Research Proposal: Cultivating Critical News Literacy in Adolescents

Title: Cultivating Critical News Literacy in Adolescents

Studying the affects of social media on the analytical skills of adolescents is what I hope to explore more this semester. This is a subject that I feel is important since children are now growing up during the time of facebook posts and bloggers they might be unable to differ fact from opinion. Let alone having well developed analytical skills to critique already established news outlets.

It has been said of the generation born in the late ‘80s grew up with the Internet. While I remember my father bring home our first personal computer and typing papers in elementary school, I feel that what we experienced as a generation isn’t as revolutionary as what children today are facing when it comes to the Internet and what they will face in the future. While some of us grew up with the Internet during the “dot .com era”, younger generations now see the Internet as a fact of life rather than a luxury, which can affect not only how they perceive the world but also how it perceives them on social networking sites.

As a research topic, there are multiple theories that will assist in the exploration of this focus; such as interpretative theory, critical theory, and normative theory. Methods will include positivism, empirical research, the scientific method, the use of surveys, and communication science.  These theories and approaches will help me in my research because of what each one represents.

Interpretative theory: subjective interpretation of meaning from words or symbols themselves as well as their context, combined with the scholar’s own interpretations of similar and different texts and contexts. This will help will help explore a child’s developed sense of semiotics, thus valuing how much news value he or she receives from a social networking or news site.

Critical theory: analysis that seeks to reform media systems that contribute to the influence of a dominant social class by promoting that group’s ideas ahead of others, which makes media organization part of the society’s power establishment and defenders of the status quo. This theory will help teach children the value of thinking critically of news and the importance of journalism.

Normative theory: An attempt to describe not how things are, but how they should be according to some ideal standard of social values.  This is where the credibility of traditional news outlets and how children perceive them will be explored.

My methods of positivism will allow me experiment my theories out on children as to understand why they may or may not be fascinated by social media. Through this I will be observing the child’s interaction with an approved social media site.  Quantitative (empirical) research will help me establish questions by providing background knowledge.  Then surveys will be used to gather feed back of children’s reactions and literacy of social networks versus news outlets. All the methods could compile some type of communication science to see the overall interaction.

The ages of kids I plan to observe are students in the fourth grade. I have been asked previously to assist with a exercise on interviewing and writing articles and hope to later studying their analytical skills for this paper.

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