Communication Commons^™

Social Media Health Campaign: Combating Rsv In Infants Through Education And Advocacy, Kyndie Jorgensen

Student Research Symposium

Education and awareness surrounding RSV has made people more aware of how it is spread and what it is. Less communication campaign work has been done to help people understand the symptoms of RSV in healthy adults who may pass it to infants and to support parents in advocating for their child's safety.

The Effectiveness Of Social Media Campaigns In Promoting Agricultural Education And Careers, Regan Christensen

Student Research Symposium

72% of adults in the US are now using at least one social media site, according to a PEW Research Study.

Xbox's Social Media Ads: Themes, Reactions, And Engagement With Game Pass Promotions, Talmage Robertson

Student Research Symposium

Subscription based entertainment has broken into the video game industry. Xbox Game Pass has set the trend for the future of subscriptions in gaming, but how does the marketing of Game Pass rope players to subscribe?

Glowing Engagement: Analyzing Social Media Reactions To Rhode Skincare's Ad Campaigns, Jetta Van Brocklin

Student Research Symposium

Context & Relevance: Analyzing social media reactions to Rhode Skincare’s ad campaigns offers insights into consumer behavior, brand perception, and marketing effectiveness, which are crucial for businesses in the influencer-driven beauty industry.

Why it matters: Social media can shape a brand's reputation, impacting sales, loyalty, and image. Brands like Rhode Skincare must understand audience reactions to refine campaigns and boost ROI.

Primary Goal:

• To assess how social media reaction to Rhode Skincare's ads influence consumer perception and brand loyalty. Hypothesis:

• Positive social media reactions to Rhode Skincare's ad campaigns correlate with increased consumer trust and purchase intent, …

Breaking Bad, Breaking Ads: A Super Bowl Social Media Case Study, Aliyah Walker

Student Research Symposium

This study examines PopCorners' 2023 Super Bowl ad featuring Breaking Bad characters and its impact on digital engagement. The campaign was selected due to its nostalgic appeal and strategic use of humor to captivate audiences. This research focuses on Instagram Reels as the primary platform for analysis.

Cultivating Connections: How @Sigmaalphasorority Strengthens Sisterhood Through Social Media, Sheridan Brown

Student Research Symposium

My topic explores how Sigma Alpha uses social media to cultivate sisterhood and community across its chapters

Slam Dunks And Social Media: The Rise Of Usu Men's Basketball On The Court And Online, Isabel Howell

Student Research Symposium

Branding is everything in the world of sports. A large part of a team’s success comes from their branding, and an essential part of that is social media. The USU men’s basketball team has had an eventful and memorable season, but that’s not just due to their success on the court. The Aggies have been very active on social media, engaging students, fans and viewers across the country. Since January, the team’s Instagram handle has shared hundreds of different posts, from post-game highlights, event and game promotion, and behind-the-scenes of the beloved players. This research dives into some of the …

Wishes In The Digital Age: How Make-A-Wish Transforms Lives Through Social Media, Haleigh Deming

Student Research Symposium

Make-A-Wish is an inspiring nonprofit organization whose mission is to create life changing experiences by granting wishes to children with critical illnesses. Along with countless donations and volunteers, Make-A-Wish uplifts families by spreading the word and promoting wishes throughout multiple social media platforms.

Connections Around The Globe: Duolingo's Unique Approach To Expanding Its Target Audience Through K-Pop, Savanna Seal

Student Research Symposium

In the contemporary marketing landscape, brands must forge genuine connections with their target audiences to cultivate engagement and loyalty.

Impact Of Social Media On Interpersonal Communication Skills, Kenadie Jackson

Student Research Symposium

There is fear of social media enhancing a communications crutch which allows space to withdraw from important social cues and interactions.

Lindenwood Digest, April 9, 2025, Lindenwood University

Lindenwood Digest

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

"Everyone Watches Womens Sports", Promoting Inclusion And Raising Awareness Through Social Media, Katelyn Bytheway

Student Research Symposium

The "Everyone Watches Women's Sports" campaign is an initiative by TOGETHXER, a media and commerce company founded by athletes Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Sue Bird. Launched in December 2023, the campaign aims to elevate the visibility and support of women's sports.

The Influence Of Social Media On Journalism: Challenges To Accuracy, Credibility, And News Consumption, Natalee Parry

Student Research Symposium

Social media has reshaped journalism, challenging accuracy, credibility, and public trust in news. This study examines the impact of social media on news consumers and how it affects their trust in news.

Neural Plasticity With The Use Of Hearing Aids, Hannah Tualamali'i

Student Research Symposium

Why does hearing loss in older adults matter?

Active Wear Meets Industry Leading Hydration Co In Social Media Connection, Lainey Boulton

Student Research Symposium

ACTA Wear has recently teamed up with HydroJug, creating a powerful partnership that brings together two brands dedicated to promoting a healthy and active lifestyle. Known for its high-quality, performance-driven activewear, ACTA Wear has found an ideal ally in HydroJug, a brand that focuses on hydration and wellness. This collaboration aims to inspire individuals to take better care of their bodies by integrating fitness, hydration, and the right gear into their daily routines. By joining forces, both brands have united their missions of encouraging healthier habits and offering products that help individuals live their best, most active lives.

Student-Made Reels And Real-Time News Drive Engagement Up To 5x Higher Than The Norm, Sicily Clay, Shelby Black

Student Research Symposium

Social media plays a crucial role in connecting The Utah Statesman with the Utah State University community, making Instagram a key platform for news and engagement.

Evolving Dynamics In The Physician-Patient Relationship Shape Our Experiences In Healthcare, Megumi Ludlow

Student Research Symposium

The physician-patient relationship is crucial for quality healthcare, but it's influenced by key elements that can lead to healthcare disparities. This research focuses on:

• Trust: the foundation for patient engagement and treatment adherence.
• Power Dynamics: The balance (or imbalance) of authority between physician and patient.
• Biases: how unconscious assumptions about patients impact care decisions.

The Digital News Divide: How Social Media Consumption Affects Trust In Utah's Traditional News Outlets, Garrett Wolverton

Student Research Symposium

Social media has changed the way we access, consume, and perceive traditional news media. This research seeks to fill gaps in local research by examining the potential correlation between social media use and the trust and credibility afforded to Utah's mainstream news outlets.

Duolingo: Language Learning App Turns Viral Sensation, Emma Olsen

Student Research Symposium

The simple language learning app has found other means of success rather than adds on TV. They have turned to social media.

Duolingo has gained momentum on TikTok by curating creative content leading to over 15 million Followers.

User-Generated Content: The Secret Sauce Behind Apple's #Shotoniphone Campaign, Kaylee Moss

Student Research Symposium

Apple is generating successful user generated content on Instagram, decreasing social media marketing costs. This is a tactic used for many social media campaigns, why is Apple's Successful?

Accuracy Of An Automated Approach To Auditory Brainstem Response Analysis, Katelyn J. Chapman, Jarrod J. Mau, Marlana J. Petersen, Kyler J. Vugteveen, Will J. Allen

Student Research Symposium

• Hearing loss affects 1.5 billion people worldwide [1]
• Hearing loss is primarily diagnosed through pure-tone audiometry
• Pure-tone audiometry is not sensitive to many disorders, especially neural disorders that cause hearing difficulty
• Pure-tone audiometry cannot identify site-of-lesion

A Novel Method For Deriving The Binaural Interaction Component And Its Association With Spatial Listening Ability In Adults, Kate M. Fisher, Marlana J. Petersen, Mindee Anderson, Annika P. Williams

Student Research Symposium

• Spatial listening helps children detect and focus on specific sounds in noisy environments.
• Classrooms require filtering relevant speech (e.g., teacher's voice) from background noise, which is challenging without strong spatial listening skills.

Examining Cultural Competency In Audiologists Across The United States: A Pilot Survey, Olivia Montoya

Student Research Symposium

• Cultural competency refers to the ability of systems to provide care to patients with diverse values, beliefs, and behaviors, including tailoring delivery to meet patients' social, cultural, and linguistic needs (Betancourt, 2002).

• Limited studies to date have explored the implementation of cultural competence in audiology, which begs the question of how audiologists are fighting against—instead of contributing to—healthcare disparities among ethnic minorities.

The Fear Of Replacement: How Ai Panic In Journalism Mirrors Existential Crisis In Industry, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

This study systematically examines the portrayal of artificial intelligence (AI) errors, such as hallucinations and deepfakes, in journalistic contexts, evaluating whether these narratives reflect a broader existential anxiety about AI's role in reshaping journalism. Using a systematic literature review combined with a qualitative content analysis of recent AI-focused news reports, this study identifies recurring themes in media coverage to assess the accuracy and context of reported AI errors relative to actual technological limitations and affordances. Findings suggest that while AI errors are comparatively rare, they receive amplified coverage, often fueling public mistrust in AI technologies. Nevertheless, a balanced examination reveals …

The Impacts Of Media Richness, Blurriness, And Beautification Of Online Dating Profile Visual Elements On Dating Outcomes, Minhao Dai, Shilin Xia

Faculty Articles

Introduction: Online dating is a popular way for individuals to connect today, and the visual elements of an online dating profile have become an essential part of online dating. The current study examined how media richness, visual blurriness, and beautification of an online dating profile’s visual elements would influence online dating outcomes.

Methods: We conducted an online dating experiment with 10 different conditions with younger adults between 18 and 35 (n = 389).

Results: The results showed that the richer visual elements and the beautified selfie in an online dating profile predicted a number of dating outcomes, including stronger …

“I Never Wanted This”: Examining Maintenance Of White Femininity Within Abortion Stories On Tiktok, Brooke Pope

Communication ETDs

The invocation of tragedy in abortion stories has been acknowledged as a rhetorical tool that creates affective prescriptions and marginalization. Expanding on this concept, this work identifies how these strategies are used to maintain white femininity structurally through individual narratives. An intersectional feminist rhetorical analysis of abortion stories told on the platform TikTok is used to identify discursive practices that signal to white femininity. These practices are organized into three prominent themes within narratives: moves toward victimization, moves toward innocence, and prescribed punishments. Thematically, these serve to identify how pro-choice rhetoric fails to be intersectional and underscore the importance of …

Examining The Success Of Qanon, Zoe Hanrahan

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In this paper I use rhetorical criticism to explore the rhetorical techniques that aid in the dissemination and continued belief in QAnon, an expanding political conspiracy theory that originally centered around former President Donald Trump fighting powerful Satanic pedophiles. Several practices have made the spread of its ideas remarkably effective. The anonymity of QAnon’s source prevents questioning, making it harder to disprove their proposed theories, and the support of politicians and influencers increases the perceived truthfulness of QAnon’s ideas. Multimedia coverage, especially on mainstream social media platforms, spreads the beliefs to a wide audience. Vague language leaves the messages open …

Democracy In Discourse: Presidential Addresses And The Public's Understanding Of Governance In The 21st Century, Knole Ihle '25

Honor Scholar Theses

This thesis explores how presidential crisis rhetoric shapes public understanding of democracy in the twenty-first century. Through a comparative analysis of George W. Bush’s address following the September 11 attacks and Donald Trump’s speech at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it examines how presidents construct national identity, justify political action, and frame civic participation. Drawing from classical rhetorical theory, Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, Burke’s dramatistic pentad, and McGee’s theory of “the people,” the study argues that crisis rhetoric is not simply a reaction to events but a means of redefining the crisis. It also considers demagogic rhetorical strategies—such as emotional …

From Adversarial Attacks To Robust Classifiers - A Study In Social Media Spam Detection - Black Box & White Box, Jonathan Jose Penaloza Rumie

Undergraduate Theses

Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the reliability of machine learning-based spam detection systems in social media. This undergraduate thesis, "From Adversarial Attacks to Robust Classifiers: A Study in Social Media Spam Detection – Black Box & White Box," systematically examines the impact of both black-box and white-box adversarial attacks on a range of spam classifiers, including Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests, K-Nearest Neighbors, Bagging, Gradient Boosting, and Support Vector Machines. Leveraging a novel dataset derived from Twitter spam messages and enhanced with adversarial perturbations such as synonym replacement and character-level modifications, this study evaluates classifier performance under …

Inciting Action By Analyzing Pachirat, Rhi N. Soto

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

The book Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat explores “the politics of sight”, or the intentional invisibilizing or transparentizing of repugnant acts in order to encourage or limit them, through the case study of a beef slaughter house in Omaha, NE. While also utilizing the politics of sight, Pachirat hopes for great political and social change concerning the immoral acts that happen at meat plants through a radical act of transparency: a narrative ethnography. Writers with similar goals of great change in social and political issues can make use of Pachirat’s techniques, which …