Director and Professor, QMSS; Professor, Communication and Media
About
Jan Van den Bulck is interested in the effects of the media on people’s behaviors, opinions, and perceptions. This is a topic designed to make life difficult for a social scientist. How do you measure media use? Do people remember how often they consult social media on a typical day, or even earlier today? What is an hour of “watching television” if it can mean being totally immersed in a thriller, or thoughtlessly having the set on in the background?
How do you measure effects? How do you know whether fear of crime is made worse by watching alot of news, or whether people who are afraid end up watching more news because they don’t leave the house so much?
How do you analyze this, if the variables can be flawed, and the relationships between them are complex and confusing?
Jan Van den Bulck has studied whether parents influence their children, or whether it is the other way around; whether young people are more likely to opt for nursing, veterinary medicine, or even Special Forces training, when either of those professions stars in a reality TV show. He has examined why we watch yet another episode of Game of Thrones instead of getting enough sleep, and what Bricklayers can teach us about some people’s tendency to overestimate just about anything.
He believes that measurement and analysis are a peculiar issue in the social sciences and that mastering those issues is necessary if we want to answer tomorrow’s questions big and small.
LAB: https://prod.lsa.umich.edu/comm/research/research-groups/m2e2.html
Bibliography:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LlAHX4kAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao