Dr. R. Lance Holbert
Associate Professor

E-mail: holbert.27@osu.edu
Office: 614.247.7644

Qualifications

B.A., 1991 University of Rochester
M.S., M.P.A., 1993 Syracuse University
Ph.D., 2000 University of Wisconsin-Madison

Profile

My teaching specialties are in the areas of persuasion, strategic communication, political communication, and research methods. All of my courses exist at the crossroads of theory and practice. Each class I teach is grounded in theory, but theory is also applied to the creation or critical assessment of real-world promotional activities. Persuasion theories are utilized as a base from which to study all facets of strategic communication campaigns, whether the campaigns are commercial, political, or social in nature.  Strong emphasis is placed on the study of conditional communication effects across publics and various sub-groups within publics.

My research in political communication has focused of late on the influence of entertainment television (e.g., The West Wing, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) and other non-traditional political outlets (e.g., Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11) on basic democratic outcome variables. In addition, I have devoted attention to the study of how the use of these non-traditional outlets complement the functions of more traditional sources of political communication ( e.g., debates, TV news, newspapers) in producing a range of effects, as well as how various traditional political communication information outlets function alongside one another to influence voters. In terms of research methods, I continue to study how the field of communication can better employ the use of structural equation modeling as a multivariate analytic technique.