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Ua68/14 Fsa Newsletter, Wku Folk Studies & Anthropology

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter created by and about the WKU Folk Studies & Anthropology department.

Emotional Responses To Opioid Public Service Announcements; Testing Trait Empathy’S Impact On Message Processing And Attitude Change, Olivia D. Cohen

ETD Archive

Addiction to opioids, including abusing prescription pain killers and using heroin, is on a dramatic rise in the United States. Communities across the country are in the process of adapting new ways of addressing the issue, which have been met with significant opposition from the general public. This study examined the impact an individual’s trait empathy has on whether persuasive public service announcements (PSAs) dealing with opioid addiction will be processed centrally or peripherally. Empathy has evolved, growing from an emotional experience, to a cognitive ability, to a function of both emotional and cognitive elements that can work both independently …

Where Do Facts Matter? The Digital Paradox In Magazines' Fact-Checking Practices, Susan Currie Sivek, Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin

Faculty Publications

Print magazines are unique among nonfiction media in their dedication of staff and resources to in-depth, word-by-word verification of stories. Over time, this practice has established magazines’ reputation for reliability, helped them retain loyal readers amid a glut of information sources, and protected them from litigation. But during the past decade, websites, mobile platforms, and social media have expanded the types of stories and other content that magazines provide readers. Doing so has shortened the time between the creation and dissemination of content, challenging and in some cases squeezing out fact-checkers’ participation. This study examines the procedures applied to stories …

Ubiquitous Emotion Analytics And How We Feel Today, Susan Currie Sivek

Faculty Publications

Emotions are complicated. Humans feel deeply, and it can be hard to bring clarity to those depths, to communicate about feelings, or to understand others’ emotional states. Indeed, this emotional confusion is one of the biggest challenges of deciphering our humanity. However, a kind of hope might be on the horizon, in the form of emotion analytics: computerized tools for recognizing and responding to emotion. This analysis explores how emotion analytics may reflect the current status of humans’ regard for emotion. Emotion need no longer be a human sense of vague, indefinable feelings; instead, emotion is in the process of …

Both Facts And Feelings: Emotion And News Literacy, Susan Currie Sivek

Faculty Publications

News literacy education has long focused on the significance of facts, sourcing, and verifiability. While these are critical aspects of news, rapidly developing emotion analytics technologies intended to respond to and even alter digital news audiences’ emotions also demand that we pay greater attention to the role of emotion in news consumption. This essay explores the role of emotion in the “fake news” phenomenon and the implementation of emotion analytics tools in news distribution. I examine the function of emotion in news consumption and the status of emotion within existing news literacy training programs. Finally, I offer suggestions for addressing …

Framing And Visual Type: Effect On Future Zika Vaccine Uptake Intent, Jeanine P.D. Guidry, Kellie E. Carlyle, Jessica G. Larose, Paul Perrin, Mark Ryan, Marcus Messner, Jay Adams

Richard T. Robertson School of Communication Publications

Introduction: The Zika virus is associated with the birth defect microcephaly, and while a vaccine was not available in early- 2017, several were under development. This study’s purpose was to identify effective communication strategies to promote uptake of a new vaccine, particularly among women of reproductive age.

Design and methods: In order to study the effects of Zika message framing (gain vs. loss) and visual type (photo vs. infographic) on future Zika vaccine uptake intent, a 2×2 between-subjects experiment was performed via an online survey in 2017 among 339 U.S. women of reproductive age (18-49 years). Participants were …

Marketing Practices Of Socially Responsible And Sustainable Businesses, Brooke A. Bivins

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The topic of this research is marketing practices of socially responsible and sustainable businesses. It examines the strategies companies and brands use to represent themselves to the public through products, advertising, and philanthropy. This includes an evaluation of existing frameworks and case studies, as well as in-depth interviews. The question that this research will answer is as follows: How can new or existing companies embrace and integrate social responsibility or sustainability in a way that is authentic and contributes to a positive public reputation?

Younger generations are increasingly willing to switch to and, in some cases, pay more for products …

Submission Or Subversion: Women With Shaved Hair In Media, Thea Cheuk

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

“It is quite obvious that the shaving of heads fundamentally damages the physical and moral integrity of those people for whom it was intended,” Fabrice Virgili asserts in his book Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (135). For centuries, hair has been held as a standard of feminine beauty, therefore a lack of it has a long and storied history as well. Records of head shaving as a form of punishment for women can be traced back to Ancient Greek and Roman times. Shaving a woman’s head was a sign of sin and shame, and stripped them of …

The Resonance And Residue Of The First African American Newspaper: How Freedom's Journal Created Space In The Early 19th Century, Valerie Kasper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first African American newspaper, Freedom's Journal, has a historical, rhetorical, and spatial purpose. It not only showed the impact made by African Americans in the fight for their civil rights in the early 19th century, but as an artifact it illustrated and preserved that history allowing it to be studied centuries after the newspaper ceased printing. The purpose of The Resonance and Residue of the First African American Newspaper: How Freedom's Journal Created Space in the Early 19th Century is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to historical newspapers that illustrates an alternative history in this country — a history …

"The 100" And The Social Contract Of Social Tv, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

I explore how the controversy surrounding an LGBT storyline on The 100 (2014–) points to the shifting social contracts of social media engagement between fans and the TV industry, as well as the challenges faced by fans and critics who attempted to solidify that contract in the wake of said controversy.

Hablando Del Autismo: Autism Coverage In South America, Silvia Luengo

Honors Program Theses

Based on media framing theory, this exploratory and comparative investigation quantitatively analyzes autism coverage in the top two newspapers from Venezuela and Argentina between the years of 2010 and 2017 in their native language, Spanish. The results indicate there are significant differences between the countries’ coverage of autism in their description of issues, discourse types, sources, images, roles and stigmatizing cues. These differences notwithstanding, science and public relations are the main top two issues reported in both countries. Additionally, a scientific discourse type is more common in Venezuelan articles than in Argentina which focuses on human-interest stories. Individuals with autism …

Social Tv Fandom And The Media Industries, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

Editorial for special issue, "Social TV Fandom and the Media Industries," Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 26 (March 15, 2018).

Hashmoney: Exploring Twitter Hashtag Use As A Secondary Ticket Market Price Determinant, Brendan O'Hallarn, Stephen L. Shapiro, Ann Pegoraro

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

The growth and prevalence of sport event ticket transactions on secondary ticket market platforms such as StubHub has led to the creation of a body of academic research studying this new phenomenon. Factors such as team performance and perceptions of fairness have been explored for their relationship with the price of secondary market tickets. This exploratory study introduces a new potential price determinant – social media activity – itself a popular online phenomenon that has inspired considerable academic research. This exploratory study of prices for eight National Football League games adds use of official team hashtags on Twitter to a …

Ethical Issues And Consequences As Portrayed By Medical Dramas: An Analysis Of The Effect Of Cultivation Theory, Molly Johnson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Television medical dramas, like American Broadcasting Company’s Grey’s Anatomy, strive to make the program as accurate as possible while creating a dramatic and entertaining program. Grey’s Anatomy, since the first episode in 2005, has employed medical consultants to help write episodes in order to make the television program as realistic as possible (Otto, 2014). Although there are some realistic aspects of Grey’s Anatomy, as a whole it is a fictional medical drama with plotlines and characters used for entertainment purposes only. However, previous research shows that fictional programs can still have an effect on its viewers. Cultivation Theory states that …

Usda Instructional Risk Messages For High Pathogen Avian Influenza, Jenna Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

High Pathogen Avian Influenza (HPAI) is a highly contagious disease threatening United States poultry farms. The aim of this study is to examine the extent to which current instructional risk communication by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) meets the expectations of existing literature, particularly the IDEA model. This study examined two documents produced by the USDA for the ongoing threat of HPAI, the Red Book and the Defend the Flock campaign. The aim of the documents is to provide U.S. poultry farmers and the publics with knowledge and information about prevention and response to HPAI. The IDEA model …

Finding Home After Fallout: The Future Of Fukushima's Forests, Katy N. Spence

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This long-form journalistic piece is about radioactive forests in Yamakiya, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, and how locals are dealing with it. Residents of Yamakiya were forced to evacuate their village in April 2011 following an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

One Yamakiyan, Hidekatsu Ouchi, stepped into the role of community leader and is the focus of this story. He hopes Yamakiya can use the radiation, rather than condemning it. Ouchi’s devotion to his community is connected to the Japanese concept of furusato, which refers to an individual’s obligation and nostalgia for family, community and place. The story asserts …

Media Exposure And Social Response As Predictors Of Citizen's Attitudes Toward Police, Tara A. Garrison

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Police-involved deaths of African Americans have increased over the past two decades, with continued high-profile media exposure. The problem is that extant research provided only a partial understanding and disparate focus about how media exposure, social responses, social media use, and attitudes towards police were possibly related to citizens witnessing acts of police-initiated actions against African Americans in the United States. The purpose of this quantitative study was to assess the predictive nature of media exposure, social response, and social media use concerning citizens' attitudes towards police. The two theories supporting this study and shaped this hypothetical system are media …

Project Manager Strategies For Strengthening Communications Within Project Teams, Christine Taylor

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Communication inefficiencies are among the reasons for poor or substandard performances in project teams. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies used by project managers in the health care industry to strengthen communication within project teams. The conceptual framework for the study was McQuail's mass communication theory and Craig's communication theory. Participants of the study were 4 project managers from 2 leading medical supply companies located in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and a review of company documents. The summarized interview responses were validated by participants through …

Budweiser In The 2017 Super Bowl: Dialectic Values Advocacy And The Rhetorical Stakeholder, Benjamin P. Windholz

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Organizational-public relations discourse is changing given the advent of social media, and corporate statements are evaluated under different criteria in the digital age. Grounding Budweiser’s response to controversy over their 2017 Super Bowl advertisement in terms of consumer expectations for corporate social responsibility provides a new perspective for approaching Bostdorff and Vibbert’s (1994) conceptualization of values advocacy. This study recognizes the power of the rhetorical stakeholder, a discursively created public, and demands re-evaluation of the values common to society from a co-creational OPR perspective. Conceptualizing dialectic values advocacy outlines the changing values among contemporary, common stakeholders as well as the …

Exploring Generational Differences In Text Messaging Usage And Habits, Daniel Wayne Long

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Members of society today embrace multiple communication media for various purposes and intents. Text messaging has been identified as the medium of choice for continual relationship maintenance and text messaging from mobile devices overshadows all other media forms for the support of social connections. Text messaging is changing everything from how operators market their plans to how advertisers and service providers reach consumers. But just as technology usage of social media and internet access are different across generational boundaries, text messaging usage and habits may also be different for various generational groups. The majority of peer-reviewed research regarding text messaging …

News Literacy, Sissel W. Mccarthy

Open Educational Resources

"The digital age has created the need for a new kind of literacy-a literacy that empowers news consumers to determine whether information is credible, reliable and truthful. This is not just a skill; it is a new core competency for the 21st century. So-called “fake news” is hard to spot and spreads easily, leading to disagreements over basic facts. The antidote to the growing challenges posed by this digital revolution is news literacy. This mini news literacy course includes two three-hour sessions that will teach anyone to become a more critical consumer of news. "

The News Literacy course package …

No Laughing Matter: Failures Of Satire During The 2016 Presidential Election, Jamie Noelle Smith

Honors Theses and Capstones

The 2016 presidential election was so full of unusual characters and unprecedented scandals, that media outlets, from the nightly news to late-night, had to adjust to this new normal in politics. Indeed, not even the jokesters on the handful of political satire shows on television were immune to the necessary changes that all the media had to take in covering Donald Trump. Given how many people tuned into to these shows each week, it is no surprise that the role that political satire television may have played in the election results was fodder for those giving post-election hot takes. Many …

The Complexity Of Learning To Teach News Media In Social Studies Education, Mardi Schmeichel, Jim Garrett, Rachel Ranschaert, Joseph Mcanulty, Shannon Thompson, Sonia Janis, Christopher Clark, Stephanie Yagata, Briana Bivens

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This research reports on data generated through an initial teacher certification program for secondary social studies teachers that introduced a specific and program-spanning focus on news media literacy. Growing out of the urgent need for pedagogies that address and promote critical engagement with the kinds of news media sources upon which civic decisions are made, our project follows teacher candidates from their initial certification coursework through the culminating student teaching semester. Our work with teacher candidates over this time was explicitly intended to intervene in and develop teacher candidates’ understandings of news media literacy, its place in social studies education, …

No Habrá Rey Sin Reina: Gender Discourse In Isabel, A Contemporary Representation Of Queen Isabel I Of Castile And King Fernando Ii Of Aragon, Michelle Sabrina Peters

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

By examining the figures of the Catholic Monarchs -Isabel and Fernando- in the popular television show Isabel, this research demonstrates how the historical fiction genre tends to privilege the stories of exceptional women and the men surrounding them. Unlike other historical fiction shows where the emphasis is placed on the empowerment of a single female character, Isabel emphasizes the mutual empowerment and equitable dynamic between a woman and a man. In an era when gender roles and prejudice were particularly strict, Fernando and Isabel enter into marriage with diametrically opposed notions of gender roles. However, when they begin ruling and …

In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk

Theses and Dissertations

We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.

Fake News: Agenda Setting And Gatekeeping In The Media, Chelsea Sydnor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This piece will examine the ideas of agenda setting and gatekeeping theories, as well as how they affect modern media coverage. Agenda setting theory is the idea that the media sets the agenda by selecting the topics that it covers. Gatekeeping refers to the idea that too many events occur for the media to cover all of them, so it must therefore choose which ones to specifically cover. It will review multiple studies and events in which the theories have played a part in the outcome. Particularly, it will analyze how campaign coverage has been found to influence voters in …

Violence Exposure In Human Rights Defenders' Work, Marko Carrasco Lundgren

Capstone Collection

The work carried out by Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) is fundamental for a more just and democratic society. Therefore, the acts of aggression against them, whether committed by individuals, the State, armed groups or corporative interests, constitute an indirect attack against the rights of the whole population. By restricting access to information and limiting political participation, these aggressions impede society from actively engaging in public affairs, something that ultimately takes the power away from the people.

From a perspective empathetic to HRDs, this Independent Practitioner Inquiry Capstone paper (IPIC) explores possible causes of violence exposure in HRDs’ work and its …

Effects Of Crisis News On Intercultural Tolerance: An International Comparative Study, Anthony Eseke

International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference

Human beings are “cultural animals who know and see and hear the world through socially constructed filters.” [1]. Fundamental to these filters are identities. Through the frames of identity, people often negotiate the dialectics of the ‘self’ with/against ‘the other’. The media in their reportage of conflicts and crisis produce and reinforce these dialectics. However, to what extent and directions do these reports influence social tolerance in the audience? This study therefore examined the effects of crisis/conflict news on otherness. The study defined otherness as the appraisal attitudes of tolerance, apathy, or intolerance towards other bodies based on identity categories. …

The Nfl As A Mega-Crisis: Applications Of Fractal Theory, Cory Young, Terry Rentner

International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference

The National Football League (NFL) is facing a reputation crisis—a serious problem for a powerhouse institution that airs its Super Bowl in 180 countries. Public and media scrutiny for its handling of domestic abuse cases and denial of concussions leading to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) have left the NFL with a mega-crisis. Television ratings are down, player injuries are up, and fewer youth are participating in the sport. This research, presented at the International Crisis and Risk Communication conference, addresses the CTE and domestic abuse scandals in the NFL and details the League’s responses to both high-profile cases. We provide …

Coming To A Full Stop: An Investigation Of Menstrual Period Stigmas In College Students, Mary Jane O'Toole

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this study was to understand perceptions college students have regarding menstruation and if viewing a normalized media message may influence these perceptions. A treatment group of participants was randomly assigned to view an episode of the hit family sitcom Blackish that focused on menstruation and then answer survey questions. A control group of participants only answered the survey questions. A mixed methods analysis revealed three primary conclusions. First, these results contradict existing research in that the college students surveyed generally do not hold negative perceptions that may stigmatize menstruation. Second, the treatment that viewed the normalized media …