Margaret Grundy, a University of Tulsa clinical psychology doctoral student, has been awarded a 2024 American Psychology Association Graduate Student/Psi Chi Junior Scientist Fellowship.
The fellowship, which comes with a $1,000 award, allows her to pursue a study with Tulsa Undergraduate Research Challenge students and other undergraduates in the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma Research at UTulsa.
Grundy has been investigating the impact of different ways of presenting news about officer-involved shootings that use body-worn camera footage. While the use of body camera video is common in the depiction of these stories, no known research has explored how this type of exposure psychologically impacts audiences.
For a pilot study she conducted last year, Grundy used a news story about the police shooting death of 25-year-old Jayland Walker to explore the impact of body camera footage and audio on a sample of 121 undergraduate participants. She compared conditions with and without audio from the body camera of the bullets firing and those who only watched the broadcaster discuss the event.
Initial analysis of the data indicated that negative emotions were significantly elevated after exposure to the news story regardless of condition. Further, results showed that political identification as conservative resulted in significantly less negative emotions and cognitions than liberal participants. The sample collected thus far has lacked the diversity to compare results between minority groups. While the pilot study starts to fulfill the ultimate objective of providing research that informs news outlets on the best methodologies to present these stories to audiences, there is more work to be done in this research area.
“With support from the fellowship, our research could reach more diverse samples afforded by monetary incentives and participants outside of the university. Additionally, it would be beneficial to consult a broadcasting professional while making our improved stimuli. Further, funds from the fellowship can be put toward expanding this research into other traumatic news topics,” Grundy wrote in her application. “Specifically, as the lab manager, I work with undergraduate students in the lab. In an effort to allow the students to experience the full scope of research, the lab will be simultaneously creating a study, collecting participants, and writing a manuscript each semester in this research area. This framework allows projects to progress, and both encourages productivity in this area and gives the students valuable experiences in psychological research.”