Research

Researching journalism, participation and public understanding.

SOLACE examines what collaborative and participatory journalism can make possible, where it encounters limits and how public responses to homelessness develop over time.

The SOLACE research

Three connected lines of inquiry.

The research follows the collaboration from different positions: how participation works in practice, how people experiencing homelessness understand media representation and how the same group of Boulder-area residents responds over time.

01 · Participatory journalism

What does meaningful participation require?

Interviews, workshops and observation examine the benefits, practical limits and ethical risks of involving people with lived experience in journalism. The research follows who can influence questions, framing and interpretation; what remains under newsroom control; and how participation is shaped by time, resources, organizational routines and unequal power.

It also considers recruitment, trust, compensation, consent, privacy, editorial independence and differing expectations about participants’ roles. Participation is not treated as automatically empowering: the central question is when it becomes meaningful, when it remains largely symbolic and what conditions make collaboration responsible and useful.

Research questions
  • What benefits do journalists and lived-experience contributors associate with participation?
  • Which professional, organizational and relational barriers limit meaningful influence?
  • How are editorial authority, responsibility and risk negotiated in practice?
02 · Representation and lived experience

What would people experiencing homelessness change?

Interviews and participatory workshops explore how people experiencing homelessness perceive the ways they and homelessness are represented in journalism. The research asks what they consider accurate, misleading, stigmatizing or missing, and how coverage connects personal circumstances with structural conditions.

Participants can discuss experiences with journalists, privacy and identification, consequences of publication and the roles they would prefer to take—as sources, advisers, writers, photographers, editors or co-producers. Workshops also create space to propose different questions, develop written, audio or visual work and assess resulting coverage.

Research questions
  • How do people experiencing homelessness evaluate existing coverage?
  • Which perspectives, questions and structural conditions do they find missing?
  • What would they change about sourcing, framing, language and storytelling?
03 · Public response

What changes as reporting continues?

A four-wave panel survey follows the same group of Boulder-area residents before the initiative and after each of its three reporting waves. It examines understanding of the causes of homelessness, attribution of responsibility, stigma, empathy and solidarity, support for public responses, civic engagement and trust in journalism.

The survey records exposure to and recall of relevant coverage but does not assign particular stories to participants. It can identify patterns of change over time and relationships between media exposure, understanding and attitudes; it cannot by itself establish that SOLACE reporting caused those changes.

Research questions
  • How do public understanding, attitudes and policy preferences develop over time?
  • How are these patterns related to media exposure, trust and prior experience?
  • Which responses persist beyond short-term attention?
How the research fits together

Three positions on the same public conversation.

  1. Journalistic practice

    How collaboration, professional routines and unequal resources shape what participation can become.

  2. Lived-experience perspectives

    How people represented in coverage evaluate it and what knowledge, questions and forms they would contribute.

  3. Public response

    How understanding, attitudes and civic responses develop as reporting continues over time.

These are connected levels of inquiry, not a simple causal chain. Together they examine the conditions under which journalism may contribute to public understanding without assuming that coverage alone produces social change.

Research and evidence

What the wider field asks.

SOLACE builds on research about representation, journalistic power, public attitudes and participation. Rather than assuming that better coverage automatically produces social change, it focuses on the mechanisms and conditions that may connect journalism with understanding and public response.

Representation

Which explanations become visible?

Research examines how episodic stories, stigma and judgments about deservingness can individualize homelessness—and whether structural context changes what audiences understand as possible or necessary.

Voice and influence

Who can shape public knowledge?

Being quoted or made visible is not the same as influencing questions, framing or interpretation. Participatory research asks where contributors gain meaningful influence and where editorial and institutional power remains unchanged.

Public response

What follows attention and empathy?

Media may shape understanding, emotional response, policy preferences and civic engagement, but these relationships are conditional. Exposure alone does not demonstrate durable change or establish that journalism caused it.

Continuity

What happens when journalism returns?

Much coverage is episodic. SOLACE examines whether connected reporting can sustain attention, follow responses in practice and keep public commitments visible beyond the initial story.

Growing evidence base

This section will develop into a curated guide to research on homelessness, media representation, participation and journalistic practice. Sources will be added selectively, with short explanations of what each contributes and where its evidence is limited.

Explore the current reporting guides
Publications and outputs

Research informing SOLACE—and work still to come.

The project draws on earlier research about representation, participation and journalistic power. Findings and public summaries produced through SOLACE will be added separately as the research develops.

Representation

When even empathy would be enough

How ostensibly sympathetic reporting can still reproduce stigma, deservingness and individualized explanations of homelessness.

Participation

Power and dialogue

Research on the possibilities and limits of dialogue, influence and shared decision-making in participatory media practice.

Self-representation

Creating media from lived experience

What changes when people experiencing homelessness move from being represented to contributing to media production.

SOLACE outputs

Findings will be added as the project develops.

Future publications, accessible research summaries, methodological materials and other public outputs will appear here when available.

Research ethics

Independent review and direct contacts.

The study is approved by the CU Boulder Institutional Review Board under Protocol 26-0364 and by the Masaryk University Research Ethics Committee under Ref. No. EKV-2026-164.

Questions about participants’ rights or ethical review may be directed to irbadmin@colorado.edu or ekv@muni.cz. For questions about the research itself, contact Vojtěch Dvořák.