Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Sociological Perspective On Pidgin's Viability And Usefulness For Development In West Africa, Victoria M. Time, Daniel K. Pryce

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

This essay examines the viability and usefulness of pidgin for development in West Africa. Pidgin in West Africa has endured as a unifying medium of communication among people who do not share a common language. It has been lauded as a neutral language that facilitates trade, commerce, and everyday dealings among people of all walks of life. Some have proposed supplanting English, which is the official language in most of the West African countries where the use of pidgin is prevalent, with either pidgin or some other indigenous language. Contrarians, however, consider pidgin to be a limiting factor, in that, …

The Design, Development And Validation Of A Persuasive Content Generator, Sam Khataei, Michael J. Hine, Ali Arya

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This paper addresses the automatic generation of persuasive content to influence users’ attitude and behaviour. Our research extends current approaches by leveraging individuals’ social media profiles and activity to personalize the persuasive content. Unlike most other implemented persuasive technology, our system is generic and can be adapted to any domain where collections of electronic text are available. Using the Yale Attitude Change approach, we describe: the multi-layered Pyramid of Individualization model; the design, development, and validation of integrated software that can generate individualized persuasive content based on a user’s social media profile and activity. Results indicate the proposed system can …

Integrating Voice Over Ip Solution In Ipv6 And Ipv4 Networks To Increase Employee Productivity: A Case Study Of Cameroon Telecommunications (Camtel), North-West, Lottin Cyrille Marcel Malobe, Austin Oguejiofor Amaechi

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Telecommunications organizations have to follow the rapid innovation of technology if they want to face challenges raised by competition. The challenge to respond to the huge market demand of updated products and services from customers requires that the organization‘s working environment be equipped with tools and communication facilities that contribute to ameliorating productivity. Cameroon Telecommunications (Camtel) is facing a digital telephony and Internet Protocol strategic management challenge. Successful implementation cannot be achieved if the employees are still depending on the ageing public switched telephone network (PSTN) as their primary communication system, despite the frequent loss of dial tone experience in …

The Soft Skills Business Demands Of The Chief Information Security Officer, Richard Smit, Jeroen Van Yperen Hagedoorn, Patric Versteeg, Pascal Ravesteijn

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

While many researchers have investigated soft skills for different roles related to business, engineering, healthcare and others, the soft skills needed by the chief information security officer (CISO) in a leadership position are not studied in-depth. This paper describes a first study aimed at filling this gap.

In this multimethod research, both the business leaders perspective as well as an analysis of CISO job ads is studied. The methodology used to capture the business leaders perspective is via a Delphi study and the jobs adds are studied using a quantitative content analysis.

With an increasing threat to information security for …

Icts For Surveillance And Suppression: The Case Of The Indian Emergency 1975-1977, Ramesh Subramanian

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Information and Communications technologies (ICT) pervade society. The Internet, wireless communication, and social media are ubiquitous in and indispensable in society today. As they continue to grow and mushroom, there are new and increased calls from various segments of the society such as technologists, activists, sociologists, and legal experts, who issue warnings on the more nefarious and undesirable uses of ICTs, especially by governments. In fact, government control and surveillance using ICTs is not a new phenomenon. By looking at history, we are able to see several instances when ICTs have been used by governments to control, surveil, and infringe …

Conference Proceedings Of The 32nd Annual Iima Conference

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Conference Proceedings of the 32nd Annual IIMA Conference

Analyzing Social Media Implementation In Hospitals In The U.S. Midwest Region, Dalsang Chung, C. Christopher Lee, David Hwang

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

The purpose of this research is to explore to what scale hospitals are adopting social media and implementing it in accordance with hospital characteristics. We reviewed hospitals’ social media activities on social networking sites such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. We studied the 912 hospitals in the Midwest region reported in the 2015 American Hospital Association Annual Survey dataset. We reviewed each hospital’s social-networking page to understand the scale of social media adoption relative to the hospital’s characteristics such as bed count, state, ownership type (control), and specialty (service). We also considered whether the hospital is in a network and …

Visual Infrastructures Of Covid-19 Messaging, Julia Ross, Claudine Jaenichen

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Infecting more than two hundred and nineteen million people internationally as of September 2021, SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19) remains a major health crisis despite the availability of vaccines in many countries and publicized guidance on effective preventative measures (WHO, 2021). To combat the spread of the virus, governments worldwide have found themselves relying on their ability to exert control over health behaviors in public and private spaces. Visual communication, which includes both graphics and text, is an integral component of how these behavioral advisories are communicated to the public. Authorities translate scientific information into digestible designs for the public to achieve effective …

Gender Differences In Fear And Risk Perception During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Abdelaziz Alsharawy, Ross Spoon, Alec Smith, Sheryl Ball

Student and Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many people to suffer from emotional distress. Previous studies suggest that women process and express affective experiences, such as fear, with a greater intensity compared to men. We administered an online survey to a sample of participants in the United States that measures fear of COVID-19, perceptions about health and financial risks, and preventative measures taken. Despite the empirical fact that men are more likely to experience adverse health consequences from COVID-19, women report greater fear and more negative expectations about health-related consequences of COVID-19 than men. However, women are more optimistic than men regarding …

Guided Toolkit For Virtual Programming, Sienna Mcarthur

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Coronavirus pandemic that has occurred over the last year was a major detriment to the entire world. COVID-19 caused businesses to shut down, people to shelter in place, and restricted in-person gatherings. Specifically, in the event coordinating profession, planners had to pivot their thought process and change how they saw their careers. Virtual events became a reality for most, but some were unsure of where to start the transition.

This research focuses on the importance of continued programming, even virtually, in order to keep positive relationships alive and encourage participants to be engaged from their homes. It also creates …

The Healers Issue, University Of Montana--Missoula. School Of Journalism

Byline

Taking the Reins: Providing therapeutic horseback riding to Montanans in need -- More than Superstition: A haunted prison fosters connection during COVID-19 -- Public Health: Local healers leave after divisive legislative session -- Misrepresented and Misunderstood: Why media needs to listen to autistics -- Confronting the Past: Recovering from Native American boarding school trauma -- Welcoming Them Home: The return of native species is healing the land of the Aaniiih and Nakoda -- No Place to Stay: The pandemic is pushing people into Montana - and others out -- They didn't bring any houses with them -- As Missoula affordable …

Hemingway Drunk: A Study Of Prohibition, Medico-Legal Rhetoric, And The Autonomy Of Masculinity, Graham P. Studdard

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis uses a combination of medical humanities, queer public theory, and literary analysis to showcase the uniquely American connections between alcoholism and masculinity in the literature of Ernest Hemingway. By situating both Hemingway and his characters within the medico-legal rhetoric of modernism’s famous Parisian Jazz-age, which occurred at the same time as American prohibition, I reveal changes in white American men’s relationships with gender, bodily autonomy, and the patriarchy that are often overlooked due to Hemingway’s publicly constructed masculine persona. My work provides new queer interpretations of The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the posthumous Garden of Eden (1986) …

The "Information Pandemic": Technical Communication And False Information On Social Media In The Age Of Covid-19, Mia M. Stephens

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The goal of this thesis is to explore the various forms of rhetoric utilized in digital communities pertaining to COVID-19. The body of this thesis synthesizes social media data with original human subjects research, supplemented by a review of the literature surrounding digital communication. The analysis of these freestanding communities highlights the differences in communication throughout these spaces, as well as discusses their differences in reaction to disordered information. Through rhetorical analysis of the language employed by COVID-19 denialist communities on Twitter and a review of the experiences of COVID-19 “long-haulers” in COVID-19 related online communities (such as Facebook and …

A Multiple Goals Perspective On Burnout Disclosure And Support Among Attending Physicians, Alison N. Buckley

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Burnout is a common experience among physicians and has been identified as a precursor to substance abuse and suicide ideation. When not addressed, burnout can have many negative personal, relational and professional consequences. Research about the burnout experience is limited due to the taboo nature of the topic. The present study used a multiple goals theoretical perspective to examine how physicians disclose burnout in order to access social support. Attending physicians from various specialties (N = 30) participated in one-on-one interviews and were asked to discuss their burnout experience, conversational goals during burnout disclosure, catalysts and barriers for disclosure, and …

Understanding Struggles And Triumphs Of Widows In Central Nigeria: A Path To Communication And Economic Empowerment, Meredith Annette Garrison

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

One in ten African women age 15 or older are widows. Approximately 8 million widows live in Nigeria with many living in extreme poverty. Throughout the nation, widows are subjected to physical and psychological harm from their families and communities following the deaths of their husbands. Women are marginalized across Nigeria, but widowed women often experience ostracization and oppression that leads to poverty. Most widows rely on informal business and petty trading to survive but these ventures typically only bring in less than a $1 a day for a family. This dissertation critically examined the situation of widows in a …

The Persuasive Power Of Instagram Metrics: Examining How User-Generated Cues Affect Consumer’S Perception Of Influencer Credibility, Madison Lea Wallace

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Since 2019, Instagram has been testing the removal of a visible like count on posts. This change particularly pertains to social media influencers whose popularity is visibly displayed through the number of likes and comments their posts receive. Therefore, the present study experimentally investigated how varying levels of the like (i.e. hidden, approximate, and exact) and comment (hidden and exact) display on Instagram’s Explore page affect user’s credibility evaluations of unknown influencers. Guided by the Heuristic Systematic Model, MAIN Model and Warranting Principle, this study conducted a 3 (like display: hidden likes, approximated number of likes, and exact number of …

Society Doesn’T Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games As Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine and simulate as well as prepare. Thus, reading the …

Re-Spatializing Gangs: An Exponential Random Graph Model Of Twitter Data To Analyze The Geospatial Distribution Of Gang Member Connections, Ryan J. Roberts

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

Gang studies often use location-based approaches to explain gang members’ interconnectedness. Although this perspective remains consistent with the proximity principle that the smaller the geographic space, the greater the likelihood of observing connections between individuals, location-based studies limit our understanding of gang member connections to narrowly defined geographic spaces at specific points in time. The advent of social media has re-spatialized gang member interconnectedness to unbounded geographic spaces, where the preservation of online activity can extend indefinitely. Despite having an online presence, most research examining the digital footprint of gangs tends to be descriptive. This study collects Twitter data to …

Assessment Of Cooking Matters Facebook Platform To Promote Healthy Eating Behaviors Among Low-Income Caregivers Of Young Children In The United States: A Pilot Study, Qi Zhang, Jill Panichelli, Leigh Ann Hall

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

How best to deliver healthy-eating education through social media among a low-income population remains understudied. To assess the impact of the Cooking Matters (CM) Facebook page on healthy eating behaviors among low-income caregivers, we conducted a pre–post survey of new CM Facebook followers in early 2020. A convenience sample was recruited at baseline from WICShopper app users and the CM Facebook page. The recruited sample included 397 low-income caregivers of a child younger than 6 who never followed CM Facebook. Among the baseline caregivers, 184 completed the follow-up survey. Paired t-test and McNemar–Bowker tests were conducted to compare the outcomes …

The Wild That Remains: A Once In A Generation Forest Plan Reignites The Wilderness Debate In Montana’S Gallatin Range, Anthony Stephen Pavkovich

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

The movement to preserve Montana’s Gallatin Mountains, which stretch north from Yellowstone National Park, has been ongoing since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. Largely undeveloped, the range’s sinuous, rocky crest, fertile meadows and thick lodgepole forests are vital to one of the earth’s last intact temperate ecosystems. The landscape provides refuge to rare populations of grizzly bears, elk, bighorn sheep, wolves and wolverines. Yet, the Gallatins remain the last major mountain range bordering the nation’s first and most iconic national park without congressionally designated wilderness. The closest the Gallatins came to being protected as wilderness was in …

Takin' Care Of Small Business: The Rise Of Stakeholder Influence, William P. Jimenez, Xiaohong (Violet) Xu, Emily D. Campion, Andrew A. Bennett

Management Faculty Publications

In this Exchange, we consider three crucial boundary conditions that Barnett, Henriques, and Husted (2020) overlooked in their model of diminished stakeholder influence. Although we agree that social media platforms have weakened stakeholder influence in certain conditions, such is not the case for all firms, all stakeholders, or all situations. Drawing from socio-cognitive and self-determination theories, we contend that (a) independent, owner-managed small firms present a context wherein information overload is rendered less of an issue because the information about the firm is more salient to locals; (b) stakeholders can be motivated to influence firms via social media platforms, which …

Toward Tweet-Mining Framework For Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information And Reporting, Farkhund Iqbal, Rabia Batool, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Saiqa Aleem, Ahmed Abbasi, Abdul Rehman Javed

All Works

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific …

Playing On The Communication And Sport Field: Dispositions, Challenges, And Priorities, Lawrence A. Wenner

Communication Studies Faculty Works

This chapter considers the origins, development, and epistemological contexts undergirding the study of communication and sport as an emergent and growing field of inquiry. Early in the chapter, the contexts underlying the development of studying sport in communication and media studies are considered and woven into a brief chronology of the area’s maturation towards disciplinary legitimacy. This is followed by an analysis of the challenges presented by competing and complementary interests at play in three disciplinary and epistemological dispositions seen in the study of communication and sport. The closing section of the chapter considers key challenges that need to be …

Media, Sports, And Society, Lawrence A. Wenner

Communication Studies Faculty Works

This chapter interrogates a research journey and the trajectory of study on media, sports, and society. Beginning with reflection on both stimulants to and motivations for this journey, the author makes a case for the necessity of interdisciplinarity in the socio-cultural study of mediated sport. Focusing on key theories, methods, and findings interwoven in his research agenda, the author summarizes key considerations in understanding (1) mediasport fan experiences, (2) dirt theory, commodification, and mega-events, (3) mediasport fan narratives, and (4) the mediasport interpellation. Moving to consideration of the larger state of play in media, sport, and society inquiry, the author …

Entertainment-Education Behind The Scenes: Case Studies For Theory And Practice, Lauren B. Frank, Paul Falzone

Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations

This Open Access book tracks the latest trends in the theory, research, and practice of entertainment-education, the field of communication that incorporates social change messaging into entertaining media. Sometimes called edutainment, social impact television, narrative persuasion, or cultural strategy, this approach to social and behavior change communication offers new opportunities including transmedia and digital formats. However, making media can be a chaotic process. The realities of working in the field and the rigid structures of scholarly evaluation often act as barriers to honest accounts of entertainment-education practice. In this collection of essays, experienced practitioners offer unique insight into how entertainment-education …

Television Viewing And Latino Stereotypes, Gustavo Rivera

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of a modern lifetime, television viewing accounts for a significant amount of information taken in by viewers. Within that consumption lies a potential problem. Viewers may learn erroneous messages about people and the world. Since television has characterized Latinos in ways that have emphasized cultural stereotypes, viewers may learn to perceive them in a corresponding manner. A questionnaire was administered to a sample of 403 students from five universities and two community colleges located in Northern California. The respondents completed a seventy-one item questionnaire. Five key variables were utilized to measure relationships between them. The key variables …

Chronic Customers Or Increased Awareness? The Dynamics Of Social Media Customer Service, Shujing Sun, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite that social media has become a promising alternative to traditional call centers, managers hesitate to fully harness its power because they worry that active service intervention may encourage excessive use of the channel by disgruntled customers. This paper sheds light on such a concern by examining the dynamics between brand-level customer complaints and service interventions on social media. Using details of customer-brand interactions of 40 airlines on Twitter, we find that more service interventions indeed cause more customer complaints, accounting for the online customer population and service quality. However, the increased complaints are primarily driven by the awareness enhancement …

Strengthening Organizational Performance Through Integration Of Systems Leadership, Participatory Communication, And Dynamic Capabilities, Esther Ewurafuah Sackey

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation seeks to include systems leadership and participatory communication as facilitators of the elements that enhance dynamic organizational capabilities to improve performance. The study employs the normative theory-building process to show how systems leadership and participatory communication can facilitate and enhance dynamic capabilities. Specifically, this dissertation offers an integrative model that combines systems leadership, participatory communication, and dynamic capabilities. The proposed integrative model is accompanied by a series of propositions that extend the dynamic capabilities theory through the integration of systems leadership and participatory communication. The potential relevance and application of the proposed model are demonstrated through multiple case …

“Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves”: Creating A Financial Literacy Workshop For College-Aged Women On The Relationship Among Spending, Saving, And Investing, Lesley Chinery

Senior Independent Study Theses

The purpose of this study is to create a financial literacy workshop for college-aged women to increase understanding of the relationship among spending, saving, and investing. Utilizing relevant scholarship on gender and economics, the Elaboration Likelihood Model, and interviews with experts in economics and with facilitators of financial literacy workshops, I created a virtual workshop for college-aged women. This research found that successfully enabling both central and peripheral processing routes plays a significant role in attracting potential participants to workshops and in turn, cognitively engages them during workshops. Moreover, planners of workshops need to ensure consistent appealing messaging in communication …

Communications In The Time Of A Pandemic: The Readability Of Documents For Public Consumption, Catherine Ferguson, Margaret Merga, Stephen Winn

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2021 The Authors Objective: Government communications in a crisis can influence public health outcomes. This research aimed to investigate if written communications of the most commonly sought sources of COVID-19 information available on the internet have readability levels commensurate with those of the general public. Methods: Online documents from the World Health Organization (WHO), and the governments of Australia, the UK and the US were assessed for readability using an online instrument that calculated scores for the Flesch Reading Ease Score, the SMOG Index and the Readability Consensus Grade Level. Results: Similar to the previous research, most documents assessed …