Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Content Analysis Of Non-Profit Organizations Social Media: Through The Lens Of Compliance-Gaining & Persuasion, Meredith Diene Kiljan

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Non-profit organizations utilize social media platforms like Instagram to reach the community, fundraise, convey their mission and vision, establish themselves, and educate others. This study examined whether the communication artifacts of selected nonprofit organizations employed Cialdini's (2021) compliance-gaining strategies through an eight-week qualitative digital content analysis on Instagram to address the problem of understanding how non-profit organizations use Instagram tools to influence and persuade their audience. Compassion International (@compassion), CARE (@careorg), and Direct Relief (@directrelief), the three non-profit organizations chosen in this study, demonstrated the usage of Cialdini’s (2021) compliance-gaining strategies within their digital media communication strategy. Non-profit organizations operate …

The Power Of The “Like”: A Quantitative Study On The Facebook Emoji As Social Support, Lina Rawlings

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This quantitative study aimed to evaluate how receiving a Facebook “like” correlates to the perception of social support and how much this correlation is moderated by the age and gender of the users. The social information processing theory guided the study, providing a framework to explain how communicators adapt to the restriction of nonverbal cues by creating surrogates to maintain interpersonal relationships in computer-mediated communication circumstances. For the central research question, findings revealed that receiving a Facebook “like” positively correlates with perceptions of social support from Facebook friends and family. While no significant correlation was found between the gender of …

Lindenwood Digest, December 6, 2023, Lindenwood University

Lindenwood Digest

The Lindenwood Digest has been a digital employee newsletter since 2009.

Spinoza And Enlightened Pleasures, Charlie Huenemann

Communication Studies and Philosophy Faculty Publications

Spinoza recognizes that worldly pleasures are not contrary to the life of the philosophical sage, but such pursuits must be carefully directed. He distinguishes between a joy that affects only some parts of the body (titillatio) and joy that extends through the body as a whole (hilaritas or "cheerfulness"). Titillation can be excessive, since it can blind us to our other needs. But cheerfulness cannot be excessive, since the whole body is improved at once. In his account of cheerfulness, Spinoza can be understood to be describing the life of a liefhebber, which is the Dutch …

Cedarville Professor Goes To Washington: Seeks Common Ground With White House Staff, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

Seeking common ground in political rhetoric was the goal of Dr. Andrew Harris, associate professor of communication at Cedarville University, and a group of communication scholars from the Religious Communication Association (RCA) met with Feven Solomon of the White House Office of Public Engagement on Tuesday, Nov. 14.

All In The Family: Parental Discount Helping Mom Earn Master's Degree, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

In large families, it’s not uncommon for siblings to be attending college at the same time. Even at the same university.

For Aileen Arreguin, a mother of two current Cedarville University students and a pair of alumni, this is certainly the case. But what is unique is that Arreguin is also a student at Cedarville — studying public health nursing in the university’s graduate school.

Fandom And Activism: Experimenting With Memetic Communication Appeals About Human Rights Issues During The 2022 Winter Olympic Games, Alicia Mason, Elizabeth Spencer, Tricia Combs, Tanner Glenn, Brooklyn Peterson, Isaac Lewis, Emerson Tice

Faculty Submissions

In the sports context, activism is a popular focus of inquiry. In fact, scholars have posited that sports present an ideal platform for human rights and political activism and protest (Agyemang, Singer, & DeLorme, 2010; Coombs & Cassilo, 2017; Kaufman & Wolff, 2010). This study aims to analyze the persuasiveness of memetic communication in the global sports context by investigating the influence of exposure to social advocacy memes on issue importance and general attitudes toward global human rights. This experiment relied on MTurk participants in an online experiment using Qualtrics software hosted by the Communication Research Lab at a Midwest …

Courageous Marketer Bringing Life To Christian Movies, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

The success of a motion picture is often dependent on a quality storyline, impactful themes, good acting and effective marketing. Scott Mills, a film marketer with Engage Media Partners, is confident that his firm’s most recent work on “Journey to Bethlehem” will help it become a holiday hit and a testament to the power of the new wave of Christian filmmaking.

Regulating Online Hate Speech: The Singapore Experiment, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In Singapore, the introduction of the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 (POFMA) generated considerable debate and feedback. One of the main concerns was whether the law would unduly restrict the freedom of expression. In focusing on the provisions of POFMA that could possibly apply to hate speech, this paper situates the criticisms within the larger framework of international human rights law and international practices and proposes some ways forward to improve the regulatory framework for online hate speech.

Write On: Cedarville Student Secures Article In National Journal, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

What began as Emily Vest’s conversation with a Cedarville University professor, ended as a creative nonfiction piece on the front page of a national literary magazine, The Albion Review.

Active Listening: Are You Hearing Me Or Listening?, Taylor Jones

Goal 3: Interpersonal Intelligence Narrative

Be able to determine the difference between hearing someone when being spoken to and actively listening to them

Do you ever talk with someone and realize they aren’t listening? Sure, they hear the words that leave your mouth but are not genuinely listening: they may not be present, texting, staring off into space, etc. If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation like this, on either side, you run the risk of making someone feel neglected and undervalued, and you could miss out on important information. Active listening requires attentiveness to the speaker so you, as the listener, can understand …

Ability Of Detecting And Willingness To Share Fake News, K. Peren Arin, Deni Mazrekaj, Marcel Thum

All Works

By conducting large-scale surveys in Germany and the United Kingdom, we investigate the individual-level determinants of the ability to detect fake news and the inclination to share it. We distinguish between deliberate and accidental sharing of fake news. We document that accidental sharing is much more common than deliberate sharing. Furthermore, our results indicate that older, male, high-income, and politically left-leaning respondents better detect fake news. We also find that accidental sharing decreases with age and is more prevalent among right-leaning respondents. Deliberate sharing of fake news is more prevalent among younger respondents in the United Kingdom. Finally, our results …

An Investigation Of Match For Lossless Video Compression, Brittany Sullivan-Reicks

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A new lossless video compression technique, Match, is investigated. Match uses the similarity between the frames of a video or the slices of medical images to find a prediction for the current pixel. A portion of the previous frame is searched to find a matching context, which is the pixels surrounding the current pixel, within some distance centered on the current location. The best distance to use for each dataset is found experimentally. The matching context refers to the neighborhood of w, nw, n, and ne, where the pixel in the previous frame with the closest matching context becomes the …

A Word From The Writing Team (December 2023), Pam Walter, Mfa, Liz Declan, Ma, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• Writing Retreats Happens This Friday, December 1^st
• The OPWPC Canvas Page Offers Helpful Tools
• The Yeo Writing Deadline is December 31, 2023!
• Publication Spotlight
• AI and Publishing is a Hot Topic
• Scott Memorial Library Renovations Continue
• Wiley Open Access Fees Waived for Jefferson Authors

Swinging Bridge - December 2023, Ethan Reisler

Student Newspapers & Magazines

Issue contents include:

• Playlist
  • Sabrina's Sweater Weather Soundtracks
• Sink Or Swim
  • Managing Stress
• The Swinging Bridge Devotional
  • Written By Students, For Students
• Meet The Managers
• The Special Olympics
  • Messiah's Original Service Day
• Service Animals
  • An Expansion To The Student Body
• Man VS. Machine
  • The Writing Center's Place Amongst AI
• Student Art Submissions
• Movie Reviews
• Satire

Growth Vs Fixed Mindset Program, Alyssa Gehrke

Goal 4: Intrapersonal Intelligence Narrative

It is easy for adolescents, because their lives are full of constant change, to feel like any conflict, challenge, or criticism makes them a failure. However, these are actually opportunities to grow and learn, about oneself and others. They are opportunities to self-reflect, challenge your own assumptions and knowledge, expand your knowledge and skill sets, gain a broader understanding of different perspectives, and develop yourself on an individual level and within a relationship—friends, family, roommates, significant others, professional, and so on. Adapting a growth mindset during adolescence will prepare teens well for college and the professional world ahead of them. …

Social Media & Mental Health: An Examination Of Tiktok & Mental Health Outcomes, Jessica Maddox

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The goal of this research study was to examine the relationship between amount of Tiktok use and the results of various mental health scales. The hypothesis was that increased Tiktok use would be correlated with a decrease in self-esteem, and an increase in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and overall loneliness. Participants were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and paid a small monetary benefit in exchange for completion of the study. There were a total of 285 participants. Correlations and linear regression analysis were used to determine statistical significance; results showed no statistical significance and none of the hypotheses were …

Boundary Setting Program, Alyssa Gehrke

Goal 2: Life Skills Narrative

It is difficult for anybody, but especially teens and young adults, to understand what their boundaries are and to know how to communicate them with others. This impacts this age group (teens and young adults) most specifically because when we are young, we are both implicitly and explicitly told to mold and change our wants and needs to make others feel more comfortable. So, when living away from home for the first time and living with and being surrounded by new people who they are just getting to know it can be natural for them to want to continue molding …

The Santa Ana Youth Media Project: Ypar And Media Advocacy, Jorge F. Rodriguez

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The Santa Ana Youth Media Project (SAYMP) was born during the summer of 2019 and grew from a need, expressed by youth, for more critical media literacy that could further amplify and focus on narratives that reflect how youth navigate their personal, cultural-social, and economic environments. Our media projects consist of intentional participative research and journalistic designs that document stories using tools such as narrative inquiry, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and video/media production to visually capture the narratives of youth and community within the city of Santa Ana and its larger Orange County context. Our goal is to develop …

Growing Natty (Natural): A Campaign To Move Beyond Steroids And Self Harm, Charles Harris

Global Strategic Communications Student Work

Steroid use is nothing new, especially among athletes in competitive sports. The drug is used to give the user an accelerated amount of strength and muscle mass, in a shorter time and often beyond the capabilities of their body's performance in its natural state. Doping is a name for it when reported about in these instances, attributed to the fall and public disgrace of some of the most celebrated sportsmen, yet has continued to be the open secret in the sporting community. The disgrace, the health risk, and the classification of anabolic steroids hasn't slowed down the trafficking or sales …

The Socialization Of Social Media: Examining The Impact Of Social Media Use On Interpersonal Skills During Face-To-Face Interaction, Tenille Thomas

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Research has well established that the use of social networking sites (SNS) has increased accessibility and connectivity to people with limitless boundaries. SNS have progressively become the preferred source of communication. However, often overlooked is the impact SNS use has on face-to-face interactions, specifically on interpersonal skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between SNS use and face-to-face interaction. Specifically, this study examines the participant’s ability to recognize and interpret nonverbal cues with increased SNS use. This was a correlational study utilizing a quantitative design of self-reported questionnaires. A total of 178 participants, ranging in age …

Transformer-Based Multi-Task Learning For Crisis Actionability Extraction, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has become a valuable information source for crisis informatics. While various methods were proposed to extract relevant information during a crisis, their adoption by field practitioners remains low. In recent fieldwork, actionable information was identified as the primary information need for crisis responders and a key component in bridging the significant gap in existing crisis management tools. In this paper, we proposed a Crisis Actionability Extraction System for filtering, classification, phrase extraction, severity estimation, localization, and aggregation of actionable information altogether. We examined the effectiveness of transformer-based LSTM-CRF architecture in Twitter-related sequence tagging tasks and simultaneously extracted actionable …

How Does Parents’ Social Support Impact Children’S Health Practice? Examining A Mediating Role Of Health Knowledge, Paulin Tay Straughan, Chengwei Xu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Background: Family environmental factors play a vital role in shaping children’s health practices (e.g., obesity prevention). It is still unclear how parents’ social support affects children’s obesity-related health practices. The present study argues that whether parents’ social support positively associates with children’s obesity-related health practice depends on if it could promote parents’ obesity-related health knowledge. Thus, we hypothesize that health knowledge mediates the relationship between parents’ social support and children’s health practice regarding weight management. Methods: To test the hypothesis, we conducted a questionnaire survey and collected a nationally representative sample of 1488 household responses in Singapore. The survey included …

Everything Old Is Q Again: X Activity About #Pizzagate Increased 9501.5% After Musk Boosted The Conspiracy, Bond Benton, Daniela Peterka-Benton

School of Communication and Media Scholarship and Creative Works

The QAnon conspiracy is largely an extension of several older conspiracies. A particularly influential conspiracy includes PizzaGate, which alleged that coded words and symbols found in hacked emails of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, point to a secret child trafficking ring in the basement of the Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant, Comet Ping Pong (Benton and Peterka-Benton, 2021). While the conspiracy was dismissed as absurd (there is no basement in the pizzeria targeted), Edgar Maddison Welch accepted it as true driving to Washington D.C. from North Carolina armed with an AR-15 rifle and a .38 calibre handgun …

The New E-Mind: Thinking Like An Entrepreneur, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

Sometimes books come about in unusual ways. For Dr. Kary Oberbrunner, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author and the Berry chair of entrepreneurship at Cedarville University, the idea of writing his newest book — The E-Mind — came while cycling the highest paved mountain in the Alps, Col de l'Iseran.

Lindenwood Digest, November 29, 2023, Lindenwood University

Lindenwood Digest

The Lindenwood Digest has been a digital employee newsletter since 2009.

Holiday Cheers On The Basketball Court, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

As students return from Thanksgiving break, the Cedarville University Christmas Tournament will be held to promote fellowship through basketball.

Nobel Peace Prize Colleague Speaking At Cedarville University, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

Earlier this year, Dr. Pierre Agostini of Ohio State University (OSU), won the Nobel Prize in Physics. On Thursday, Nov. 30, Dr. Louis Franklin DiMauro, a colleague of Agostini, will be speaking at Cedarville University’s Physics Colloquium at 4 p.m. in Engineering and Science Center Room 210.

Miss Michigan's Unexpected Turn: A Medical Mission Unveiled, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

Sierra Bognear was on the fast track to entertainment and modeling stardom. With a modeling contract with Nike in hand and after being crowned Miss Michigan, Bognear’s professional future was bright.

Ultra Lyte Running: From Summer Startups To Full-Fledged Business, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

Many students work summer jobs to fund their college experience. Aaron Perry decided to do something a little different — he created his own startup business.