Jin Woo Kim Named 2019-21 George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow
His work focuses how people are affected by political (mis)information and how new media environments shape politics.
The Annenberg School for Communication has named a new George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow for 2019-21: Jin Woo Kim.
Kim, who received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School in 2016, has spent the last two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth College’s Program in Quantitative Social Science.
In his research, Kim uses a variety of data sources, including online text data, web browsing data, and survey experiments to examine how people are affected by political (mis)information, and how new media environments shape politics. Methodologically, he is interested in identifying communication effects based on real-world events such as political rumor diffusions and sudden shifts in news cycles. He has won four top paper awards from the International Communication Association and the American Association of Public Opinion Research.
As a Gerbner Fellow, Kim will develop a standard procedure for constructing survey items that measure partisan biases in political knowledge. He will use the instruments to identify citizens who possess accurate knowledge of “inconvenient” facts that are inconsistent with one’s party’s position. He will investigate how such citizens differ from others in terms of individual characteristics, political opinions, and the quality of political judgments.
At Annenberg, Kim’s dissertation was titled, “Assessing Civic Competence Against the Normative Benchmark of Considered Opinions” and he was advised by Professor Michael Delli Carpini.
Before coming to Annenberg, Kim received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Communication from Seoul National University in Korea.
