Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Using Academic And Learning Analytics To Explore Student Success In An Online Graduate Program In Communication, Megan N. Bergman

Open Access Theses

Fueled by the increase in data associated with the use of learning management systems, scholars and practitioners alike have been trying to explain and predict student success; yet the use of data analytic methods (academic and learning analytics) in higher education has created challenges and shortcomings for those who wish to adopt learning and academic analytics practices for their institution or program. Very little is known about either online education, particularly in the field of communication, as well as in online graduate and professional degree programs in any field from a learning and academic analytics perspective. This work reviews the …

Facebook And User Experience: Evaluating Brand Equity Of Purdue University Residences, Jackelyn Perkins

Open Access Theses

This study investigated how brand equity was perceived on the Purdue University Residences’ Facebook page by applying a user experience method. From a review of previous literature, Website Experience Analysis was identified and performed to evaluate brand equity. This study addressed and explored various themes throughout the data. The results showed how page content and user interactions within a Facebook page influence participants’ perceptions of brand equity.

Strategic Public Relations Management In China, Cen Yue

Open Access Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore the current status of the strategic public relations management in China. This study is the first to apply the generic principles of excellent public relations in China. Surveys and in-depth interviews were used to address five research questions: (1) practitioners’ strategic public relations practice, (2) their relationship with the dominant coalition, (3) communication models in use, (4) proficiency in practicing the managerial and technical roles, and (5) the challenges facing public relations industry were explored as research questions. The study results suggested that public relations was hardly managed in a strategic manner …

The Politics Of Town Hall Meetings: Analyzing Constituent Relations-In-Interaction, Robert J. Green

Open Access Dissertations

The politics of town meetings proposes that town hall meetings are institutions of representative democracy that present an opportunity for constituents to hold their elected representatives accountable in a public setting. Constituent relations-in-interaction glosses a complex set of interactional practices and procedures through which ensembles of participants bring town hall meetings, as structures of social interaction, into being. This study uses conversation analysis, the study of talk-in-interaction, to show that the politics of town hall meetings orients to three types of accountability: Interactional accountability, political accountability, and public accountability. The articulation of these accountability types provides a sense of overall-structural …

Silent Dissent: The Effect Of Structural Secrecy On Professional Communication At Nasa, Charlotte N. Hyde

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the creation and legitimization of knowledge through an examination of Dr. Warner von Braun’s weekly communications with his department heads during the Apollo project. My researched is focused on an archive of memos from the Marshall Space Flight Center during the 60’s. The memos were referred to as either Monday Notes or Weekly notes. I use the terms interchangeably, but some scholars differentiate between the two and refer to the Monday Notes as the communication system that worked during the Apollo project and the weekly notes as the communication system that broke after the Apollo project. In …

The Graphic Side Of Fear: The Effects Of Anti-Tobacco Graphic Threat Appeals, Latasha R. Swanson

Open Access Dissertations

Many public health organizations have proposed and implemented campaigns and policies involving graphic ads or warnings to deter individuals from smoking. The current study evaluated how high-cigarette dependent smokers evaluate these messages compared to low-cigarette dependent smokers using a mixed, 3 x 2 factorial design. A pilot study involving focus groups, interviews, and evaluation questionnaires (N=10) was conducted to classify graphic threat appeals and develop stimulus materials for the primary study. For the primary study, three graphic threat appeal conditions were evaluated by Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users (N=200). Findings suggested that the graphicness of the …

The Meaningfulness Of Internships: A Sensemaking Approach, Kaley Campbell

Open Access Theses

Internships are an important part of undergraduate education, with more than 61% of students completing an internship, yet there is not much academic literature surrounding this topic (NACE, 2015). Using Weick’s (1995) sensemaking theory, report data was analyzed thematically looking at how interns made sense of their experiences and what they found to be meaningful. This study found four distinct themes that interns used to navigate unique tensions and power dynamics within their organizational setting: “Just an intern,” “It’s up to me,” “For my future,” and “I was allowed.” Future research could explore framing internships more as a career choice …

Beyond The Gender Gap: Understanding Women's Participation In Wikipedia, Danielle J. Corple

Open Access Theses

In 2010, UNU-MERIT researchers surveyed editors of Wikipedia, “the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (Glott, Ghosh, & Schmidt, 2010). When the report revealed that almost 90% of the editors were male, however, it suggested that perhaps not everyone “can edit” Wikipedia—especially women. As the resulting media and academic explanations of the Wikipedia “gender gap” have largely attributed the gap to ‘female lack’—lack of initiative, confidence, or technical skills—very little research has explored the treatment of women within Wikipedia culture. Thus, this paper first draws upon feminist technology scholars to problematize current explanations of the gender gap that frame …

Using Construal Level Theory To Promote Hpv Vaccine Uptake Among College Males, Julie Cannon

Open Access Theses

College males’ uptake of human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination is low. Prior research indicates perceived susceptibility to HPV among college males is also low. Construal level theory may offer a framework to alter perceived susceptibility and intention to vaccinate, but little research has examined this potential. Construal level theory provides foundational elements including that low construal level of perceptions is associated with more proximal psychological distance (hypothetical, social, temporal and spatial). Research indicates a disparity in college males’ susceptibility estimates which suggests high hypothetical distance. A reduction in hypothetical distance should be indicated by a measured increase in perceived susceptibility. …

Superheroes And Social Action: Reproduction, Recurrence, And Recognition In The Superhero Genre, Max M. Renner

Open Access Theses

Rhetorical genre analysis examines genre as social action and is primarily concerned with the experiences of individual users (Miller, 1984). The genres that rhetorical genre scholarship takes up are typically functional genres or genres in which individuals have direct means of utilizing and modifying a genre. This focus on functional genres makes sense in terms of the tradition’s interest in user experience and reciprocity. This project seeks to examine the potential implications rhetorical genre analysis has for vernacular genres which, for the most part, have remained the domain of literary scholarship due to their focus on structural, formal elements.

This …

Impact Of Communication Appeals On Recycling Behaviors Among Undergraduate Students, Ning Zhu

Open Access Theses

The present thesis aims to understand factors influencing student recycling behaviors, and to investigate effective communication approaches to increase such behaviors. An online survey was conducted to examine the relationships between student recycling frequency in different contexts, students’ attitudes toward the environment, barriers to their recycling, students’ perceptions of communication messages, and communication media they think to be effective. Descriptive statistics, ANOVAs, t-test, simple linear regressions, categorical multinomial logistic regression, and a chi-square test were conducted, and the data was collected from a large land-grant university in the Midwestern United States. A total of 537 questionnaires were answered.

The …

Data Mining Twitter For Cancer, Diabetes, And Asthma Insights, Kimberly Chulis

Open Access Dissertations

Twitter may be a data resource to support healthcare research. Literature is still limited related to the potential of Twitter data as it relates to healthcare. The purpose of this study was to contrast the processes by which a large collection of unstructured disease-related tweets could be converted into structured data to be further analyzed. This was done with the objective of gaining insights into the content and behavioral patterns associated with disease-specific communications on Twitter. Twelve months of Twitter data related to cancer, diabetes, and asthma were collected to form a baseline dataset containing over 34 million tweets. As …

Improving Online Food Safety Communication: The Role Of Media, Jing Ma

Open Access Dissertations

Food safety is important as foodborne illness outbreaks cause great economic and societal losses. Efforts to protect public health and reduce foodborne illness outbreaks will not be fully effective unless the resulting information is communicated to consumers.

However, food safety communications have not been particularly satisfactory (Worsfold, 2006). If food safety information were more accessible, consumers would be more likely to use it (Worsfold, 2006). In this regard, the Internet presents great possibilities for communicating food safety information to the public. But media’s role has been largely overlooked in existing literature. When the lack of research is combined with consumers’ …

Emerging Genres, Dangerous Classifications: The Kairos Of Digital Composing Policy, Ellery Sills

Open Access Dissertations

Emerging Genres, Dangerous Classifications: The Kairos of Digital Composing Policy argues that writing policy infrastructure plays a significant (if often invisible) role in affording emerging digital genres in rhetoric and composition. Within the last few decades, the accelerating transformations and instabilities of emerging genres have posed a challenge for contemporary writing programs, which demonstrate a persistent wariness over incorporating digital composing into their mission. In response to this challenge, national educational associations have issued a growing number of policy statements meant to encourage a broader understanding of composing in the classroom. Curiously, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to …

Authentic Enterprise, Communal Employee Relationship, And Employee-Generated Managerial Assets, Yeunjae Lee

Open Access Theses

This study aims to explore managerial intangible assets of organizations generated by their internal publics, employees. Considering employees’ perception and communicative behaviors as an organization’s managerial assets, this study examines an organization’s authentic behaviors and organization-employee relationships. To be more specific, this study firstly investigates how an organization’s authentic behavior—truthfulness, transparency, and consistency—affects communal relationship between employees and an organization. Using megaphoning, scouting, and microboundary spanning as theoretical frameworks for employees’ communicative behaviors (ECB), this study also examines the association among perceived authenticity of organizational behavior, organization-employee relationships, and employees’ communicative actions. Furthermore, this study investigates how employees …

Make The Connection: Personal And Institutional Identity In The U.S. Department Of Veterans Affairs Ptsd Campaign, Staci B. Smith

Open Access Theses

The common procedure in a health campaign is to use fear and guilt appeals to influence health behaviors among target populations (Mattson & Lam, 2016). The use of identity, identification, and reframing in a health campaign has been relatively under-explored. This study examines invitations to identification and reframing in a specific health campaign, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) “Make the Connection” campaign. With the issues of mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reaching high levels of attention in media and society, the VA’s Make the Connection campaign encourages military veterans and their families to seek help for …

Technical Communication In Place-Making Professions: Exploring The Network Pictures Of Urban Designers, Fernando Sanchez

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation addresses how professional writing as a field can pay attention to broader definitions of design in order to help further conversations of spatial justice (the act of helping to promote equity in matters of development in urban spaces). I begin by noting the conversations that have circulated regarding the relationship between urban design and rhetoric, noting that professional writing can help add a unique lens to the conversation. The second chapter provides an overview of how design is discussed in technical communication scholarship. Here, I showcase how most of these discussions regarding research in design have centered on …

Innovation As Everyday Action: A Case Study Of Organizational Discourse And The Local Meaning Of Innovation, Jennifer C. Batra

Open Access Theses

This study describes and explicates the nuanced nature of commonly adopted buzzwords such as innovation by analyzing how innovation is defined and embedded structurally within a single organization. Working to uncover how the individual construction of a local definition of innovation within the global context of a quasi-academic organization changes as organizational priorities and practices evolve over time, I present the varied framings of innovation at the micro, meso, and macro levels, through two research phases (a) the definition phase and (b) the practice phase over the course of one year.

This thesis project is situated within a single Mid-Western …

A Black Art: Ontology, Data, And The Tower Of Babel Problem, Andrew J. Iliadis

Open Access Dissertations

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical …

Understanding The Communicative Processes Of Baby Boomer Women Adjusting To Retirement: Connecting Micro And Macro Discourses, Patricia E. Gettings

Open Access Dissertations

Baby Boomers are changing the face of retirement in the United States. For example, retirement traditionally refers to the time when an individual who has worked full-time for the majority of her life chooses to entirely and permanently exit the workforce, but now includes a range of formations (e.g., bridge employment). Baby Boomer women are most affected by this “new” retirement because they have worked a broader range of jobs for longer periods of time than ever before. Transitioning to retirement implicates processes of adjusting beyond just a change in one’s employment status as retirees potentially confront instrumental (e.g., where …

Designing Prenatal M-Health Interventions Through Transmigrants Reflection On Their Pregnancy Ecology, Hana Aljaberi

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation presents the findings from three participatory focus group and co-design sessions with Caribbean transmigrant women in the United States. Informed by their focus group discussions regarding their pregnancy experiences in the United States, the participants produced design ideas that reflected on physical, emotional, informational and social gap themes. The purpose of this study was to understand the challenges affecting the women’s prenatal wellbeing practices, and to conceive a set of recommendations and opportunities for mHealth technology design to assist with prenatal preventative care and management. The study uses the theoretical concept of pregnancy ecology to identify gaps in …

Language, Writing, And Social (Inter)Action: An Analysis Of Text-Based Chats In Macedonian And English, Mira Bekar

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate the text-based chatting practices of a particular community of native Macedonian speakers who chat both in Macedonian and in English (as their foreign language). Much research in computer-mediated communication (CMC) over the last decade has been done in English as L1. Some of the few studies which explored CMC cross-linguistically include the comparison of French vs. English (Werry, 1996), Japanese vs. English (Nishimura, 2003b), Spanish vs. English (del-Teso-Craviotto, 2006), Serbian vs. English (Radic, 2007) and Turkish vs. English (Savas, 2010). In these studies, a number of different language features (e.g., orthography, code …

Employee Wellness Coaching As An Interpersonal Communication Intervention: Exploring Intervention Effects On Healthcare Costs, Risks, And Behaviors, Heather Noel Fedesco

Open Access Dissertations

In order to address the rise in healthcare expenditures, employers are turning to wellness programs as a means to potentially curtail costs. One newly implemented program is wellness coaching, which takes a communicative and holistic approach to helping others make improvements to their health. Wellness coaching is a behavioral health intervention whereby coaches work with clients to help them attain wellness-promoting goals in order to change lifestyle-related behaviors across a range of areas. Given the limited amount of research on wellness coaching, this project had four main purposes in order to fill gaps in the literature: to (1) identify whether …

Public Understanding Of Chemistry Research In Print News, Michael D. Hands

Open Access Dissertations

Despite numerous calls for improving scientific literacy, many American adults show a lack of understanding of experiments, scientific study, and scientific inquiry. News media is one important avenue for science learning, but previous research investigating health and/or environmental science news has shown that it is inconsistent in the presentation of scientific research limitations, potentially impacting reader understanding. In the first phase of this dissertation, seventeen news articles reporting on a single chemistry research article, along with associated press releases and research articles, were analyzed using move analysis to determine the structure of each type of text. It was found that …

Being Out Of The Loop On Pop Culture, Nicole Elizabeth Iannone

Open Access Dissertations

Being out of the loop is a form of partial ostracism that leads to lower need satisfaction (Jones, Carter-Sowell, Kelly, & Williams, 2009). Research has shown that people experience lower need satisfaction when they are out of the loop on pop culture (Iannone, Kelly, & Williams, in preparation). Five studies expanded on previous research by exploring theoretical issues and potential boundary conditions. Study 1 developed a new method and explored theoretical foundations of being out of the loop on pop culture - whether being unfamiliar makes people feel worse or whether being familiar makes people feel better. This study also …

Information Seeking And Concern For Mental Well-Being, Cynthia K. Lindley

Open Access Theses

Mental health concerns among college students are quite prevalent, but the help-seeking practices of this population are hindered by a variety of barriers. Help-seeking for mental health concerns in its earliest (and most common) form is ultimately information-seeking, which has been identified as a process with specific predictors that has the potential to lend structure to the myriad help-seeking barriers and facilitators. In an effort to apply and extend the Theory of Motivated Information Management (TMIM; Afifi & Weiner, 2004), the current study asked college students experiencing concerns for their mental well-being to report details of their circumstances. The results …

Attitudes Toward A Cancer Coalition: Implications For Coalition Health Communication, Chervin Lam Shih Kian

Open Access Theses

A cancer coalition is a communication hub for cancer patients that may help address cancer by promoting health and mitigating health issues. Attitudes toward a cancer coalition may be important in determining whether or not patients participate or utilize a coalition. However, little is known about the attitudes of cancer patients toward a cancer coalition, its services, and toward participation. This study addresses this gap by investigating these attitudes. The results encourage the development of a cancer coalition in states that do not yet have a coalition. Effective coalition health communication was found to be a pivotal service that cancer …

Analyzing Emotions On Twitter During The 2014 Purdue University Shooting Crisis, Elaheh Molla Allameh

Open Access Theses

Social media has recently attracted much attention as an emergency management tool. Providing public emotional support is one of the aspects of emergency management where social media can be extremely useful. However, before we can effectively use social media for this purpose, we need to fully understand the dynamics of emotions on social media platforms. This study contributes to this understanding. In this thesis I look into the emotional expressions on Twitter following the 2014 Purdue shooting incident. I analyze how different types of users emotionally reacted to the incident during the critical one and a half hours following the …

Suitability Of Commercial Certification Assessments For Film And Video Editing Courses, Bobby L Chastain

Open Access Dissertations

A study on the microstructure development of as-cast Cu-Mn alloys based around the congruent minimum at 34.6 wt % Mn and 873 °C was performed. Initially, this was to evaluate the alloy as an alternative to wide freezing range Pb and Sn bronzes that are plagued with porosity. The shallow minimum and associated narrow freezing ranges around the congruent point result in a completely cellular (non-dendritic) solidification morphology for a composition range ~3 wt % Mn about the congruent composition (C _c). The degree of cellular solidification was found to depend on the mold material. Increased mold conductivity lead …

The Process And Dimensions Of Family Member Marginalization: A Mixed-Method Construct Explication, Elizabeth Dorrace Hall

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation builds upon social psychology, organizational studies (i.e., social identity theory, social network theory), family studies, and interpersonal communication (i.e., hurt, confirmation theory) literature to understand how marginalized family members, or "black sheep," come to live at the edge of their families. In some societies, marginalized family members are called black sheep because they stand out from the rest of the group. Being marginalized refers to feeling different, not included, or not approved of by family. Two studies were conducted to uncover and test the dimensions of family marginalization and explore the process of marginalization in families. Study 1 …