Jennifer McClearen, left, a graduate student in the Department of Communication, talks with undergraduate honors student Sean Wong about his research project, “A.S. Roma, Seattle Sounders and Female Soccer Fans: A Study of Fandom.”

By Kristina Bowman -

This year’s honors students will research topics including the reinforcement of bipartisanship in the media, speech codes in an urban community, Internet pornography and others. The students presented their research topics on Wednesday to faculty and graduate students who chatted with them one-on-one in a relaxed setting complete with cookies and coffee.

James Kim, a junior, is researching the verbal response to Internet pornography. He said people were a little shocked when they saw his poster, which included blurred images of pornography. Kim said he became interested in the topic because he has friends who are concerned with sex trafficking. “A lot of these women are victims of human trafficking,” he said of the women who appear in the images. To research the verbal response to porn, Kim plans to do a content analysis on the comments of six videos.

Jessica Kamzan, right, talks about her research project with Principal Lecturer Lisa Coutu.

Jessica Kamzan, a senior, became interested in learning how diverse groups co-exist in a community while she was studying abroad in Rome with faculty member Lisa Coutu. She studied the Trevi Fountain and observed people from all over the world coming to take pictures of the Roman landmark. She is transferring that interest to the University District and plans to do ethnography research on the Ave to understand speech codes and oppositional codes in an urban community.

The other research projects include:

• Krista Dyer, Reinforcing bipartisanship in the media
• Kirsten Johnson, How are daily newspapers using Twitter to drive readers to their online content?
• Sheridan Smalley, an examination of the content diversity of daily news on mobile phone news applications
• Sean Wong, A.S. Roma, Seattle Sounders and female soccer fans: A study of fandom

Professor Valerie Manusov, who teaches the honors class, said students will use the feedback from the session to complete their research proposals and give the feedback to their faculty advisors, who will help them with the research. Students generally complete their projects by the end of spring quarter. Students who will be juniors or seniors during the 2013-14 academic year may apply to the honors program in May.