Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Balancing Learning And Enjoyment In Serious Games: Kerbal Space Program And The Communication Mediation Model, Sonny Rosenthal, Rabindra A. Ratan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

When designed well, serious games can support effective learning. This study used the communication mediation model to examine the process and outcomes of playing serious games, in this case, the science-themed game, Kerbal Space Program. During a 4-h research session, 241 undergraduate students played through the game's tutorial missions and completed surveys to measure variables of interest. Results of structural equation modeling showed that game progress was positively related to self-efficacy in computer gaming (β = 0.26) and ordinary science intelligence (β = 0.13). Knowledge acquisition was positively related to game progress (β = 0.21) and positively predicted experiential attitude …

A Cross-Country Investigation Of Social Image Motivation And Acceptance Of Lab-Grown Meat In Singapore And The United States, Mark Chong, Angela K. Y. Leung, Verity Lua

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This research has three goals. First, it sets out to compare consumer acceptance of lab-grown meat in the U.S. and in Singapore. Second, it seeks to explain the difference in Americans' and Singaporeans' acceptance of lab-grown meat by examining their eating motivations. Specifically, we focused on social image motivations – the motivations to present oneself positively in social contexts. Third, this study also aims to assess if exposure to information about lab-grown meat communicated by celebrity versus expert social media influencers (SMIs) can impact people's acceptance of lab-grown meat products. Our analysis showed that Singaporean participants had greater acceptance of …

The Queer Dictionary, Mia Lew

Graphic Communication

With the government continually obstructing queer education in public schools, it becomes harder and harder for queer people to understand themselves than in turn, have the tools to explain what they are going through to others. This is a problem but in turn an opportunity. While there are queer literature and children’s books out there, they typically only encompass one story or one view on queerness. Thus, this project's main goal is to encompass queerness as a whole by using as many LGBTQ+ words as possible, people's stories under each word, historical graphics, highlights on the internationality of queerness, pronoun …

Lindenwood Magazine, Spring 2022, Lindenwood University

Lindenwood Magazine (2017- )

Lindenwood University news magazine.

Augmentative And Alternative Communication Use, Service Delivery Experiences, And Communicative Participation For People With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Betts Peters

Dissertations and Theses

People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) often experience changes to their speech, and may use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices and techniques to maintain the ability to communicate. The use of AAC may facilitate the participation of people with ALS in various life situations involving communication. There is limited data in the literature about the AAC approaches currently used by people with ALS, the professional services they receive to support communication, or the effects of AAC on their communicative participation. This dissertation involved a nationwide online survey of people with ALS, and comprises three papers intended to add to …

Online Legal Help-Seeking For Victims Of Intimate Partner Violence During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Christina S. Walker

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Legal, court, and criminal justice professionals regularly navigate court procedures and processes through online portals. They know where to locate applicable court rules, such as a specific section on a court website or a departmental contact. However, these tasks can be extremely daunting for laypersons seeking court assistance, especially for victims of violence who have limited time away from the abuser. To determine how state judicial branches make information available about protective order procedures and general information to a layperson, especially to victims of intimate partner violence, this study assessed court websites of five states where intimate partner violence (IPV) …

Balloons, Breadcrumbs, And Spoons: Emerging Adults’ Privacy Negotiation And Management Of The (Non)Disclosure Of Chronic Illness-Related Information With A Friend, Robert D. Hall

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Emerging adults (EAs) experience many changes throughout this life-stage, characterized by self-focus, identity explorations, instability, in-betweenness, and possibilities of optimism (Arnett, 2014). As EAs transition from home of origin into independence, they may place more reliance on social networks apart from their family of origin (e.g., friends, Rawlins, 2009). Yet, chronically ill EAs may experience complications due to the biographical disruption, or interference of expectations in one’s life (Bury, 1982), particularly given that chronic illness is typically viewed as an elderly-related issue rather than occurring with youth (Kundrat & Nussbaum, 2003). Through transitions in the EA life-stage, EAs with chronic …

Cityengine As A Tool For Visualizing Neighborhood Change: An Initial Study, Zach Noyes

City and Regional Planning

Urban planning is reliant upon genuine public engagement to ensure that planning and policy decisions reflect the ideas shared by the public. Because planning is a profession largely focused on the physical and built implications of more abstract planning concepts, effective graphic communication is critical to securing public support and understanding of policy decisions. ESRI's CityEngine uses procedural modeling technology to render personally-tailored scenes to non-planner members of the public, and shows potential to positively change the way that planners generate graphic representations of physical impacts of policy changes. This initial study establishes a methodology for determining the efficacy of …

A Protracted Developmental Trajectory For English-Learning Children's Detection Of Consonant Mispronunciations In Newly Learned Words, Carolyn M. Quam, Daniel Swingley

Speech and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Children are adept at learning their language’s speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature native-speaker performance, adults were taught a new word under training conditions of low prosodic variability. In a second experiment, 24- and 30-month-olds were taught a new word under training conditions of high or low prosodic variability. Children and adults showed …

Outside The Boundaries Of Biomedicine: A Culture-Centered Approach To Female Patients Living Undiagnosed And Chronically Ill, Bianca Siegenthaler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a community who voices feeling misunderstood, unheard, and uncared for by the medical system, female patients who live undiagnosed and chronically ill and their health narratives lie beyond biomedical boundaries. To examine how chronically ill and undiagnosed female patients narrate their experiences in and with the biomedical system and how these narratives resist biomedical health standards, I employ semi-structured interviews with 20 female patients living undiagnosed and chronically ill as well as engage in critical autoethnography to recount my own health experiences living a part of this community. In utilizing the culture-centered approach to health communication as a theoretical …

Social Media Marketing And Insurance: An Analysis Of The Impact Of Social Media Marketing On Small Independent Brokerages Of Property And Casualty Insurance, Kaylee B. Brucker

University Honors Theses

Property and casualty insurance is an intangible service. It is a large industry within the US that in most regard is perpetual. Marketing for insurance is not similar to marketing for most other services or products. The agent must relay the value to the consumer prior to them purchasing it. Further, when considering social media marketing, we find a separate strategy of marketing. Social media marketing is becoming increasingly popular, it has shown as a successful strategy for obtaining consumers' attention and their business. This success has been seen in many industries, including insurance. However, there is a lack of …

Data For Power: A Visual Tool For Organizing Unions, Shay Culpepper

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The strength of a labor union comes from the participation and engagement of its members. In her book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Jane McAlevey says, “Since organizing’s primary purpose is to change the power structure away from the 1% to more like the 90%, majorities are always the goal: the more people, the more power. The first test of this strength for a budding union is for the workers to declare that they want to be unionized. Over fifty percent support is required for the union to be recognized. To even hold an election, …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

Look At All Those Big Knobs! Online Audio Technology Discourse And Sexy Gear Fetishes, Eliot Bates, Samantha Bennett

Publications and Research

Despite a predominantly digital, 21st century music production landscape, analogue hardware professional audio technologies persist. In the discoursal throes of the leading online audio technology message forum Gearslutz, such technologies are routinely objectified, sexualized, fetishized and socialized into gear. Situated in a contemporary critical, interdisciplinary framework of fetish, masculinity and sexuality studies, this research interrogates how audio technologies manufactured and intended for music production contexts become sexy. Applying a mixed-mode methodology, including an intensive discourse, image and material-semiotic analysis of an ‘epic’ sexy gear thread, we collated extensive data about technological fetishization. Sexy gear discourse articulates themes of voyeurism, acquisition, …

Strainer: State Transcript Rating For Informed News Entity Retrieval, Thomas M. Gerrity

Master's Theses

Over the past two decades there has been a rapid decline in public oversight of state and local governments. From 2003 to 2014, the number of journalists assigned to cover the proceedings in state houses has declined by more than 30\%. During the same time period, non-profit projects such as Digital Democracy sought to collect and store legislative bill and hearing information on behalf of the public. More recently, AI4Reporters, an offshoot of Digital Democracy, seeks to actively summarize interesting legislative data.

This thesis presents STRAINER, a parallel project with AI4Reporters, as an active data retrieval and filtering system for …

Qualitative Evaluation Of Breakthrough Action/Nigeria’S Community Capacity Strengthening Approach To Sustaining Integrated Social And Behavior Change Programming: Phase I, Martha Silva, Nrupa Jani, Adetunji Adetayo, Mayokun Adediran

Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Choices

To ensure the maintenance and sustainability of social and behavior change (SBC), Breakthrough ACTION/Nigeria is implementing a phased, performance-based community capacity strengthening (CCS) approach that focuses on engaging existing community leaders and structures—namely ward development committees—to increase community self-efficacy, coordinate and support the health ecosystem in general, and to ensure sustained community-level activities supporting behavior change and positive social norms for improved health outcomes. Using a qualitative approach, Breakthrough RESEARCH assessed early successes, challenges, and opportunities for Breakthrough ACTION/Nigeria’s CCS Phase 1 approach in selected wards of the Bauchi and Sokoto states in Nigeria.

Gamer Girl Vs. Girl Gamer: Stereotypical Gamer Traits Increase Men’S Play Intention, Shay Xuejing Yao, David Ewoldsen, Morgan Ellithorpe, Brandon Van Der Heide, Nancy Rhodes

Communication Faculty Publications

The present study utilized two theories (the common ingroup identity model; expectation states theory) to examine male players’ intention to play video games with a female player. Consistent with the common ingroup identity model, male participants who were exposed to a pseudo Xbox profile presenting a woman as a stereotypical gamer showed stronger identification with the gamer category compared to those who saw a profile presenting her as a stereotypical female player. These male participants in turn showed stronger intention to play video games with the woman in the Xbox profile. Results also supported expectation states theory, suggesting that viewing …

The “End” Of Neutrality: Tumultuous Times Require A Deeper Value, Carol Pauli

Faculty Scholarship

This essay has observed that, when times are tumultuous, third parties who intend to be neutral may need some mooring beyond the norms that are shifting. It argues that neutrality is an unsatisfying value in such times and suggests that neutrals look to the deeper values of their field. It proposes human dignity as a good place to begin, and it invites others to explore whether an initial commitment to the inherent worth of every person would make a helpful difference in practice.

Age As A Moderator Of The Association Between Anticipated Regret And The Posting And Deleting Of Alcohol-Related Content On Social Networking Sites Among Adolescents And Young Adults, Cassidy R. Loparco, Ashley Lowery, Zhengyang Zhou, Marcela Leon, Annalynn M. Galvin, Melissa A. Lewis, Dana Litt

Health Behavior Research

Research demonstrates associations between alcohol consumption and posting alcohol-related content on social networking sites (SNS); less is known regarding motivations behind deleting alcohol content on SNS and differences by age. The present study examined the associations of anticipated regret with posting and deleting alcohol-related content; age was examined as a moderator. Participants (N = 306; 47.1% male) aged 15 – 20 completed a baseline survey for a larger experimental study. Results indicated significant interactions between anticipated regret and age, such that higher levels of both increased the odds of both posting (OR = 1.37) and deleting (OR = 1.30) …

Investigating Nonverbal Strategies To Support Communication With Persons Living With Dementia, Emma Bender

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Many persons living with dementia experience difficulties comprehending language and benefit from nonverbal communication (NVC). This research aimed to identify potential strategies for nonverbal behaviour adaptation to enhance communication with persons living with dementia, based on the Communication Enhancement Model. Studies included a scoping review of NVC strategies for caregivers with persons living with dementia and an analysis of whether NVC strategies used by personal support workers (PSW) co-occurred with verbal communication demonstrating person-centered indicators (recognition, negotiation, validation and facilitation). Video-recorded interactions (n=40) between PSW and simulated persons living with dementia were analysed using a codebook of NVC strategies (facial …

Towards Practicalization Of Blockchain-Based Decentralized Applications, Songlin He

Dissertations

Blockchain can be defined as an immutable ledger for recording transactions, maintained in a distributed network of mutually untrusting peers. Blockchain technology has been widely applied to various fields beyond its initial usage of cryptocurrency. However, blockchain itself is insufficient to meet all the desired security or efficiency requirements for diversified application scenarios. This dissertation focuses on two core functionalities that blockchain provides, i.e., robust storage and reliable computation. Three concrete application scenarios including Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity management (CSM), and peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery network (CDN) are utilized to elaborate the general design principles for these two main …

Summoning Laplace’S Demon: The Erosion Of Meaningful Voter Choice In An Era Of Algorithms?, Stephen Bork

Compass: An Undergraduate Journal of American Political Ideas

Precise individual microtargeting threatens to remake the political landscape as thoroughly as it has remade marketing. This paper explores the observed uses to date of political microtargeting as well as the many difficulties, some inherent to politics, of measuring its effects. Considering the philosophical difficulties of predictively removing human choice, it then assesses the observed risks of and some potential remedies to the current trajectory and finds that free electoral choice is not doomed to be written out of the system.

A Framework For Understanding How People Can Draw Different Conclusions Based On The Same Information, Evan Schapiro

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

At least partially fueled by misinformation, political polarization is growing in the United States, leading to a breakdown of confidence in our traditional academic and political institutions. A popular belief is that a solution is to train people to think more rationally by eliminating the cognitive biases embedded in their subconscious thought patterns. This paper identifies the influences on my thinking and the framework used to look at these issues from a different perspective through methodological believing and the application of models of learning and conversation. The paper also points out that the methods of scientific inquiry often assume that …

Building Constructive Interpersonal Communication Skills In Military Professionals: Generating A Culture Of Trust, April L. Baptiste Robertson

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

Trust and open communication are interdependent and as a post 9/11 career Army leader, I have witnessed what appears to be the erosion of both within the military ranks. Military quality of life and mental health issues are on the rise, with compliance and prevention programs appearing to be less than impactful solutions. The resulting effects of which is a loss of trust and confidence in leadership. The research and findings presented within this synthesis strongly indicate that targeted training on interpersonal communication skills and counseling would simultaneously foster leader development and underpin a culture of trust and open communication. …

Georgia Southern University's Communication During Covid-19 Analyzed Using The Discourse Of Renewal Theory, Jessica Hickman

Honors College Theses

This research aims to analyze how Georgia Southern University handled COVID-19 through a public relations perspective using the discourse of renewal theory. In order to do this, this research looks at the communication sent from the University to the faculty, staff, and students during the time periods of March to April of 2020 and July to August of 2020. The three research questions this research will examine are: how did the University apply the discourse of renewal theory to speak to the students, faculty, and staff regarding COVID-19, how did the University use its email system to communicate with the …

“Ambassadors Of Good Will”: The Peace Corps In U.S. Capitalist Imperialism, Jasmine Shirey

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

The Powerful Myth Of Racial Equality: A Review Of Colombia’S Mestizaje, Adriana Fajardo Mazorra

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Noam Chomsky On The State Of The U.S. Empire, Chris Helali

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

The Power Of Mis-Education, Ladarius Dennison

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Men We Reaped: A Call For A Revolutionary Social System, Ladarius Dennison

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.