Ph.D. student Luxuan Wang has been named the recipient of the 2020 Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award by the National Communication Association. The award honors the top student paper across all NCA divisions. Wang received the award for her paper “Race, Social Media News Use, and Political Participation.”
Wang said, “I’m very honored and actually, surprised to receive this award. Honestly speaking, it’s really beyond my expectation. The NCA section I submitted my paper to is sponsored by Partnership for Progress on the Digital Divide. This is not a traditional NCA division but the issue it concerns is so significant globally in the digital, networked age. As a novice researcher, I perceive this award not only as a recognition of my paper but an invitation for more work that reflects on our relationships with digital media and technologies and ways to enhance equity, diversity, and social justice. And I take it as my research concentration now and future. The development and operation of ‘new’ technologies push us to consider new questions and challenges as well as revisit old questions in new contexts. There is a lot work to do.”
In the NCA’s announcement of the award, the NCA selection committee wrote, “Luxuan Wang’s ‘Race, Social Media News Use, and Political Participation’ stood out among a group of very fine papers nominated for the Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award. Given the current political and racial tensions in our country, the selection committee found this paper timely and useful as it has heuristic value for the role that social media platforms play in the political arena among racial backgrounds. This study’s ambitious statistical analysis offers results that both supports existing literature and offers direction for continued research in this important area.”
When Wang began working on the paper and creating the cutting-edge statistical analysis she used to analyze the data, she was a student in a class taught by Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Lauren Feldman a year ago. Feldman said, “Luxuan developed her paper in my Quantitative Research Methods course last fall. The paper was excellent from the start -- she asked important questions related to the intersections of race, social media use, and political participation, and she conducted a careful analysis of the data. I am incredibly proud to see her work honored in this way!”
Describing the key findings in the paper, Wang said, “The question my research wants to explore is not a ‘yes/no’ question, but ‘how,’ because of the complexity of the issue. There is a continuing debate over the democratic effects of social media and the Internet in general, and the digital divide is one concern. My paper demonstrates one facet of the complicated issue.
“Political participation as a democratic effect of social media and the Internet is complicated. There are various forms of political participation, traditional ones like voting and protest, to creative ones like hashtag activism and we can’t measure them in a same way. Also, do likes, comments, and shares of posts of political opinions on social media count as political participation? They kind of lower the entry bar for political participation and scholars have different ideas and even controversial ideas (i.e., narcotizing dysfunction/demotivation effect vs. spill-over effect). So, it should be examined under a multi-level integrative perspective.
“And then, when we consider technologies’ role, there is an issue of the digital divide. Technically, with overall wealth growth and a decrease in technology costs, the digital divide in accessing the internet should not be a problem. But will people equally enjoy the benefits of using the internet and social media? Not necessarily. There are the second and third level divides concerning use, capability (skills and knowledge), and outcomes. The democratic divide exemplifies the second and third level of digital divide as it asks the disparity of internet use and outcome for political purposes.
“Finally, when it comes to the racial gap in using technologies to engage with politics, some research suggests that the digital divide enlarges the racial gap in political participation as new online skills are required, and only those who already are politically engaged are further mobilized in the digital age. Meanwhile, studies also show that there is an increase in social media news use among racial minorities (check this https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/11/among-u-s-latinos-the-internet-now-rivals-television-as-a-source-for-news/).
“And we see how social networking sites have enabled Black and Hispanic people to acquire more political knowledge and participate in more political activities, including expression of political opinions, activist movements (#BlackLivesMatter), and engagement with political campaigns.
“So, no matter the democratic effects of social media, or the digital divide, or the racial gap in using technologies to engage with politics, they are all issues of multiple facets and multiple realities. Again, the question is ‘how’ and no research can comprehensively answer the that question.”
Describing the process by which she formulated the idea for the paper, Wang said, “Since my master’s program, I have been interested in the democratic effects of the internet and social media. For this paper, in fact, at the very beginning, my research question was on immigrants’ news consumption behaviors and their political participation in this country. I notice that many immigrants, especially the first-generation, heavily rely on second-hand news in their native languages on social media platforms to perceive things that take place in this country. The Internet and social media play a complicated role here. The information from these sites is of low quality. Yet they help immigrants keep pace with the mainstream and engage with politics. So initially, I want to explore how social media use, especially use for news consumption, help or not help immigrants with political participation.
“This paper was developed from the course Quantitative Research methods I took with Professor Lauren Feldman and at that time, I didn’t have enough time and resources to design my own survey and collect my own data. Dr. Feldman at that time encouraged us to look for exiting datasets. It’s difficult to find a perfect dataset for my research question. While I was looking for appropriate ones and reviewing literature, I shifted my research focus to racial minorities, who are similar to immigrants to some extent, concerning their growing use of social media platforms, and their status of being vulnerable and historically marginalized in political participation.
“I know there are many studies that focus on the debate. We want to examine what kind of democratic effects are there, and beneficial for whom. My paper was not aimed to give a decisive answer. Instead, with the national-represented dataset by Pew Research, this paper explored the question of ‘how’ – what form of political participation does social media use for news consumption promote and for which racial groups?”
The statistical analysis Wang developed was innovative, and Wang said she examined the association between social media news use and political participation across racial groups.
Describing how she conducted the analysis, Wang said, “I firstly compared social media news use and political participation between Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. I then ran several regressions with a particular focus on the interaction between race and SNS news use, in addition to control variables of demographics, political news seeking, other news platform use, and relevant predispositions of ideology and partisanship.
“Put simply: Consistent with existing literature, SNS news use is positively associated with online political participation, including creating and promoting online political content, encouraging other people to engage with political activities, and contacting a politician or public official. The results also show that race moderated the association between social media news use and online political participation. The results show that both Black people and Hispanics had a higher level of SNS usage for news consumption, and Black people significantly engaged more with politics than White people, especially when the SNS news consumption was at a low frequency. Although White people enjoyed extra democratic benefits of increasing social media news use, it is also notable that SNS is crucial for racial minorities’ political participation, especially for Black people. In contrast, this research did not find a significant racial gap in offline voting engagement nor extra democratic benefits of SNS news consumption for racial minorities.”
Wang said she does not think her findings are unprecedented and she can’t claim that this is the whole scenario we have, because it has limitations and only reflects one facet of the reality. However, she said, it is still meaningful and invites scholars to explore more.
“For instance, we need to further compare different social media platforms with different affordances and technological properties,” Wang said. “As algorithmic ranking and recommendation mediate the visibility of political and election information, on Facebook and Twitter, how people of different races act in response is unknown. Whether and how much they believe news on different social networking sites may also be critical factors influencing their political engagement. Ultimately, as digital media usage will reinvigorate people’s involvement in the democratic process, it matters far more for racial minorities than for the majority, which serves as the alternative venue narrowing the participation gap between racial groups.”
This award-winning paper will only partly form the basis of her doctoral dissertation, Wang said. “I am broadly interested in the impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on individuals and societies. This research experience definitely drives me to contemplate more fundamental questions that this paper did not fully answer, the sophisticated technological affordances, news consumption behaviors in a networking environment, power and authority in the social construction of algorithms, and modifications of social institutions. I just started my second year here at SC&I and there are a lot of possibilities waiting for me.”
Image: Courtesy of Luxuan Wang
