Grad students selected to attend AEJMC conference for excellent research on internet advertising

By: Harper Anderson

Nearly half of the first-year BYU Department of Communications graduate students were selected to present their research at this year’s 94th annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).  Six students contributed to three research projects that were selected by the association and presented at the conference which took take place in Denver, Colo. Aug. 4-7.

AEJMC is a nonprofit organization that promotes the association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The annual conference brings in top authors, publishers and researchers to demonstrate and teach about the latest industry research and current issues. It is an honor to be selected to attend the conference.

Dave Mecham, Ashley Stevens, Aymara Jimenez, Jessica Danowski, Lincoln Hubbard, and Kenny Trent represented BYU at this prestigious conference.

“I was excited to go to Denver to present this paper,” said graduate student Ashley Stevens “It represents a lot of hard work from my classmates Dave Mecham and Lincoln Hubbard as well as our professor Dr. Tom Robinson and Dr. Mark Popovich out of Ball State who helped us.”

Stevens, Hubbard, and Mecham wrote a paper detailing the effectiveness of internet advertising. Their research used a unique procedure called the Q-method, which allows the researcher to separate respondents into different groups.

Kenny Trent and Jessica Danowski wrote a paper about doctors in the media. They showed that the real world doctor-patient relationship can be affected by how doctors are portrayed in the media.

“We are very excited about our research and hope to do a follow-up study this fall related to this project,” said Trent. “The opportunity to present at AEJMC, one of the most prestigious mass media conferences in the nation, is exciting, to say the least.”

Dr. Tom Robinson worked with the students on their research papers.

“I think the acceptance of these papers into the AEJMC conference is a strong indicator of the quality of students we have in the communications graduate program and their desire to be scholars,” said Dr. Robinson, associate professor in the BYU Department of Communications and co-author on all three papers. “It’s exciting to see so many of our students present their research at such a prestigious conference. This is no small feat.”