Thomas Wold

Thomas Wold has done research on topics related to children's young people's and media use, pro-anorexia, safety and communication in the petroleum industry, ideology in pop culture, crime reporting in the news and the relations between journalists and the police, journalistic use of social media and news sharing on social media, and user-generated content in the news.

Research prosjects

ViSmedia: 2017-2020

The ViSmedia project investigates empirically, experimentally, and conceptually how the adoption and adaption of visual surveillance technologies in the news media might best be optimized in ways that integrate the societal responsibility of high quality journalism. The project is interdisciplinary, and the core group of researchers includes social scientists from Norway, USA, and Finland.

The ViSmedia project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council's program SAMANSVAR (2015-2019), and builds on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), a framework developed by the EU. Principal Investigator is Professor Astrid Gynnild, University of Bergen.

Link to the project's website: https://www.vismedia.org/

As part of this project, Wold investigated user-generated content from social media in the news and the ethical dilemmas related to visual media exposure of ordinary citizens.

Center for Safety and Human Factors: 2012-2016

During his PhD scholarship at the Department of Psychology at NTNU, Wold was a member of the Center for Safety and Human Factors, which specifically researched issued concerning safety in high-risk industries.

His Pdh-thesis was on safety, communication and the use of management systems in high-risk industries. The data was collected through qualitative interviews with employees at different levels in two different companies in the petroleum producing sector. The PhD was financed through the PETROMAKS-program at the Norwegian Research Council and an industry partner.

A summary of the thesis can be accessed here: https://gladwold.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/implications-of-communication-theory-for-safety-management/

EU Kids Online:

EU Kids Online is a multinational research network. It seeks to enhance knowledge of European children's online opportunities, risks and safety. It uses multiple methods to map children's and parents' experience of the internet, in dialogue with national and European policy stakeholders.

Wold was an active member of the network from 2008 to 2011.

Police and media: Cand Philol-thesies (equivalent of Master Thesis)

Wold took his Cand. Philol degree, equivalent to a Master's Degree, at the Department of Art and Media Studies.

The thesis presented a quantitative analysis of crime reporting in newspapers, and a qualitative interview study with journalists and police investigators and police managers, focusing on the relationship between news journalists and the police.