community Structure and Science Framing of News About Local Environmental Risks
When newspapers cover stories about environmental pollution, the nature of the community they serve can indirectly influence the contents of that coverage. This article describes research showing that newspapers in pluralistic (i.e., usually larger) communities are more likely than papers in homogeneous (i.e., usually smaller) communities to interpret the pollution as a science story. Framing a pollution incident as a science story makes it more …
Users and navigation patterns of a science World Wide Web site for the public
We report here initial findings of a multi-year study of public use of a World Wide Web site for science information. “The Why Files” strives to provide “the science behind the news” in story narratives that contain opportunities for both linear and non-linear navigation. We report results of two studies, one using survey data and another using computer-collected audit trails. The survey revealed that the typical user was male and well-educated, …
Journalists, Cognition, and the Presentation of an Epidemiologic Study
Cognitive processes can inform an understanding of newswork. In this case study, the authors examine a growing literature relating cognitive theories to newsmaking and then apply some of the principles in that literature to media coverage of EPA-mandated reformulated gasoline in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In an analysis of how local Milwaukee television news presented an epidemiologic study answering health complaints associated with the gasoline addi…
Proposed Model of the Relationship of Risk Information Seeking and Processing to the Development of Preventive Behaviors
Protection Motivation and Risk Communication
The purpose of this study was to explore the utility of protection motivation theory (PMT) in the context of mass media reports about a hazard. Content elements of a hazard's severity, likelihood of occurring, and the effectiveness of preventive actions were systematically varied in a news story about a fabricated risk: exposure to fluorescent lighting lowering academic performance. Results of this experiment ( N = 206) suggest that providing inf…
User Control and Structural Isomorphism or Disorientation and Cognitive Load?
User control theory predicts that providing freedom in learning increases learning compared to traditional instruction, implying that the Web is more effective for learning than print. Theorists have also argued that navigation through Web sites mimics the associative nature of human memory and information processing—structural isomorphism—suggesting Web superiority. However, studies indicate that hypermedia increases cognitive load and produces …
Applying Research on the Uses and Cognitive Effects of Hypermedia to the Study of the World Wide Web
This article situates the technological and historical origins of the World Wide Web in hypermedia systems that were conceptualized during the World War II era and first developed decades before the Web. The article then reviews the cross-disciplinary literature on hypermedia, which has developed over the past decade or so in education and educational technology, computer science, library and information science, psychology, and even geography. T…
Interactivity, Information Processing, and Learning on the World Wide Web
This study examines the role of interactivity in the presentation of science news on the World Wide Web. The authors propose and test a model of interactive information processing that suggests a relationship between interactivity, cognitive elaboration, and learning. A think-aloud method was employed to provide insight into study participants' mental processes during Web use
Studying Users of the Why Files
Science Web sites proliferate, offering users a virtual avalanche of information that ranges widely across topic, message style, and quality of evidence. Users, too, are proliferating. But what kind of people visit these sites, how do they maneuver through the site once they arrive, and do they learn anything about science as a result of their visits? For the past five years, a team of researchers has been trying to answer these questions by focu…
An Investigation of Elaboration and Selective Scanning as Mediators of Learning From the Web Versus Print
Recent studies suggest that Web delivery may produce less learning than traditional print. Left unanswered are questions of the process through which differences are produced. Using 2 theories user control and structural isomorphism-we proposed 2 mediators of the influence of medium on learning. Path analysis of experimental data varying medium while holding content constant suggested that the Web increases learning through increased elaboration,…
Linking the Heuristic-Systematic Model and Depth of Processing
This study draws a nexus between heuristic-systematic information processing and the theory of planned behavior through a model of risk information seeking and processing. The model proposes that the form of information processing individuals apply to risk information from the media and other sources affects beliefs, evaluations, and attitudes considered important to making judgments about performing risk-reducing behaviors. This study found that…
Attributions in explanations of risk estimates
In the spring of 1993, nearly 40 percent of Milwaukee-area residents experienced a nationally publicized outbreak of cryptosporidium, a parasite that infested the metropolitan drinking water supply. Using open-ended survey data gathered from 610 adult residents in the wake of that outbreak, this study looks at factors related to the ways in which people make sense of their quantitative personal risk estimates. The concepts of informal reasoning a…
Studying Heuristic‐Systematic Processing of Risk Communication
Using a model of risk information seeking and processing developed by Griffin, Dunwoody, and Neuwirth (1999) , this study looks at predictors of the processing strategies that people apply to health risk information. Specifically, this article focuses on one relationship within the model—the relationship between perceived amount of information needed to deal with a risk and heuristic‐systematic processing. Perceived amount of information needed r…
Information Sufficiency and Risk Communication
In an effort to better understand individuals' use of information in risky situations, in this article we propose a new variable, information sufficiency, as an important component of people's information-seeking behaviors. We surveyed residents of 2 Great Lakes cities to test the ability of a group of factors often employed in risk communication studies to predict information sufficiency, defined as a person's sense of how much information he or…
Predicting Knowledge Complexity in the Wake of an Environmental Risk
In 1993, the parasite cryptosporidium infested the Milwaukee-area drinking supply and sickened some 400,000 people. This study uses survey data gathered from 610 residents in the wake of that outbreak to look at predictors of the complexity of people’s understanding of two causal components of the outbreak: (1) how the parasite got into the water and (2) how it caused illness in the human body. Analysis of open-ended data indicated that, consiste…
How valuable is formal science training to science journalists
The science writing community in the United States increasingly privileges formal science training as part of a science journalist's 'tool kit.' This article asks if existing research supports the argument that such formal training offers attributes critical to a science writer's work and finds that the answer is no. In studies of journalists generally, as well as a very small number of studies of science writers specifically, newsroom socializat…
Psychology (29 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (24 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Risk Perception and Management (17 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Perception (12 works) · Public relations (12 works)