Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Green” Marketing In The Apparel Industry: The Spectrum Of Veracity, Stephanie R. Keane

Honors Theses

Apparel companies’ propensity for manipulation in their marketing of environmental initiatives contributes to immense environmental pollution from petrochemical textile material production. Public scrutiny pressures these businesses to adopt “green” initiatives to avoid losing devoted consumers. In some cases, these initiatives disguise the real operations of a company or claim benignity for the company when this is not the reality. Previous business ethics research analyzed the emergence of “greenwashing” in corporations and thus concluded that corporations market themselves as eco-friendly to portray commodification as sustainable. In the form of case studies, this paper scrutinizes four companies: Zara, Patagonia, Lululemon, and Pact. …

Paying Attention: The Effects Of Different Social Media Posts On Consumers, Noah Lapointe

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Predictors And Outcomes Of The Occurrence And Valence Of Campaign-Related Talk: The Interplay Between New Media Use, Conversations, And Vicarious Learning In The Context Of Reproductive Health, Carina Mazariegos Zelaya

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Study 1 explored the dominant or deciding barriers and facilitators, beyond environmental and systemic factors, influencing women’s LARC uptake (RQ1, RQ2). Moreover, it examined pregnancy ambivalence and motivation to prevent unintended pregnancy as distal variables to LARC information seeking and uptake (H1, H3). Additionally, it examined embodied experience as an important source of information about contraception (H4). Furthermore, it explored how informal and formal sources support reproductive health decision-making, specifically focusing on social networks as sources of information, knowledge (RQ3, H2), and norms regarding LARC uptake (RQ4, RQ4a, RQ5). Study 2 examined the influence of social learning and LARC knowledge …

Assessing Dialogic Communication Elements In Online Emergency Communication, Lauren Bailey Cain

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Social media have been identified as powerful tools for two-way crisis communication, allowing officials to reach, inform, and motivate at-risk publics during emergencies. However, government use of social media during emergencies is a relatively new area of study and is thus understudied and undertheorized, with little evidence-based guidance for online messaging strategies during emergencies. Dialogic communication theory has recently been used as a framework to investigate the utility of social media as channels for facilitating two-way, cocreational communication. This study assesses the use and impact of dialogic communication elements at each stage of the crisis and emergency risk communication model …

Applying The Causal Network Model To Advance Care Planning Messages, Katherine Leigh Harville

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

The process of advance care planning often involves conversations that focus on worst case scenarios and discussions of end-of-life, which makes the topic a daunting one. Most of these conversations occur with older adults or individuals who are seriously ill. However, advance care planning is of importance to those who are healthy, young adults as well. Narrative messages could help simplify the process of approaching such conversations and provide tools for conducting them in a more effective manner.

The proposed study makes use of the causal network model, a model that proposes that the location of information within narratives impacts …

Artists As Assets: Labor And Capital In The Unity Asset Store, D'An Knowles Ball

English Faculty Publications

The Unity Asset Store sells amateur designers and artists a promise of being able to participate in an idealized, rationalized vision of how the game design industry operates. However, the Unity Asset Store depends on marketing the content created by amateur artists in ways that require the artists to essentially package their work as labor and to mask their role as artists. This essay views labor and capital in the Unity Asset Store through a Marxist lens, informed by Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter's (2003) model of technological, cultural, and marketing forces as "three circuits of interactivity" in the mediatized …

Effectiveness Of Wechat-Group-Based Parental Health Education In Preventing Unintentional Injuries Among Children Aged 0-3: Randomized Controlled Trial In Shanghai, Yuheng Feng, Xueqi Ma, Qi Zhang, Ruo Jiang, Jun Lu, Kaiyue Chen, Huiping Wang, Qinghua Xia, Jicui Zheng, Jingwei Xia, Xiaohong Li

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Unintentional injuries to children are a major public health problem. The online social media is a potential way to implement health education for caregivers in online communities. Using WeChat, a free and popular social media service in China, this study evaluated the effectiveness of social online community-based parental health education in preventing unintentional injuries in children aged 0-3.

METHODS: We recruited 365 parents from two community health centers in Shanghai and allocated them into intervention and control groups randomly. Follow-up lasted for one year. The intervention group received and followed their WeChat group and a WeChat official account for …

E-Payment Adoption In Saudi Arabia, Alexander N. Chen, Joseph Y. Thomas, Mark E. Mcmurtrey Ph.D., Michael E. Ellis

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Internet technology has influenced banking systems because of its capability to enhance the performance of financial operations. Several factors influence the adoption of new technology within the financial industry. Namely the customers’ perception of benefit, quality, Ease of Use, Security, Self-Efficacy, and Trust. However, various cultures and geopolitical issues influence technology adoption and are therefore worth further study. This paper focuses on the factors that influence the behaviors of Saudi Arabians and their adoption of e-payment systems. The paper shows the fundamental discoveries of an investigation examining the dispersion and the adoption of e-payment technology in …

Corporate Activism Best Practices In The Age Of Social Media, Fransisco Flores

Theses and Dissertations

Corporate activism, or the act of corporations speaking out on sociopolitical issues, has become more common with technological advances and social media access. Corporations’ role in society has evolved to include non-economic functions that aim to improve societal conditions. Despite corporations fulfilling additional societal roles, they face increased scrutiny from shareholders and stakeholders alike. Speaking out on social issues or staying silent causes ripple effects amongst their internal and external networks. Speaking out on social media while working for a private or publicly traded corporation can be challenging as it entails weighing a wide array of conditions, stakeholder desires, and …

Archiving Feminist Truth In Trump’S Wake Of Lies, Julie Shayne

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This article is about an assignment I do in one of my Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies social movement classes. I revised the assignment the first time teaching the class after Trump lost the 2020 election. For the assignment, students work in groups to research local feminist and gender justice organizations and deposit all of their original materials – recordings, photos, flyers, etc. – into a digital, open access archive I co-created several years ago with librarians and staff on my campus. In 2021 I had my students do the “post-Trump” edition where they researched local organizations about how their …

[Review] Liz P.Y. Chee. Mao’S Bestiary: Medicinal Animals And Modern China. Duke University Press, 2021. 288 Pp., Peter J. Li

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Liz P.Y. Chee. Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China. Duke University Press, 2021. 288 pp. The COVID-19 pandemic has secured its place as a 21st century global public health disaster. It has killed more than 6.2 million and infected close to 500 million people worldwide (Worldometer). Acknowledging Wuhan’s wildlife market as the ground zero of the pandemic and the devastation caused by SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) 17 years earlier, China’s Communist authorities made the long overdue decision on February 24, 2020 and outlawed wildlife breeding and trade for the country’s exotic food market (National People’s Congress of …

The Examination Of Social Support Received After Traumatic Experiences, Emily Abellon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to explore what constitutes effective and ineffective social support after an individual endures trauma. Participants were recruited mainly through social media to complete an online survey with open-ended questions. The survey provided participants with the opportunity to reflect and share the social support they received after the endured trauma, specifically disclosing what support messages were effective and ineffective, and why these messages were effective and ineffective. The messages found to be effectively supportive after the endured trauma, and the ones most frequently mentioned were emotional and appraisal support. These messages were found to be effective due to …

Memorable Messages Received By Bereaved Parents: Using Attribution Theory To Understand Hurt And Compassion, April Samaras

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The communication bereaved parents have with family members, friends, colleagues, and healthcare providers following the death of a child can serve as a great comfort or exacerbate their grief. In order to understand this communication and why bereaved parents find it helpful or harmful, this study examines bereaved parents' experiences of compassionate and hurtful communication using the frameworks of memorable messages (Stohl & Reardon, 1981) and attribution theory (Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967). Fifty bereaved parents who lost a child between birth and 25-years-old completed an online survey. Tracy’s (2018) iterative analysis method revealed four types of compassionate messages: …

Com 378: Intercultural Communication, Kim Ranger

Handouts

This handout was created for Dr. Spencer's COM 378 class. The handout provides information to help students search databases, find full text, and create a citation. It also includes workspace for students to jot down concepts and synonyms for their topic.

Instructions For Authors, Discovery Editors

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

No abstract provided.

'Never Time To Do Anything Well': Mothers' Reported Constraints During A Pandemic, Grace Ellen Brannon, Molly Wiant Cummins

Communication Faculty Publications

Mothers’ perceptions of mothering could potentially influence several aspects of their home and work commitments. This study explores how mothers perceive their mothering experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic via 18 in-depth interviews. The authors use constraint theory and negotiation frameworks to discuss how family communication processes and perceptions of mothering are related within the context of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Findings demonstrated how working from home increased perceptions of family tensions, especially with the lack of home/work separation. Throughout the narratives, participants describe specific constraints at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural levels, as …

The Effectiveness Of Handwriting Intervention On Handwriting And Spelling Outcomes Delivered Via Telehealth, Laura Bray

Theses and Dissertations--Rehabilitation Sciences

Across the United States, there has been a push to improve the literacy of our population, especially in the school systems. This has resulted in emphasizing reading skill development; however, literacy encompasses more than just reading. Literacy is the internal processes needed to create and understand contextualized visual, written, and verbal information. According to the Common Core State Standards, foundational literacy skills include reading, but also writing, listening, and speaking abilities. Handwriting is an area of literacy that is often forgotten, but has significant positive correlations to writing composition, spelling, and early reading skills. In fact, the Simple View of …

Learning By Playing: A Curriculum Utilizing Improvisational Theater To Develop Prosocial Behavior Skills And Self-Efficacy In Young Adolescents, Lynn Lovett Barr

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Prosocial behavior requires competency in social-emotional skills including interpersonal skills, conflict resolution, and emotional regulation. During the developmental stage of early adolescence, youth are learning these skills and are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior if they feel efficacious in them. However, most social-emotional learning programs focus on conceptual knowledge in these areas without providing sufficient opportunities for practice, which does not allow students to develop sufficient procedural knowledge and self-efficacy. Improvisational theater offers a solution to this problem; used in concert with social-emotional lessons, it provides practice scenarios and procedural learning opportunities. This project consists of a curriculum …

Jenny Vorpahl And Dirk Schuster (Eds). Communicating Religion And Atheism In Central And Eastern Europe. (Book Review), Oleg Kyselov

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

A review of Jenny Vorpahl and Dirk Schuster (eds). Communicating Religion and Atheism in Central and Eastern Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. 312 p. ISBN 978-3-11-054637-8 Hardcover $114.99.

Deepfakes: Ai Technology Of The Future, Hosanna Root

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Deepfakes technology’s danger stems from its ability to create realistic but fake synthesized media that people often identify as something that is real. With this powerful technology in the wrong hands, deepfakes can cause devastating havoc through information warfare, election campaign disruptions, and more, creating distrust in society. Disinformation is already rampant today, even without wide deployments of deepfakes, which is concerning given the fact that deepfakes’ nefarious full potentials are yet to be reached.

Networks Of Disinformation: The Proliferation Of Hate Speech In Chile And Colombia During The Venezuelan Migration Crisis, Isabelle Valdes, Erika Frydenlund (Mentor)

Computer & Information Science: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics

No abstract provided.

Identifying Challenges And Opportunities For Designing Social Media Nudges For Adolescents, Oluwatomisin Obajemu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

With the prevalence of online risks encountered by youth online, strength-based approaches such as nudges have been recommended as a potential solution to subtly guide teens toward safer decisions. However, most nudging interventions to date have not been designed to cater to teens’ unique needs and online safety concerns. To address this gap, this study aimed to better understand adolescents’ perceptions and feedback on online safety nudges to inform the design of more effective online safety interventions. We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and 3 focus group sessions with 21 teens (13 – 17 years old) to get their feedback on …

D&D&U&G: Uses And Gratifications Theory And Dungeons & Dragons, Ariana Ferrante

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Given the growing popularity of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, this thesis study applied the Uses and Gratifications theory to determine what players of the game get from engagement with this particular, previously overlooked form of entertainment media. Additionally, this research sought to determine whether these discovered gratifications overlapped at all with perceived similar media, specifically massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, MMORPGs, and social media. A series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews designed to elicit relevant responses were conducted with 14 respondents, followed by a thematic analysis to determine gratifications. The qualitative analysis determined a set of …

Learning And Decision Making In Social Media Networks, Zhecheng Qiang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Social media is a virtual community where users share news, ideas, interests, and information. Learning the information diffusion dynamics and making decisions correspondingly, e.g., selecting the seed nodes to maximize the influence, have been widely applied to the areas of viral marketing and cyber security. In this dissertation, we study the problem of learning diffusion process, i.e., infection prediction, in social media networks utilizing both feature-based machine learning methods and mathematical model-based methods. For feature-based machine learning methods, the neighborhood information is treated as an important feature together with user profile and content similarity features. For model-based methods, two distinctive …

Circulating Suburbia: Locating A Transnational Suburban Imagination In Post-War Periodicals, 1945-1970, Tyler Dick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In this thesis I argue that a suburban cultural imagination developed transnationally during the post-war period (roughly 1945-1970) rather than as a cultural phenomenon largely associated with the 1950s United States. I situate the suburbs—in both their physical and cultural constructions—as my primary focus and discuss the suburb's influence on hegemonic culture by performing an in-depth comparison of the U.S. with another country with a long history of suburbanization—Australia. Given that the suburbs structure several social, cultural, economic, political, and historical vectors—which all in turn inform issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality—I focus on how the suburbs inform …

Post-Crisis Organizational Learning Thresholds, Pitfalls And The Risk Of Repeated Crises: Clarifying The Discourse Of Renewal Theory, Rodrigo Soares

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Through a case study analysis of repeated crises that impacted the same organization in Brazil, this dissertation aimed to solve an applied problem: the potential for unresolved or amplified risk for organizations and their stakeholders facing repeated crises due to incomplete post-crisis learning. This research expands and clarifies the understanding of organizational learning, particularly in the Discourse of Renewal theory, by exploring the potential for organizations to ascertain vital lessons for a crisis but fail to communicatively constitute them as central features of a renewed organization. The study investigated an organization's failure to avoid repeating a crisis within a relatively …

What Motivates Saudi Females' Intentions To Get Mammography? A Randomized Control Trial To Evaluate Effective Preventative Messages, Saleh Bin Khulayf

Theses and Dissertations

Background. In Saudi Arabia, breast cancer mortality is a public health concern where females often discover breast cancer at an advanced stage due to ignoring preventative testing such as mammography. While increasing mammography awareness is essential in Saudi Arabia, almost nothing is known about the effectiveness of health communication messages in mammography's context. This research tested whether exposure to Entertainment-Education (E-E) message or educational infographic messages would influence Saudi females' intentions to get mammography.

Method. This research relied on a randomized control trial among n=240 Saudi females older than 40. Respondents were randomly assigned to watch YouTube E-E message or …

Women Of Appalachia: Common Ground, Different Matriarch, Cecelia A. Bagnoli

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Media And Peer Culture: Young People Sharing Norms And Collective Identities With And Through Media, Sun Sun Lim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

When young people interact, they absorb the peer culture that underpins and sustains their relationships with each other. Peer culture encompasses norms and conventions, shared interests and activities, and the unique modes of communication deployed in the afore-mentioned elements. The ways in which young people integrate their media consumption into their peer culture is the focus of this chapter. Specifically, it examines how young people incorporate media content into their peer interactions and appropriate a variety of communication platforms to socialize with their peers, thus generating distinctive traits, norms, practices, codes and shared identities that make up their unique peer …

Screenlife Capture: An Open-Source And User-Friendly Framework For Collecting Screenomes From Android Smartphones, Andrew Z. H. Yee, Ryan Yu, Sun Sun Lim, Kwan Hui Lim, Tien Tien Anh Dinh, Lionell Loh, Andre Hadianto, Miguel Quizon

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

As our interactions with each other become increasingly digitally mediated, there is growing interest in the study of people’s digital experiences. To better understand digital experiences, some researchers have proposed the use of screenomes. This involves the collection of sequential high-frequency screenshots which provide detailed objective records of individuals’ interaction with screen devices over time. Despite its usefulness, there remains no readily available tool that researchers can use to run their own screenome studies. To fll this gap, we introduce ScreenLife Capture, a user-friendly and open-source software to collect screenomes from smartphones. Using this tool, researchers can set up smartphone …