Jiyoung Jennifer Hwang
M.S. Student | Associate Instructor
Contact Information
Biography
Jennifer Jiyoung Hwang is a second-year master’s student pursuing a Master of Science in Communication in The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and before graduate school, Jennifer worked for Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. She was born in South Korea and also calls Singapore, Indonesia, and Shanghai home.
Her thesis is an online experiment that gauges the effectiveness of Fakey, a news media literacy game, compared to a (narrative) inoculation treatment, in improving the ability to discern between accurate and misleading information on the Internet.
Jennifer’s research focuses on identifying individual and cognitive factors that shape one’s ability to effectively process online information. The many perspectives that inform her research are media effects, media literacy, computational work, communication science, and social networks. Jennifer also studies the ever-evolving information ecosystem with regards to misinformation prevalence, and tests interventions that aim to mitigate the negative effects of misinformation.
She has conducted a survey experiment (N = 500) on the Third-Person Effect and COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. She has also worked on a cross-platform study analyzing comments on politician AOC’s videos across YouTube and Instagram, where she webscraped 82,765 comments. Recently, she submitted an extended abstract to ICA reporting preliminary findings that politically congruent sensationalist misinformation increases attention, skin conductance, and negative emotional responses. In this project, she used the measures of electrocardiography (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), facial corrugator muscle activity (EMG) to collect data on participants’ attentional and emotional responses to viewing political misinformation.
Overall, Jennifer specializes in using surveys and experiments. She also works with computational methods, Python, and R in her research.