This study examined the relationship of world view to selected communication, demographic, and social variables. Using a newly developed scale for world view, the researcher tested one hundred forty-nine high school and college level subjects to determine significant interactions between world view and communication apprehension, use of mass media, trust, life satisfaction, social participation, age, grade level, sex, income, and race. Data analyses included factor analyses, analyses of variance, and correlation and regression analyses. Results of the simple correlation indicated that the age-grade combination was the strongest single factor followed by income, religious participation, television watching, sex, newspaper reading, radio listening, and communication apprehension. Generally, the ANOVA showed that the college level student had a higher world view than the high school student; that with one exception males had a higher world view than females; that low religious participation almost consistently accompanied a higher world view than high religious participation, that low television watching accompanied high world view; that low income males showed higher world view than high income males, while income failed to show any affect on females; and that communication apprehension interacted with world view in conjunction with religious participation and sex in a complicated pattern. No significant interaction was detected with world view and race, world view and trust, or world view and life satisfaction.

This thesis contains an analysis of apologia from the 1988 national presidential campaign which resulted from Republican vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle's disclosure that he served in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. Quayle's revelation created a "gaffe sequence" played out in the media over a period of approximately two weeks. The rhetorical situation dictated the use of an eclectic methodology to evaluate apologia generated in response to media questions about Quayle's avoidance of active military service. Quayle's defense included minimalizing the issue through avoidance and denial during staged and spontaneous contact with the media, and also the rhetorical support of other Republicans. Ultimately, he overcame the issue by turning questions about his competence and character into questions about the media's ethos. Notwithstanding, the media's investigation of the relatively unknown Quayle pointed to the larger issue of his qualifications for national office. Although Quayle's strategy was successful, the initial gaffe raised questions about Quayle's ethos which persist to this day. The study yielded three important insights about apologia: (1) apologia is not a single response, nor responses given in a single setting; (2) not only does apologia repair an ethos, it can also help construct an ethos in cases where the public knows little or nothing about a political figure; (3) apologia includes the rhetorical support of others. Additionally, critics must continue refining existing methodologies as they seek to understand rhetorical phenomena.

Since its inception, intercollegiate debate has not only survived storms of controversy and periods of great change but has grown and matured into a vital part of almost every speech department across the country. Today, tournaments are more numerous than ever; the debaters are more plentiful and just as enthusiastic (even if spectators are not). Even though intercollegiate debate has withstood the struggles of its beginning and the ensuing growing pains, maturity has not brought an end to the problems and controversies. Many present day controversies--such as the value of debate, the value of the tournaments, and the type of decision have raged since the early years; other problems such as debating on both sides of the topic have developed and been temporarily solved only to reappear later. In short, intercollegiate debate is still being debated after more than seventy years. In the face of this realization, has intercollegiate debate made any real progress? that has happened in those seventy years-- what have been the major disagreements and problems of the past? Are they the same today? A survey of this past might suggest realistic and pragmatic solutions of some of the present problems. Some predictions on the direction of debate in the future should be evident concomitant with possible changes that will be necessary for debate to grow as an educational tool. In this study, only the history of intercollegiate debate in America will be dealt with; only the major changes and additions to the tournament1 the topic, the form, and the style will be examined from around 1892 until 1968. In almost every instance, this survey is traced through debate as it existed in the four year college.2 This is, presumably, the place where the most important and significant debating was (and is) done in terms of viewing trends and patterns. 1. Both the contest and tournament will be dealt with, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between them--a contest debate is a single meeting between two teams whereas a tournament is a predetermined number of contests between several teams from different schools ;:ho meet at one commonly agreed place to carry on a tournament until a champion is determined. 2. Every attempt has been made to limit information to four-year colleges except when a form or change involving a prep school or junior college, or some other context, has been significant to the overview of intercollegiate debate.

For the sake of this study, news impact and artistic value will be the chief concerns. Of course, the problem of obtaining news impact poses a number of questions, and two of the most obvious will be studied here: 1) Who is to evaluate a picture's new impact and artistic value? 2) How should the photographer cover his daily assignments to obtain the best of both and thus make the reader stop and look at a particular picture?

Inoculation is a robust theory applied to a variety of health behaviors. Social marketing is designed to change behavior by applying marketing tactics in the context of social change. This study combines inoculation theory with social marketing in the context of substance abuse disorders to promote long-term recovery. This is a pilot project that specifically focuses on the Beacon House, a residential recovery treatment center in Louisville, Kentucky. With the growing drug problem in America, it is necessary to implement effective recovery strategies in treatment programs. The social marketing plan focuses on the target audience to outline potential barriers, motivators, and competition to remaining in long-term recovery. Three intervention strategies were developed as part of the project: a core inoculation message, booster messages, and refusal skills training. These strategies utilize inoculation messages in various ways to address the complexity of long-term recovery. While this study focuses on the Beacon House treatment facility, the concepts can be applied to similar treatment centers.

The United States has a serious epidemic of mass incarceration and high recidivism rates. The U. S. must act on these high recidivism rates by implementing social services programs that help the formerly incarcerated stop committing crimes. The formerly incarcerated are being oppressed by a historic process that has continued to incarcerate and control them, even after they had served their time for their crimes. This project attempts to assist in reducing the high recidivism rates by creating an education-based transitional housing facility with a plethora of supportive services that will be open to formerly incarcerated individuals. This project sheds light on some of the problems that continue to plague this demographic group of people, while providing a possible solution to help reduce recidivism. The outcome of this project is a business plan that explains a procedure to help create a non-profit transitional housing facility that will be located in Palm Springs, CA. The steps of building this non-profit business are detailed in an implementation plan following this manuscript.

This dissertation investigates the interaction of gender and party in the political communication of members of Congress (MCs). The study focuses on the tweets of all MCs in the House of Representatives during two weeks of the 114th Congress (9,374 tweets from 431 MCs). I conduct an in-depth content analysis of these tweets to extract important message characteristics related to issue areas, electoral behaviors, and constituency targeting. I find that MCs emphasize their partisan ties when they tweet about women’s or men’s issues, but Democratic congresswomen and Republican congressmen go further to address feminine and masculine issue areas respectively. In their electoral behaviors, congresswomen posted more advertising tweets than congressmen, especially Republican congresswomen. Republican congresswomen took individual credit for legislation at high rates and shared very little, while Democratic congresswomen shared credit almost as much as they took individual credit. Furthermore, while both Democratic and Republican congresswomen see themselves as “surrogate representatives” (Carroll 2000) of the women beyond the boundaries of their districts, Democratic congresswomen target national constituencies significantly more often than their colleagues. These results provide evidence that gender is not enough to understand how MCs communicate – the key lies at the nexus of gender and partisanship.

This thesis proposes an alternative way of establishing a link between market orientation and electoral success, by focusing on market orientation as a message instead of as a management function. Using interpretive textual analysis the thesis examines the advertising messages of the highest polling political parties for evidence of voter orientation and competitor orientation in the 1999 and 2002 New Zealand general election campaigns. Relating manifest market orientation to a number of statistical indicators of electoral success the thesis looks for plausible associations between the visual manifestation of market orientation in political advertisements and parties' achievement of their party vote goals in the 1999 and 2002 elections. It offers party-focused explanations for electoral outcomes to complement existing voter-centric explanations, and adds another level of scholarly understanding of recent electoral outcomes in New Zealand.While the thesis finds little association between demonstration of competitor orientation in political advertisements and electoral success, it finds a plausible relationship between parties that demonstrated a voter orientation in their political advertisements and goal achievement. The parties that achieved their party vote goals in 1999 and 2002 tended to demonstrate an affinity for their target voter groups by showing images of voters and their environments and images of party leaders interacting with voters. They demonstrated concern for the satisfaction of the needs of existing voters by using words of togetherness and proving they had met their previous promises. They did not change their policy or leadership messages dramatically between campaigns. There was a visual consistency to their television, print and billboard advertising messages which rendered the messages easy to recognise and remember. They were clear about what they were offering in exchange for the party vote and recognised the need to offer something in addition to previous offerings in order to attract new voters.

Title: The battle of the budget – Communication in a modern policy (Slaget om budgeten –Kommunikation inom den moderna politiken)Numbers of pages: 39Author: Niclas KarlssonTutor: Peder Hård af SegerstadCourse: Media and Communication studies CPeriod: Autumn 2009University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science,Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The purpose of the paper is to see how Minister of Finance Anders Borg andthe Social Democratic economic spokesman Thomas Östros communicate their messages tothe public.Material/Method: The material is the minutes of the budget debate in the SwedishParliament. The method is rhetorical analysis and content analysis.Main result: Trust making is very important for both of them, especially when the financecrisis reached Sweden. The most common rhetorical quality is ethos.Keywords: Strategic political communication, rhetorical analysis, political trust.

Regarding presidential responsiveness and leadership, this study addresses two questions: Does the president respond to the public? Does the president lead the public? Unlike prior research, this study tries to answer these questions by focusing on the news media intervening in the relationship between the president and the public. Rather than positing a direct relationship between them, this study points out that information flows between the president and the public through the news media, which affect the president and the public. The public receives daily political information including presidential messages from the news media. Also, presidents recognize public sentiments from news stories. Accordingly, this study examines the potentially multidirectional relationships between the three actors from 1958 to 2004 in the United States. This study estimates the reciprocal relationships between the three actors by using Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Moving Average Response (MAR) simulations. Analyzing the three actors' issue stances, this study reveals that the news media significantly influence the public and the president. However, the direct relationship between the president and the public is negligible. Furthermore, the empirical findings demonstrate that presidential responsiveness is more likely to be observed when the news media report news stories consonant with past public opinion changes.