Ji Ye Kim (Jiye Kim) is a PhD candidate at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research examines how people interact, form relationships, and influence one another in digital environments, with a particular focus on online games and social media. More broadly, she is interested in how features of digital platforms and mediated social environments shape users’ psychological experiences, social behaviors, and patterns of participation.
Her work integrates communication theory with computational and quantitative methods to study social interaction at scale. She uses a range of approaches, including behavioral trace data, surveys, social network analysis, machine learning, natural language processing, and longitudinal modeling. Across these methods, her research investigates topics such as social influence, relationship formation, psychological needs, prosocial and toxic behavior, and behavioral adaptation in online communities.
Kim holds an M.A. in Media and Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her master’s research examined user discourse surrounding gaming content on YouTube using computational text analysis. She received dual bachelor’s degrees in Content Convergence and Communication and Media from Ewha Womans University in South Korea.