[Air-L] literature search: what works for online political content?

[Janelle Ward]

Hello all,

I'm currently putting together a research proposal that will involve a
look at how civil society organizations (like NGOs) are using the
internet to inform and mobilize citizens and citizens' response to
these initiatives.

I'm searching for literature that has taken a particular website(s) or
online approach and examined citizen response to that specific
content. There's plenty of literature theorizing about various
approaches to online communication and empirical studies of content OR
citizen's political behavior online, but I'm having trouble finding
literature that specifically answers the question "what works?".

I can think of two such studies that I used in my dissertation
research, though my focus is now broader than youth:

Livingstone, S. (2007). The challenge of engaging youth online:
Contrasting producers’ and teenagers’ interpretations of websites.
European Journal of Communication 22(2), 165-184.

Xenos, M., & Foot, K. (2008). Not your father’s internet: The
generation gap in online politics. In W. L. Bennett (Ed.,) Civic life
online: Learning how digital media can engage youth (pp. 51-70).
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Any suggestions are appreciated! I'll probably see many of you next
week at the AoIR conference, too. Really looking forward to it.

Best,
Janelle


-- 
Janelle Ward, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Media and Communication
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Faculty of History and Arts
P.O. Box 1738
3000 DR Rotterdam
The Netherlands

http://www.fhk.eur.nl/personal/ward/
http://janelleward.wordpress.com/