My original research idea I had formed at the beginning of the year was not specific, but I new I wanted to study along the lines of how the media affect a person. My idea is essentially the same, but now I know which direction I would like to go. The only difference really, is that I narrowed down what I had began with.
I want to research how the media (of all sorts) affects a person’s psychological and emotional wellbeing, and that is my primary question. My secondary question is to figure out which type of media has the biggest impact. Is it TikToks? Maybe a national news story about a good samaritan? Or possibly the latest crime news?
I have not dug deep into which studies I would like to use yet, but before I settled for this topic I did do research to see if there was any information on this topic. I used the FHSU library database and Google Scholarly and found several articles related to “Mass Media” and “Mental Health” tagged together.
Databases:
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Communication and Mass Media Complete is one database I believe will help me. I did a vague search of what I was looking for and I found one research article I think would be helpful to be in my research.
- Independent Voices also had more than 2 articles I would like to dive deeper into.
- The final database I looked into was Access Newswire, because I would find it interesting to read a news article covering this topic, to see how journalists themselves address the issues of the effect their coverage may be having on people.
If nothing else, I’d suggest the Comm database you identified at first, PsychInfo, and then, probably a sociology database. There are other media and general databases you can use as well.
hello Shayna,
I think you will have decent amount of material to look over for your research topic. there has been many reports about mental health issues. I have read some of those reports and they are the reason why I stay away from social media. It seems that you found some articles to dig into just keep in mind there are plenty more articles out there that can be useful towards your research.
I think this is a great way to direct your research. This question probably used to center around the TV in the past, but now with the growth of social media, there’s probably more eyes on TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube these days than TV even. I’d be interested to see the results of this data. I think the Communications and Mass Media was a good choice for a database to look at. Perhaps delving into medical or psychology fields would be useful as well.
Hi Shayna! I think this is a great topic. I am curious myself as to which social media platform has the affects a user’s wellbeing the most. I think you have the right databases listed to search for resources.