Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Public Health Agencies Outreach Through Instagram During Covid-19 Pandemic: Crisis And Emergency Risk Communication Perspective, Aqdas Malik, Laeeq M. Khan, Anabel Quan-Haase

FIMS Publications

Background: Governmental and non-governmental institutions increasingly use social media as a strategic tool for public outreach. Global spread, promptness, and dialogic potentials make these platforms ideal for public health monitoring and emergency communication in crises such as COVID-19.

Objective: Drawing on the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication framework, we sought to examine how leading health organizations use Instagram for communicating and engaging during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: We manually retrieved Instagram posts together with relevant metadata of four health organizations (WHO, CDC, IFRC, and NHS) shared between January 1, 2020, and April 30, 2020. Two coders manually coded the analytical …

Heating Up The Debate: E-Cigarettes And Instagram, Stephanie L. Ritter

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Electronic cigarette (“e-cigarette”) posts on Instagram are increasing daily. Two compelling reasons to investigate e-cigarette content on Instagram are: the large numbers of young people on Instagram and recent research suggesting that e-cigarettes function as tobacco smoking initiation products, especially among teens. For this study, a representative sample of 854 e-cigarette hashtag (“#”) ecig posts were compiled from Instagram in October 2014. A content analysis was then performed on these posts to determine the frequency and composition of such categories as product shots, promotion, event sponsorship, “vape-selfies,” and health-related messages. Noteworthy findings include the preponderance of e-cigarette product shots, “follower …

Navigating The Social Landscape: An Exploration Of Social Networking Site Usage Among Emerging Adults, Kristen Colbeck

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study explores how emerging adults (Arnett, 2000) in their first- and second-year of undergraduate study make use of social networking sites (SNSs) for their day-to-day sociality. This study compares emerging adults’ use of Facebook, which is the most popular and widely used SNS among this particular demographic, to increasingly popular SNSs Twitter and Instagram. This project seeks to discover how the use of different SNSs supplements, changes, or replaces the use of Facebook, considering social capital exists on each platform, and if and how each sites’ uses and gratifications differ. This study employs face-to-face semi-structured interviews to pursue the …