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Research Questions

The Symbolism, Meaning and the New Media @ Home project was interested in the relationships between family media consumption practices and the formal and informal social networks to which these families are related. Research Questions include:

A. General questions:

1. How are media symbols and values integrated into patterns of meaning, identity, and behavior?
2. How does this process of meaning-making relate to the social networks with which families and individual members of families identify, such as congregations, community groups, and informal associations?

B. Questions of family identity:

1. How do families talk about the introduction of the Internet into their homes?
2. How does the Internet relate to other media practices? Do responses to and ways of talking about the new media differ from earlier technologies in the home?
3. How do patterns of habituation to these various media and technologies relate to their uses and meaning?
4. What role is the Internet coming to play in the structuring of time, family interaction patterns, social networks, and providing symbolic resources to meaning-making?

C. Questions of media, family, and religious identity:

1. Do families and individuals see any immediate relationship between Internet practices and the ways they understand faith, spirituality, or religious meaning?
2. Are there differences in this regard between the Internet and previous technologies, channels, and media?
3. Are new patterns or practices emerging?
4. What is the nature of the inventory of symbolic and other resources for meaning that is thus evolving in the household, and what are its contours? Are these contours different for "new" and "old" media?

D. Questions of sense-making:

1. How do adults make sense of the world using mediated materials -- and how might communities of faith participate in this process in constructive and authentic ways?
2. What do they see in media experience (both "new" and "old") that is particularly meaningful?
3. What Internet practices do they engage in for the fulfillment of what we might call "religious" purposes, such as inspiration, connection, affirmation, edification, participation in justice-seeking, etc.? How are these resources and practices related to conventional religious contexts? How are tastes, needs, desires, or modes of religious meaning-making addressed in media-coentered and more traditional settings?
4. How is identity understood individually and collectively with reference to these various contexts and sources?

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