Professor Erica Scharrer has received the 2004 SBS Outstanding Research Award.
Prof. Scharrer studies the role of the media in the lives of children, teens, and adults, with particular emphases on identity and representation, violence and aggression, and commercialization. “One main thread in my research stems from my ongoing community engaged research program” Scharrer says, “together with students (sometimes undergraduates, always graduate students) in the department, we design and put into place media literacy programs in one or more local elementary schools. Right now, I am in the middle of my 2024 iteration of [this] long-term community engaged research project. Grad students (Cecilia Zhou, Michelle Ciccone, Gopa Caesar, Janet Chon, and Val Paskar) and undergraduates from my Children, Teens, and Media class are in the midst of offering a lesson plan to local 6th graders to promote their critical thinking about data privacy and the way that internet users' data is used to target them with personalized ads.”
Outside of these studies taking shape from her media literacy work, since 2019, she has published an additional three co-authored refereed journal articles relating to representation in the media. These include a content analysis of the depiction of fathers in U.S. situation comedies, a survey study testing correlations between various forms of media use and endorsement of dominant norms for masculine gender roles within a national sample of U.S. adolescents, and a synthesis/review article about the quantity, qualities, and implications of roles for minoritized groups in television, video games, and film.
“One of the developments in my research about which I am most proud has to do with advancing principles and practices for researchers to use to conduct quantitative research from a critical theory-informed, social justice lens.” Said Scharrer. In 2021, Routlege published Quantitative Research Methods in Communication: The Power of Numbers for Social Justice (with Srividya Ramasubramanian) and they are currently under contract to produce the second edition.
Erica has also received the Distinguished Community Engagement Award at UMass in 2021, was inducted as a fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA) in 2022, and was honored with the Senior Scholar Award from the Children, Adolescents, and Media division of ICA in 2023. She worked and developed her research portfolio while serving as a Chair of the Communication Department, during a period that included the pandemic.