Professor Chen Hsuan-ting was recently awarded the Best Faculty Article Award by the Chinese Communication Association (CCA) for her paper, “Network agenda setting, partisan selective exposure, and opinion repertoire: The effects of pro- and counter-attitudinal media in Hong Kong.” The paper is co-authored with Prof. Lei Guo and Prof. Chao Su of Boston University. It was published in Journal of Communication, which is the flagship journal of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Prof. Chen and her colleagues make a theoretical contribution to the literature on Network Agenda Setting (NAS) by examining the effects of different media types, considering the patterns of media consumption, and differentiating between NAS effects on one’s own opinion repertoire and the oppositional opinion repertoire (i.e., thoughts about how oppositional others perceive an issue). In terms of methodology, they introduce the idea of an opinion repertoire and develop a new method to measure how related various topics are. While much of the work on these theories has been done in Western contexts, they extend the research to a non-Western context. Prof. Chen and her colleagues found that different partisan media had different NAS effects on either one’s own or oppositional repertoire, depending on whether an individual engaged in partisan selective exposure or not. The findings provide important implications for understanding political polarization in Hong Kong and its political climate in terms of the relationship with the mainland.

Currently, Prof. Chen is continuing her collaboration with Prof. Guo and Prof. Su on this line of research to examine different issues and contexts by incorporating computational methods. She is also collaborating with Prof. Celine Song at Hong Kong Baptist University on the topics of vaccine hesitancy and incivility, and with Prof. Shuning Lu at North Dakota State University on a project of consumptive news feed curation. She is also part of the Hong Kong team for the Digital News Report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Congratulations to Ting!