About the Center's Research
Beginning with an initial grant to Center Director Stewart Hoover in 1991, researchers in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication have conducted a series of media-audience studies under grants from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., a private foundation located in Indianapolis.
Later projects in this series, co-directed by Professor Hoover and Professor Lynn Schofield Clark, have focused on media use in the household context and have been primarily concerned with one of the Endowment's primary research interests: the evolution and prospects of religion in modern life. Thus, religion and spirituality have been the foci of these studies, which have addressed issues as disparate as parenting, family identity, the concept of "the local" in the media age, the mediation of meanings and behaviors around environmental spirituality, youth culture, generational media practices and meanings, emerging digital media, a variety of other "spiritualities," and questions of gender and civic engagement.