Assistant Professor of Journalism Claudia Kozman joined NU-Q in 2022. She has maintained a rigorous rate of journal article publications in the fields of media systems, media and conflict, research methodologies, and sports journalism. We interviewed her to learn more about her overall strategy and inspiration behind her collective body of work.
How would you describe your personal inspiration behind your work?
I’m inspired by the potential to contribute to theory building. Knowing my research can expand theory beyond its normative state is what drives me in every study I conduct, every research publication I review, and every question I have about the meaning of what I do. The fact that one research study, when theoretically grounded, is one step forward toward theory building is profound. At the core of this is my overall curiosity about why things happen the way they do. Why do journalists work the way they do? Why does the public accept one fact but reject another? Questions like these seem simple but what’s behind them is quite complex. What amazes me about research is that the more I do research the more questions I have. It’s a humbling experience because you start with a fixed concept, then as you design your study, you realize there’s so much you don’t know, and when you finish the study, you add to the realization that there’s so much more to learn. This rollercoaster of knowing and unknowing is what excites me. And when I’m in the process itself, the two biggest stimulants that give me euphoria are the literature review phase where I read other studies to craft my argument and the statistical analysis phase when I run my stats. Working with numbers and seeing the vast knowledge they can give us brings me real joy.
With one or two articles as an example, what does your work highlight that previous research in the field has overlooked?
I would say my attempt to apply journalism and communication theories to sports, especially in sourcing. My entire journalism education was based on public affairs and political communication research. Doing sports research always meant I had to find the significance of my work for both the journalism and the sports fields. That was a blessing in disguise because it pushed to confront my research and find the true value in what I do. Sports mean so much to society and are pervasive in all aspects of our lives. So I started studying sports journalism focusing on how stories that intersect with politics and society are framed, and more importantly, who influences these frames. This latter part is the bit I’m most invested in. Decades of research on journalists’ sourcing habits are confined to the “important” topics in journalism, with less than a handful on sports. I still see myself in the beginning of this path with so much theorizing to do about the circumstances under which we can expect which types of sources to dominate and how this changes across contexts.
How would you define your research methodology? How do does this methodology sustain your interventions?
I’m a journalism researcher trained in the social sciences. This is where I am most comfortable. I have conducted and still conduct interpretative qualitative research, but I experience some unease in offering my subjective interpretation as a researcher, always finding myself wanting to attach numbers as evidence of my analysis. As a social scientist, my methodology is rooted in the positivist paradigm. I mostly conduct content analyses where I examine media content. I also do surveys and I’m in the process of conducting two controlled experiments. Of course, the research question determines the method. Nobody ever sets out saying I will conduct a survey to find out something about public opinion. It’s almost always a phenomenon I observed, a pattern I saw in my surroundings, either in people or in media content, that gets me thinking about the why and connecting my observation to theories I know. This is where I start reading about the topic. If existing research doesn’t satiate my curiosity, or if I see a gap that I can fill with the particular context that piqued my interest in the first place, I start designing the study. My interest in examining connections between elements, whether it’s how people’s attitudes towards a topic influence their media consumption or how differences in journalists’ work routines and their quoting/sourcing habits reveal differences in their products, ultimately drives my interventions.
Besides other academics in your field, what audiences do you most hope will read your articles, and what do you hope will be their take-away message?
My career goal is to make research more approachable. For that to happen, I would need to start with the media and the general public. My late mother is the inspiration behind this goal. She was an intellectually curious woman but she never had the chance to go beyond primary school. I remember trying to explain to her in the first year of my doctoral studies what my first publication was about. I simplified what was then a theoretically and methodologically complex study about second level agenda setting in a superstar athlete’s scandal – where I studied the effect of the media’s coverage of the issues on the people’s media choices – and explained the study and its significance in layperson language. This is when I started thinking research scares people because it seems so far removed from reality but it’s quite the opposite. Theories inform our daily lives so why not make theoretically-driven research more approachable so we can have a more scientifically literate society that bases its conversations on established evidence instead of rumors and baseless information? This is the main reason I have been teaching research methods for the past 11 years. My goal is to help students develop a research mindset even if they choose not to become researchers. Naturally, I would hope for the media and the public to develop this mindset as well. I would truly want journalists to read my and others’ work. I wish there wasn’t such a disconnect between academia and the industry. Sadly, it’s huge in journalism. It seems to me journalists and media people are quick to dismiss academic research about them or simply do not even seek it. This is not beneficial because one of the primary goals of research is to make positive changes in the industry. Other industries rely entirely on research. Not ours. The takeaway would be the practical component of my research, the applicability of it, which often includes awareness of our own biases as journalists when we interview people or frame stories in the angle we see fit.
