Analysis of the Environmental Media Impact on the Youth Audience

Abstract

The study provides the results of the Internet environmental information analysis. The article highlights the results of the study of environmental content perception using eye-tracking, survey, and content analysis methods. The respondents are young people between 18 and 21 years old. The results of the study based on the respondents’ data confirm the author’s assumptions about the literacy and accuracy of this kind of content presentation.The purpose of the research is to study the peculiar features of building headlines of environmental texts from Internet media resources to identify their impact on the target youth audience (Generation Z) and their subsequent behavioral response. The study of the environmental materials from Internet media was characterized by using a group of methods, including neuromethods (in particular, eye-tracking, which tracks the indirect reactions of respondents), as well as a survey and content analysis.The stimulus material for the study was environmental materials from Internet sites of risk bearing regions, namely, the Chelyabinsk region and Northern Kazakhstan. The paper reflects the results of the target youth audience’s responses to the stimulus material and shows the level of impact on the respondents’ behavior and emotions. It presents in detail the data of the content analysis, which significantly expand the scientific perspectives on the coverage of environmental issues in the media and the consequences of such coverage.To carry out the content analysis, we chose a quantitative and qualitative approach, which outlined the semantic and stylistic features of building environmental texts and helped to establish the connotative characteristics of such texts with their subsequent classification by topics, categories, and groups.The use of the survey method helped us to better understand the problem of perceiving environmental information and contributed to a more detailed study of the respondents’ behavior. The chosen methods contributed to the definition of "active areas" of the youth audience’s interests and made the authors more confident in the assumption that the texts of headlines harmoniously combined with the image significantly influence the perception of the youth audience, as well helped to understand the appropriate coverage of environmental issues in the Internet media.