Undergraduate - UnitATS2439 - Youth media: Understanding media research

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	Communications and Media Studies
Offered	Not offered in 2015
Coordinator(s)	Dr Andy Ruddock

Synopsis

This unit analyses what research on young media users reveals about the media's social influence. The unit covers topics such as media violence, the political effects of social media, international reality television, the relationship between mobile phones and gendered identities and advertising practices. It considers a wide array of genres, including music, film, news, reality media, advertising, gaming and comedy. The unit draws on international case studies from Australia, China, Columbia, Finland, the Middle East, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the UK and the USA. The overall point is that media matter to young people because it is increasingly difficult to live a social life without having access to media resources. For this reason, it is important to appreciate how the experiences of young media users inform new agendas in the fields of critical media studies and media education.

Outcomes

On the successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:

Explain how media affect how young people experience the world.
Understand the major conceptual and methodological challenges in researching media influence.
Appreciate the strengths and limitations of various qualitative and quantitative approaches to media research.
Appreciate the relationship between studies of cultural industries, media texts and media audiences.
Be able to define media research questions through the appropriate selection of concepts and case studies, developed through a process of drafting and redrafting written work.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 60%
Exam: 40%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Andy Ruddock

This unit applies to the following area(s) of study

Communications
Journalism studies

Prerequisites

Twelve credit points of first-year Arts units.

Prohibitions

ATS3439, AZA2439, AZA3439