{"title":"An “Identity Turn” in political communication?: testing the relationship between media use and identity alignment in the United States","authors":"Daniel S Lane, Melody Chen, Yifei Wang","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf026","url":null,"abstract":"Despite a rise in identity-centric communication scholarship, there is a lack of theory and evidence regarding how media use relates to the on-going alignment between political and social identities (i.e., identity alignment). We offer a framework for theorizing this dynamic and apply it to examine the relationship between Americans’ media diets and on-going psychological alignment between political and social identities in the United States (i.e., partisan social sorting). We use data from 33,690 American respondents from three national surveys: one longitudinal (1972–2020) and two fielded in 2020. There is evidence that identity alignment (i.e., sorting) has grown over time, but only among those who are most interested and attentive to politics and media. In 2020 surveys, we find no evidence that the frequency of media use was a significant predictor of social sorting. Instead, the composition of individuals’ media diets predicted the alignment between their social and political identities.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144612871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mohan J Dutta, Phoebe Elers, Andee Zorn, Stephen Bray, Selina Metuamate, Venessa Pokaia, Pooja Jayan, Mahbubur Rahman, Shakila Hashim, Jie Liu, Negin Nematollahi, Akbar Shah Bin Mohd Sharif, Christina Teikmata-Tito, Francine Whittfield, Sarah Holdaway, De’Anne Jackson, Bronwyn Kerr, Ihaia Raharuhi
{"title":"Preventing Violence in the Disability Margins: A Culture-Centered Study in Aotearoa","authors":"Mohan J Dutta, Phoebe Elers, Andee Zorn, Stephen Bray, Selina Metuamate, Venessa Pokaia, Pooja Jayan, Mahbubur Rahman, Shakila Hashim, Jie Liu, Negin Nematollahi, Akbar Shah Bin Mohd Sharif, Christina Teikmata-Tito, Francine Whittfield, Sarah Holdaway, De’Anne Jackson, Bronwyn Kerr, Ihaia Raharuhi","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf027","url":null,"abstract":"Disabled people are overrepresented as victims of sexual violence and family violence, but are often excluded from research and the development of communication campaigns, laws, and interventions. Grounded in the culture-centered approach, we undertook 77 qualitative interviews with predominantly Māori (Indigenous) and low-income disabled individuals to identify primary prevention needs for reducing family and sexual violence. Participants articulated disability as being structural, intersectional, and layered with erasure, contributing to conditions that perpetuate violence. Erasure and the resulting loss of agency were pervasive across diverse disabilities and participant groups, with Māori bearing a disproportionate burden. Emergent in the participants’ narratives were strategies around addressing communication inequalities and grounding prevention resources within local community contexts, set against structural determinants of violence perpetuated by the settler colonial State. This study challenges the hegemonic approach to addressing sexual violence and family violence, revealing a relationship between communicative and material forms of violence.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144612869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The labor of love: romance authors and platform solidarity","authors":"Christine Larson","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf011","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, emerging technologies and neoliberal policies have transformed the way people work. This article explores the impact of sociotechnical change on platformized cultural production, where creators depend on digital platforms to make a living. By examining the case of American romance writers, the paper reveals how unique solidaristic practices, including gender-focused community building, an emphasis on pan-hierarchical connections, and communicative norms of open information-sharing, empowered romance authors throughout the platformization of publishing. Through 57 in-depth interviews and 40 years of archival research, the study demonstrates how these practices facilitated the diffusion of digital self-publishing, reducing romance writers’ precarity. By introducing a novel, multi-level communicative framework, this paper integrates meso-level theories of innovation with macro- and micro-level understandings of platform power. This framework provides a new model for understanding collective agency within platformized industries The paper contributes to broader discussions of “good work,” suggesting that communicative strategies can reshape power imbalances even under platformized conditions.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144603137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evidence of balance theory as a predictive framework for character interdependence","authors":"C Joseph Francemone, Matthew Grizzard","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf025","url":null,"abstract":"Across three studies, we examined how balance theory can be used to predict interdependent character evaluations. Leveraging the propositions of balance theory as suggested by Grizzard, Francemone et al. (2020), our findings demonstrate that moral information about a single character biases perceptions and judgments of other characters within the same narrative. Beyond replicating binary comparative judgments between characters, similar to past work on character interdependence, we show that the relational information conveyed by a character network can reveal how interdependent effects between several characters will manifest. Specifically, our results demonstrate that characters are either contrasted or assimilated to one another based on the relationship valences communicated by the narrative’s character network. Extrapolating from these findings, we discuss several aspects of character networks that should be considered to further develop the concept of character interdependence.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144516028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Privacy calculus, privacy paradox, and context collapse: A replication of three key studies in communication privacy research","authors":"Philipp K Masur, Giulia Ranzini","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf007","url":null,"abstract":"Since the advent of social network sites, researchers have investigated how and why users share personal information online. Yet, the replicability of individual findings remains unclear. We addressed this gap by closely replicating three seminal studies: Krasnova et al.’s (2010) study on the privacy calculus, Vitak’s (2012) analysis of the impact of context collapse, and Dienlin and Trepte’s (2015) investigation of the privacy paradox. While only 32.5% of the original effects replicated exactly across the three studies, 67.5% were significant and in line with the original direction. Despite this overall replication success, the prominent negative privacy concerns and self-disclosure link did not replicate and became positive instead. Additional specification curve analyses revealed that the strength of this relationship is contingent on a variety of analytical decisions. The findings offer insights into the replicability of survey-based privacy research, highlighting the role of replication in a dynamic research landscape.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144516029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Struggles for believability: from rape victims to senators, dictators, and news brands","authors":"Jayson Harsin","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf010","url":null,"abstract":"One of the rare uncontested contemporary public facts is that especially Western academic and popular discourse became preoccupied with problematizing public untruth, misbelief, and distrust in the wake of Brexit, Trump, and the Covid-19 pandemic, a conjuncture more controversially referred to as “post-truth politics.” Three diverse books under review here can be gingerly approached under that post-truth banner, so long as it means a public anxiety about the possibility of securing publicly accepted facts (as opposed to, say, Oxford dictionaries’ definition). Considering them together affords us a broader global and deeper historical, social, and psychological perspective on the conjuncture. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s Wrong encourages us to see what appears as a perplexing polarization of politics and entrenched (mis)beliefs as, instead, a distilled product of media-economic logics and the political exploitation of basic psychological needs for agency, control, comprehension, and/or community. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins’ Believability—engaging with the post-#MeToo and post-truth political entanglements—explores how disbelief in factual accounts has always been reserved for women and other structurally demoted truth-tellers in historically specific “economies of believability”. In Spin Dictators, meanwhile, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Triesman draw attention to shifting styles of dictatorship, from bloodily repressive autocratic and totalitarian historical examples—the test cases of Arendt’s proto-post-truth politics around the “fragility” of public facts—to something more liberal-democratic in terms of style and strategy.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time after time: longitudinal qualitative interviewing and the interplay between structure and agency in communication research","authors":"Oren Meyers, Roei Davidson","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf022","url":null,"abstract":"Given that communicative phenomena are inherently processual, the scarcity of a longitudinal narrative perspective is an evident lacuna in communication research. This article argues that to explore communicative processes as a longitudinal experience, shaped by the constant tension between structure and agency, researchers can elicit and analyze stories that information producers and consumers construct in their own words across time. Consequently, the article explores the implementation of Longitudinal Qualitative Interviewing (LQI), the repeated interviewing of the same individuals at two (or more) time points, in the study of media. It considers the methodological and conceptual insights that could be drawn from such an application, and the ways in which the unique affordances of LQI enhance the validity of qualitative communication research. Our discussion of the implementation of LQI is anchored in an exploration of occupational life histories of 39 Israeli journalists over the span of a decade.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The artisanal imaginaries of contemporary production","authors":"Michelle Phillipov, Susan Luckman, Lyn McGaurr","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf028","url":null,"abstract":"Ideas of “craft” and “craftsmanship” have long been mobilized in middle-class Global North markets to promote the romanticized authenticity of artisanal goods, but what happens when these ideas are applied to industrially-made products? This article analyzes the artisanal imaginaries of the Australian Made Campaign to explore how the campaign taps into the growing cultural desirability of the handmade and the artisanal, and heightened concerns about the future sustainability of mass production. Focusing on the discursive and aesthetic approach of the campaign’s Facebook posts, we show how the campaign contributes to a wider mainstreaming of neo-craft as a dominant mode for promoting production in a national context where onshore manufacturing has long been in decline. We argue that the campaign’s media repertoires work to “domesticate” large-scale manufacturing via emotive appeals to traditional artisanal tropes (“love,” “family,” “care”) to tap into the zeitgeist appeal of locally-specific and knowable scales of production.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Karoliina A Karppinen, Leena Mikkola, Malgorzata Lahti
{"title":"Identity construction through talk of difference and similarity: blocking and threading analysis","authors":"Karoliina A Karppinen, Leena Mikkola, Malgorzata Lahti","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf024","url":null,"abstract":"Identity construction is a continuous process that permeates all social life. Drawing from intercultural communication scholarship and the Bakhtinian perspective on the construction of the self, we suggest that identity is constructed in talk through the interplay of socially constructed, ideologically imbued similarities and differences and propose the blocking and threading analysis (BTA) method to study this process. Blocking refers to constructing differences and social boundaries, whereas threading creates similarities, unity, and commonality. These practices are intertwined, and we argue that identity emerges from the constant shifts between the two. The four-step analytical process entails identifying positioning, recognizing connected utterances, interpreting blocking and threading, and examining their shifts. We illustrate the analytical force of BTA by an analysis of an extract from a focus group discussion among an interprofessional healthcare team. The method requires further application to different datasets, but it shows promise in terms of bringing new insights into research on identity construction.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brian Manata, Andrew C High, Shannon M Cruz, Timothy R Worley
{"title":"Measurement invariance of core communication constructs across race, nationality, and age","authors":"Brian Manata, Andrew C High, Shannon M Cruz, Timothy R Worley","doi":"10.1093/joc/jqaf023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf023","url":null,"abstract":"Communication science has been criticized for relying on WEIRD samples. One question that arises from such criticisms is whether core communication constructs and measures generalize to different demographic groups. In other words, are measures of common communication variables interpreted similarly across groups? In this study, we assess the measurement invariance of numerous scales that are used commonly in research on communication science across five U.S. racial groups, seven English-speaking countries across five continents, and four age groups that are recognized by the American Psychological Association. Results indicate that respondents from different racial, national, and age groups exhibited measurement invariance. That is, people with different backgrounds responded to scales in similar ways, thereby indicating that some core communication constructs might be generalizable across certain groups. The implications of these results are considered, while noting that the invariance framework used herein can be used to continue examining the problem of construct invariance.","PeriodicalId":48410,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144290220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}