Assistant Professor of Communication, Quantitative Methods, at California State University, East Bay. PhD in communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specialized in media communication and quantitative methods.

Benjamin Smith is Assistant Professor of Communication, Quantitative Methods, at California State University, East Bay. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in strategic communication, media communication, and quantitative research methods. He received his PhD in communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specialized in media communication and quantitative methods. He’s previously worked as the Research Director at the Institute for Methods Innovation, a Visiting Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, and as the Market Analyst and Account Planner at a public relations firm. Dr. Smith’s research interests lie within the domains of public opinion, informal learning and news media, with a particular focus on how issues, events and actors are framed in media communication, and the effects of these frames on the formation, updating and expression of beliefs, attitudes, and opinions. In addressing these questions, he employs a multi-disciplinary approach, bridging theories and research paradigms from mass and political communication, political science, cognitive and social psychology, and media sociology. He also employs a variety of analytical approaches, choosing the method that best answers the question at hand, whether that be computational text analysis, inductive framing analysis or multilevel structural equation mixture modeling.