David Altheide, Ph.D.

Regent’s Professor, Arizona State University

BA, Sociology, Central Washington State College, 1967

M.A, Sociology, University of Washington, 1969

Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 1974

Dr. David Altheide is Regent’s Professor at Arizona State University where he has been on the faculty since 1974. Both his teaching at the School of Justice and Social Inquiry and his research have focused on mass communication, social interaction and social organization. He is a leading expert in a qualitative research methodology known as “ethnographic content analysis,” which he uses to analyze the language of news reports, particularly focusing in recent years on the increasing prevalence of the language of fear in the media and in everyday use. Dr. Altheide has written numerous scholarly articles and is the author of several books, including Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis (2002) which received the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (2006) which was selected by the American Library Association as one of its “Outstanding Academic Titles for 2006.” Terrorism and the Politics of Fear also received the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. In 2005, Dr. Altheide was the recipient of the George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and in 2007 was honored with The Mentor Excellence Award from the same academic society.

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