Ord Community Study

Strategic Discussions for Nebraska conducts research for the UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communications. This semester, students in two separate journalism classes are conducting interviews by telephone with residents of Ord, Nebraska.

The results of the interviews will be published in a magazine and on the program's Web site in late spring, 2010. The magazine will have a wide distribution in Nebraska and may be used as a guidebook for other communities who wish to effectively target news, advertising and other information to their residents by using the forms of communication people prefer. The classes involved in the research study are described here:

Theories of Mass Communications is a graduate course in which students are conducting communication research interviews with Ord residents. Each list of survey questions is exactly the same, will take about 30 minutes for the respondent to complete and will not reveal the identity of the respondent. The purpose of this research is to learn about how Ord residents get news and information about what is happening in the community.

Communication in Nebraska Communities is offered to both undergraduate and graduate students. These students are conducting journalistic interviews with community leaders regarding the changes and improvements that have come to Ord in the past several years. The students will write stories from the interviews, attributing quotes and other facts to the individuals interviewed.

Strategic Discussions for Nebraska also produces magazines explaining the relevance of often-complex research to the general public.