Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Let All Voices Be Heard: Creating An Engaging And Inclusive Asynchronous Qr Classroom, Ruby A. Daniels, Kathryn Appenzeller Knowles

Numeracy

With the shift to remote teaching, many instructors used Zoom for synchronous work. However, this presented issues (fatigue, turning cameras off, inequitable technical hurdles) that motivated quantitative reasoning (QR) instructors to look for asynchronous alternatives. A common technique has been text-based online discussions, which can be difficult for students to find engaging. This mixed method study (N = 41) describes an inclusive video alternative, specifically for teaching QR and quantitative fluency skills, which was piloted in two asynchronous sections and one hybrid section of the same course. Students posted their video responses, watched their classmates’ videos, and wrote short …

Florida Punks: Punk, Performance, And Community At Gainesville’S Fest, Michael Anthony Mcdowell Ii

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fest is an annual punk rock music festival held in Gainesville, Florida. At Fest, participants engage in aesthetic creation and participation, negotiate identities, participate in political discourse, and forge communities. In this dissertation, I use theories of performance, framing, and culture to understand Fest. To do so, I theorize Fest using three approaches to performance: performance as an object of study, performance as a metaphor for everyday life and identity, and performance as a method of inquiry. Using these three approaches to performance, I understand Fest as performance, as a site that permits and constrains performances of self, identity, and …

Organizing Economies: Narrative Sensemaking And Communciative Resilience During Economic Disruption, Timothy Betts

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation unites organizational communication, and economic theory to understand how individuals make sense of economic crises, imbed power and logic in those understandings, and construct new economic realities in the aftermath of crisis. Contra economic orthodoxy, this project conceives of economy and economics as a social construct. As a social construct, individuals organize economy and economics through discourse, make sense of through narrative, and rebuild through communication. This dissertation combines different theoretical perspectives—actor-network theory, antenarrative organization theory, and the communication theory of resilience—to recenter social scientific accounts of economic reality around communication, story, and power.

Specifically, I focus on …

The Tesla Brake Failure Protestor Scandal: A Case Study Of Situational Crisis Communication Theory On Chinese Media, Jiajun Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to test how Tesla handles a protestor in Tesla’s booth in Shanghai. This thesis evaluated the effectiveness and acceptance of Tesla’s public relations and crisis communication through analyzing domestic Chinese official news articles and consumers’ attitude on China’s most used social media platform, Weibo. The electric vehicle industry is relatively a newer industry than traditional automobile manufacturing industries. Therefore, the immaturity of the industry could bring different types of crises, and traditional vehicle problems could also be the problems of electric vehicles, such as engine failure, brake failure, safety concerns and security threats, and …

The Use Of Social Media By Leaders In Times Of Crisis: 2020–21 United States Election Protests, Cagdas Yuksel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the Facebook posts made by presidential candidates Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden during the crisis that emerged after 2020 presidential election. The purpose of the study is to gain a better understanding of how crisis response is enacted via social media. This study's conceptual basis is the Social Crisis Communication Theory. The crisis, which is the focus of the study, was limited to the post-election process, which started with the allegations of Donald Trump alleged fraud in the election, after the 3 November 2020 US presidential elections, and especially to the process that resulted in the …

An Analysis Of International Soccer Fans’ Knowledge Of Qatar, Perceptions Of Qatar’S Country Image, And Intention To Support The 2022 Fifa World Cup, Taleb Al-Adbah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

International sporting competitions have become an essential tool for countries to promote a favorable image of themselves around the world. This study focuses on the FIFA 2022 World Cup, which will be hosted by Qatar - the first Arab country ever to host the event. Since 2010, when Qatar was awarded the FIFA 2022 World Cup, several studies have shown that soccer fans are hesitant to attend matches in Qatar. This study investigates the correlations between soccer fans’ level of knowledge, soccer fans’ perception of Qatar using a 4D model of country image, and soccer fans’ behavioral intention to support …

The Effect Of Racial And Ethnic Identity Salience On Online Political Expression And Political Participation In The United States, Jonathon Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How close an individual identifies with their race or ethnicity can affect how individuals behave as political actors. Racial identity can affect how individuals express their political beliefs on social media sites or participate in political activities. However, does political expression on social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, affect levels of political participation? The purpose of the project is to examine the relationship between racial and ethnic identity, online political expression, and political participation among the three largest racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Specifically, this project aims to answer whether online political expression mediates the relationship between …

Analysis Of Prescription Drug Brand Mentions In Music: Prevalence And Consumer Perceptions, Lisa A. Blake

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Music is not only a lucrative mass reach media (Stassen, 2021) but also a deeply personal tool for self-expression (Hallam, 2019). Music listeners are exposed to a slew of branded messages within music promoting a variety of product types such as apparel, automotive, and alcohol (Craig, Flynn & Holody, 2017). Promotion in music has been proven to be an effective vehicle for building brand awareness when listeners are interested in the music (Delattre & Colovic, 2009, Hoyer & Brown, 1990; Macdonald & Sharp, 2000; Thoma & Williams, 2013). Brands promoted within music enjoy some of the benefits of promotional tactics …

Inaugural Addresses, Framing Theory, And The Impact On American Perceptions Of The Presidency, Kalin Meagan Velez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study uses the inaugural addresses given by both Donald Trump and Joseph Biden as the source texts by which to examine the sentiment portrayed by particular framed messages. Framing theory stands as the central framework in which this study was conducted. The objective was to identify how political speeches like that of the presidential inaugural address frame messages to citizens and inform the audience on what their presidency may look like. This study utilizes a quantitative analysis using LIWC software followed by a qualitative discourse analysis. A thorough examination of the history of inaugural addresses, preceding presidencies, and each …

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 …

Informal Communication, Sensemaking, And Relational Precarity: Constituting Resilience In Remote Work During Covid, Tanya R.M. Vomacka

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted every corner of the globe, impacting our personal and professional lives with intensity and scope that have yet to be fully comprehended. One such disruption has been to the workplace and organizational culture as businesses, non-governmental agencies, governments, and other organizations worldwide rapidly moved face-to-face operations to remote work. Two years into the pandemic, with vaccines available and the immediate health threat for most healthy individuals waning, businesses still find themselves confronting a changing paradigm as remote work becomes more of a permanent and competitive fixture.

This study explores the impact of remote work on …

Re-Centering And De-Centering ‘Race’: An Analysis Of Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Testing Organizational Websites, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing technologies become an ever-expanding business in the United States, this dissertation project investigates the ways in which two leading organizations, AncestryDNA and 23andMe, utilize discourses of ‘race’ to connect with their customers. This study is particularly significant because it opens up new avenues of research in the field of organizational communication by engaging with a new genre of organizations and the complexities of biocapitalism, in which genetic data is commodified for consumption. Blending computational scraping of data and manual qualitative analysis of organizational texts and videos available on the corporate websites, while using postcolonial studies …

The Labors Of Professional Wrestling: The Dream, The Drive, And Debility, Brooks Oglesby

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study centers and examines the laboring body of the professional wrestler as it moves and works through professional wrestling training. I put forth debility as a theoretical framework to naming and understanding the ways that long-term bodily wear and early death becomes an acceptable cost of doing business for the wrestling industry. Dreams of achieving wealth, fame, and stability while escaping precarity and obscurity draw fans toward joining the industry, and these dreams work to maintain a working culture that takes for granted the ways that the wrestler’s body is marked for disposability, wearing down, and early death. I …

Grey’S Anatomy And End Of Life Ethics, Sean Micheal Swenson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this qualitative study, I analyze three episodes of the prime-time television medical drama Grey’s Anatomy to explore how the show stages conversations of end of life. I extend the work of end of life ethicists with attention to the ways that media may/should/could be used to teach and reflect issues of dying in America. Performing a close textual analysis, I identified two modes of storytelling within the structure of these episodes: Documentary Realism and Melodrama. I argue that if we are to understand medical dramas as a tool for the dissemination of information about end of life ethics, we …

The European Super League (Esl): A Political Economy And Media Framing Analysis, Patrick Sidwell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The European Super League (ESL) offers an opportunity for research as a case study which exemplifies the potential for sports to engender seismic societal events. To try to understand the ESL and the events surrounding it, this thesis examined it through the dual frameworks of political economy and framing theory to comprehend the roles played by corporate owners and working-class fans who support the game. An overview of the political economic processes of English football was conducted to create meaningful insights. From there, using framing as a theoretical guide, a thematic media analysis was performed across 251 news articles from …

Elements Of Instagram Influencer Posts That Drive Follower Engagement, Yishan Li

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Influencers are now becoming more popular on social media as a way for brands to promote products and services. The relationship between influencers’ post content and follower engagement deserves more attention. Through a content analysis, this research examines how influencer posts drive follower engagement. The results showed that emojis, campaign hashtags, frequency, and sponsored tags had a significant relationship with follower engagement. The present study sheds light on future research to explore other content variables of influencers’ posts.

Pad Beyond The Classroom: Integrating Pad In The Scrum Workplace, Jade S. Weiss

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: The “story” format used in Scrum ticket writing is confusing to developers and leadsto insufficient ticket content, which lends to miscommunication between team members and administrators, and disrupts workflow from the bottom up. A burgeoning methodology in Technical Writing, Purpose, Audience, Design (PAD) is an alternative ticket format that is easier to teach developers and improves the aforementioned conditions than the existing “story” format. The goal of this paper is to lay out why and how PAD can benefit developers on smaller Scrum teams who are tasked with writing their own tickets. This paper does not offer solutions for …

A User-Generated Content Analysis On The Quality Of Restaurants Using The Tourqual Model, Tiago S. Mondo, Andre R. C. Perinotto, Valerio Souza-Neto

Journal of Global Business Insights

The restaurant market is becoming more competitive, and businesses are challenged to differentiate themselves in this sector in terms of quality of services. This research aimed to identify the specific indicators for measuring the quality of restaurant service in Brazil. Based on a quantitative paradigm, we adopted a user-generated content analysis with a sample of 1,143,631 customer reviews from 35,611 restaurants in seven Brazilian cities available on the TripAdvisor platform. We collected and registered the data in text and analyzed the results with the support of T-LAB software. Moreover, we adopted TOURQUAL Protocol (Mondo, 2014) to identify the main requirements …

Curricular Assemblages: Understanding Student Writing Knowledge (Re)Circulation Across Genres, Adam Phillips

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes that the field of Writing Studies (WS) as well as writing program administrators (WPAs) should integrate quantitative methods into curricular assessment in order to improve pedagogical practices within their curricula. Through the use of the theoretical framework of assemblage theory, a theory that has been underutilized within WS, and the lens of linguistic, cultural, and substantive (LCS) language patterns, this study attempts to identify and understand student writing knowledge circulation and recirculation within one local curriculum. As well, with the incorporation of technological tools such as RAND-Lex, WPAs and WS researchers can identify granular patterns within student …

Implementing Diversity Training Targeting Faculty Microaggressions And Inclusion: Practical Insights And Initial Findings, Ellen Ernst Kossek, Patrice M. Buzzanell, Brittany J. Wright, Cassondra Batz-Barbarich, Amy C. Moors, Charlene Sullivan, Klod Kokini, Andrew S. Hirsch, Kayla Maxey, Ankita Nikalje

Communication Faculty Publications

Despite the importance of faculty diversity training for advancing an inclusive society, little research examines whether participation improves inclusion perceptions and belongingness. Integrating training and diversity education literature concepts, this study examines the effectiveness of training targeting microaggressions in six STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) oriented departments at a research-intensive university. Reactions data collected at the end of face-to-face training suggested that participation generally increased inclusion understanding. Self-assessments on inclusion concepts collected from 45% of participants before and three weeks after training suggest participation increases perceptions of the importance of inclusion, microaggression allyship awareness, inclusive behaviors, and organizational identification. Compared …

Enacting Economic Resilience: A Synthesis Of Economic And Communication Frameworks, Timothy Betts, Patrice M. Buzzanell

Communication Faculty Publications

This work examines three frameworks for responding to economic disruption: risk mitigation, systemic recovery, and economic resilience. Specifically, by reviewing the metatheoretical commitments, analytic contexts, and implications of two economic perspectives, represented by risk mitigation and systemic recovery, we argue that current approaches to understanding resilience in academic economics have failed to address ongoing and emergent disruptions in the economic and social world. In response, this work also reviews a possible synthesis of economic and communication frameworks. This review places the economic resilience framework, inspired by the communication theory of resilience, in conversation with extant literature in economics, communication studies, …

Surveying The Landscape Of Numbers In U.S. News, John Voiklis, Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, Bennett Attaway, Uduak G. Thomas, Shivani Ishwar, Patti Parson, Laura Santhanam, Isabella Isaacs-Thomas

Numeracy

The news arguably serves to inform the quantitative reasoning (QR) of news audiences. Before one can contemplate how well the news serves this function, we first need to determine how much QR typical news stories require from readers. This paper assesses the amount of quantitative content present in a wide array of media sources, and the types of QR required for audiences to make sense of the information presented. We build a corpus of 230 US news reports across four topic areas (health, science, economy, and politics) in February 2020. After classifying reports for QR required at both the conceptual …

Advice As Metadiscourse: On The Gendering Of Women's Leadership In Advice-Giving Practices, Amaly Santiago

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is about advice as social practice. Specifically, I examine leadership discourse as communicatively constituted and advice-giving as creating a metadiscourse of gendered abilities and leadership asymmetries. In the light of the growing number of initiatives created for women to improve their status as leaders, this project examines leadership, not as a quality, but as discourse: as a communicative dynamic. This is in line with how organizations see leadership when they create leadership programs, for these programs are designed to advise or teach women to be different and better leaders. My purpose is to encourage inclusiveness and contribute to …

Narratives Of Success: How Honors College Newcomers Frame The Entrance To College, Cayla Lanier

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Starting college marks an important period of transition for young people, as they manage multiple changes at once and begin to establish identities independent from their parents. The first year college student experience has been the focus of a great deal of academic research, as scholars and practitioners seek to discover the best way to support students and ensure they remain successfully enrolled at the university. However, very little of this research attends to the specific experiences of Honors College students. Further, a focus on the communicative process of transitioning, or organizational socialization, may add to what is currently known. …

The Media Reproduction Of Racial Violence: A Content Analysis Of News Coverage Following The Death Of George Floyd Jr., Keylon Lovett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The media has played a critical role in reproducing anti-Black violence in the United States, which has often harmed African American communities. Historically, the white press has depicted graphic imagery and descriptions of Black people being brutalized, with little ethical regard to their harmful effects. The Black press has historically challenged negative portrayals in the white media and shown more nuance, to protect the Black audience it represents. This dynamic underpins media depictions of racial violence still seen today. Darnella Frazier’s video capture of George Floyd’s death by Minneapolis police, was widely shared in the weeks following the incident, across …

Advances In Global Services And Retail Management: Volume 2, Cihan Cobanoglu, Valentina Della Corte

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

This is the second volume of the Advances in Global Services and Retail Management Book Series. This volume has the following parts:

• Part 1: Hospitality and Tourism
• Part 2: Marketing, E-marketing, and Consumer Behavior
• Part 3: Management
• Part 4: Human Resources Management
• Part 5: Retail Management
• Part 6: Economics
• Part 7: Accounting and Finance
• Part 8: Sustainability and Environmental Issues
• Part 9: Information Technology

ISBN: 978-1-955833-03-5

Hospitality and Tourism

• Significance of VR in the spa: A spatial analysis
  • Irini Lai Fun Tang, Schultz Zhi Bin Xu, and Eric Chan
• Social media marketing in rural hospitality and tourism destination research
  • Samuel …

Learning From The Seed: Illuminating Black Girlhood In Sustainable Living Paradigms, Toni Powell Powell Young

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The contemporary image of sustainable living presents a culturally narrow view of its participants and the manner of engaging in sustainable living paradigms. Through crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) I present a mixed methods approach that emphasizes participant observation, visual, mediated, and discursive analyses, as well as demonstrates the efficacy of Culture Centered Black Feminist Auto/Ethnography. This project seeks to highlight and place within historical context, the ways in which African American girls, who are largely left out of the prevailing image of sustainability, perform and articulate sustainability for themselves, in their homes, and throughout their home communities.

In their everyday lives, …

A Field-Wide Examination Of Cross-Listed Courses In Technical Professional Communication, Carolyn M. Gubala

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study assesses cross-listed courses (courses with a mix of undergraduate and graduate students) to uncover current pedagogical and programmatic trends at a field-wide level. The applied mixed-methods study provides important foundational insights into an under researched area in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC). Research questions include: What courses are cross-listed? How does offering these courses affect writing programs and writing program administration? Through the use of three types of data: (1) course data from institutional documents, (2) interview data from program administrators and/or faculty, and (3) pedagogical materials (syllabi and assignment sheets) from the courses supplied by administrators or …

A Comparative Thematic Analysis Of Newspaper Articles In France After The Bataclan And In The United States Of America After Pulse, Simon Rousset

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project interrogates unequal power relations that underlie newspaper representation of terrorism and reinforced Orientalism discourse following the 13 November 2015 mass murders in Saint-Denis and Paris, France, and following the 12 June 2016 mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, United States of America (U.S.A.). It was not surprising to bear witness to the ways national media took hold of these major socio-political events. These events, and the stories that have been published about them, are interpreted through the prism of terrorism, moral panic, and Orientalism, in the sense that the media tend to transcribe the shock of the attacks as …

The Extended Parallel Processing Model (Eppm) And Risk Perceptions Of Twitter Messages Related To Covid-19, Muhammad E. Rasul

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since its genesis, the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 has claimed millions of lives across the world and has infected many more. The population in the US experienced one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19 in the world, with the number of deaths rising monolithically at one point. Although the development and inoculation of a large number of the public has helped, newer variants threaten to revitalize the growth and spread of COVID-19. Scholars have extensively studied health messages related to COVID-19 in a variety of contexts. However, little attention has been paid to the risk perceptions of health messages related …