Human Subjects Review Form

Nature of Human Subject Involvement: Participants will be instructed to read an online news story of their choice for a period of 10 minutes. The news story will be available in two formats: a traditional news format and a hypertext format. Participants will be asked to read through each format in the 10-minute period. Following this period, participants will be asked to respond to a qualitative questionnaire regarding their interpretations of how the two forms differed. The interview will last from 20-45 minutes depending on the length of the responses.

Level of Risk: Low to none.

Steps Taken to Mitigate Risk: Explanation of the project and signed consent form.

Description of the study

This study grows out of a course that was taught in the Fall 1998 semester, COMM 3340, Media Writing: Reporting On/For the Internet. In that course, we examined both applied and theoretical research regarding the changing nature of narrative structures in the digital environment. Applied research focused largely on the design concerns of narratives created for electronic media, including screen size, column width, font size, image size, graphic formats, and file size as they relate to readability and reader behavior. Theoretical research focused on the essential characteristics of digital media and how those characteristics might be applied to electronic narratives. Essential characteristics of digital media included notions of participation, interactivity, simulation, fragmentation, immersion, transformation, multiple perspectives, and human agency, among others. Although these concepts sound ethereal, they are based on the very straightforward belief that as communication media change, forms of expression must change to respond to their new constraints and abilities: writing for theatre is different than for film; writing for radio is different than for television. In the realm of journalism for the electronic media, the hypertext news form was a topic that we developed both theoretically and practically.

During the semester, students in the course created hypertext narratives out of existing news stories published on sites ranging from the Washington Post to The Onion (a satirical, online news source). They did this simply by copying conventional, linear news reports, and redesigning them into smaller, compartmentalized segments of texts that could be read in multiple orders (chronological, topical, comparative, etc.) according to the reader's interests. These redesigned stories resulted in narratives that both the applied and theoretical research suggest are more appropriate to new electronic media. The hypertext forms were tailored to the space and readability limitations of the computer screen and to the known behavior of readers to click around rather than scroll through text. They also resulted in what some researchers refer to as "potential texts" or "readerly texts" that only come into being once a reader has actively constructed them. A number of theorists speculate that such readerly texts are more engaging, interesting, and informative, as they rely on active and explicit choices of readers in the construction of the narrative.

The article redesign exercise explained above demonstrated two things. First, hypertext news forms were challenging, yet possible to create for a wide range of journalistic topics. Second, based on the limited experience of the class, the hypertext news forms confirmed what was suggested by a variety of our course readings: the experience of reading a hypertext narrative is vastly different than that of reading a conventional, linear news report online. The project being proposed here will take the next logical step of gathering empirical evidence from readers regarding how their experiences differ from reading traditional news narratives versus hypertext news forms.

For this study, 20 volunteers have been recruited from the Trinity University student body. They The volunteers responded to flyers posted around campus soliciting participants who enjoy reading online news to take part in a 90-minute study in exchange for a $10 gratuity (flyer attached). The participants who have volunteered for the study will be contacted early in the spring 1999 semester and scheduled at their convenience to take part in the study. Once scheduled, the participants will be asked to report to RCC 316-H01-L, an office that has been set up with an online computer. The 10-minute reading exercise and follow-up interview will be conducted in this office. Five communication students enrolled in COMM 4390, Directed Studies in Communication, will be conducting the reading and interview sessions under the supervision of Dr. Robert Huesca. The procedures for individual reading and interview sessions are as follows: 1. Read, explain, and sign the consent form; 2. Read through a set of instructions; 3. Time the online reading session; and 4. Conduct an interview, which will be tape recorded. Copies of the consent form, verbal instructions, and interview protocol are attached.

Following the reading and interview sessions, the independent study students will transcribe their tape recordings, assigning pseudonyms to the participants. The principal investigator will maintain a master list of participants and their pseudonyms. The interview transcripts will serve as the principal data source for this study, and they will not contain any names that can be connected to the participant. ; cCopies of the complete sets of transcripts will be made and distributed to the independent study students. As the semester progresses, the course will move from data collection to data analysis, with the final objective of submitting a research paper to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication by April 1, 1999. Following the submission of this paper, all transcripts will be collected and maintained by the principal investigator. There are no plans to destroy audio cassettes or printed transcripts, given that this sort of data is occasionally used in research audits and secondary analysis years after being conducted.

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