Seth Goldman, honors associate professor in the Department of Communication and Commonwealth Honors College, has, along with a multidisciplinary team, received a Presidential Authority Award from the Russell Sage Foundation to continue research on how people of color perceive media coverage of rising diversity.
The funding allows Goldman and his team to pursue a unique, paneled approach that seeks to enhance and, to some degree, correct earlier survey work by using large representative samples and interviewing the same population several times over a longer period. Goldman explains, “Most survey research and polling is cross-sectional, that is, one-off at one point in time, so it can't tell you anything about how people form their opinions or how their opinions change over time, whereas, the panel gives you that opportunity.”
As the US goes through an historic shift during which the Census Bureau has projected that America will become a “majority-minority” nation in the next 25-30 years, Goldman’s study challenges that definition, “It only counts people as white if they don't also identify with any other racial or ethnic group, so it excludes multiracial Americans and relies on a very old and exclusive definition of whiteness going back to the ‘one-drop’ rule in the US.” The large samples of Asian, Black, Latino, multiracial and white Americans allow the team to gain perspective as to what people of color feel about their place in American society and how they are reflected back through the lens of media coverage.
Goldman stresses the benefits of the multidisciplinary approach and Communication’s key role in work such as this. “Communication itself really benefits from being an interdisciplinary discipline and I, myself, have received a lot of training in communication, political science, and social psychology. It really makes the project that much better because you're decreasing the chances you're going to miss something and increasing the chances that you're going to get something right and capture the full range of what's important.”
The Russell Sage Foundation grant will allow the team to continue the study through a second and third wave of panel interviews and provide resources to support junior scholars who are members of underrepresented minorities.