Host institution: Vrije universiteit Brussel (VUB) 🇧🇪
Supervisors: Prof. Wendy Van den Broeck (VUB) and Prof. Petr Szczepanik(CU)
Academic secondment: Charles University (CU) 🇨🇿
Industrial secondment: Mediawijs 🇧🇪
PhD duration: 4 years
The PhD project is titled: Reaching the unreachable.
Public Interest Media — and specifically Public Service Media — are mandated to provide universal and equitable access to information, yet substantial groups remain rarely or never reached. Vulnerable and underserved audiences — including individuals with low literacy, low-skilled workers, people in precarious socio-economic situations, refugees, and diverse younger audiences — are often overlooked in both academic research and industry practice. This gap persists partly because these groups are difficult to identify, reach, and engage through conventional research approaches.
Recent studies underscore the pivotal role of intermediary actors — such as youth workers, social organisations, and media literacy networks — in facilitating contact with vulnerable and diverse communities. Existing findings also point to higher rates of news avoidance, media disconnection, and trust deficits among these populations.
For Public Interest Media, understanding and engaging vulnerable and underserved groups is essential to upholding their societal mission and reinterpreting ‘universality’ in a platformised media environment.
This research project aims to:
- Identify the media needs, habits, expectations, and barriers experienced by vulnerable and underserved groups.
- Develop a nuanced categorisation of media use across diverse user profiles.
- Generate evidence-based recommendations to help Public Interest Media reach, inform, and interact more effectively with these audiences.
- Contribute to the conceptual rethinking of universality, inclusivity, and equity in Public Interest Media.
The PhD researcher will contribute to the following core activities:
- Conduct a contemporary conceptualisation of universality, inclusivity, and the notion of underserved audiences in Public Service Media.
- Analyse existing Public Service Media audience data to identify unreachable, overlooked, and underserved groups, i.e., who is being left behind?
- Map and consult intermediary stakeholders (e.g., NGOs, youth workers, community organisations) to support ethical and effective user engagement.
- Develop an ethical, accessible, and context-sensitive framework for engaging vulnerable and underserved groups in research, including diverse young audiences.
- Investigate current media behaviours, needs, motivations, and barriers to Public Interest Media access among diverse communities, in particular youth.
- Construct a typology of underserved audience profiles based on media practices, motivations, structural constraints, and socio-contextual conditions.
- Iteratively develop, test, and refine strategies and interventions designed to help Public Interest Media better reach and serve vulnerable and underserved audiences with public interest content.
The doctoral project will adopt a mixed-methods research design; methods may include:
- Desk research, structured literature review
- Qualitative methods: focus groups, co-creation and participatory workshops, in-depth interviews, diary and longitudinal engagement methods
- Quantitative methods: surveys, secondary data analysis (e.g., audience metrics, platform analytics)
- Scenario-building.