Because of the advent of the Internet, traditional journalism is changing. Advanced technology includes the tools for everyone to publish their thoughts, feelings, photos, and videos, allowing individuals to be citizen journalists. This experimental-design study was aimed at discovering the influence of biographies in people's judgments of the credibility and professionalism of news articles. The study involved four treatments 1: professional journalist feature article with professional journalist biography; 2: citizen journalist feature article with professional journalist biography; 3: citizen journalist feature article with citizen journalist biography; and 4: professional journalist feature article with citizen journalist biography. These treatments were used to determine how the 198 study participants judged the work and biography of a traditional journalist compared to the work and biography of a citizen journalist. Study data was acquired through an online survey. A credibility scale and a professionalism scale were used to determine that, based on the articles used in the study, news consumers do not see professional journalists as more credible than citizen journalists, although news consumers do see traditional journalists' content as more professional.

This is a qualitative exploratory, descriptive study to ascertain the feasibility of public administrators at the local government level using an Appreciative Inquiry approach to increase direct citizen participation. It is framed by the interpretive paradigm. Twenty city managers or their designees from cities of between 40,000 and 250,000 citizens were interviewed. Specifically, respondents were asked twelve semi-structured interview questions. Content analysis was used to identify six themes in the data. Ultimately, this study found that Appreciative Inquiry may be useful in limited circumstances as long as barriers to implementation were adequately addressed. However, the potential risks may outweigh the benefits. / Ph. D.

Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) occur due to the excessive growth of algal in waterbodies such as lakes, rivers, and ponds. The cyanotoxins produced by HABs are harmful to wildlife, animals, and humans when ingested or exposed. Due to the toxic and rapid growth of HABs, it is essential to assess potential causes of HABs over broad geographical scales. This observational study aims to understand the spatiotemporal patterns and drivers of HABs across the State of Illinois using both regular environmental monitoring and citizen science datasets from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA). The Ambient Lake Monitoring Program and the Illinois Clean Lakes Program regularly conduct chlorophyll-a measurements, collectively referred to as the ALMP + ICLP dataset. Similarly, the Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) organizes volunteer citizens to collect Secchi-disk measurements, known as the VLMP dataset. Machine learning algorithms including Random Forest, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine are used to evaluate HABs and trophic states of HABs based on nine meteorological variables, six lake morphological variables, and eight land use and land cover variables. The data characteristics found the Cook county area consisted of over half of the total VLMP observations. The meteorological variables were most important for accuracy and classification in the Random Forest modeling, and the VLMP dataset performed the best at trophic state classification, and the Random Forest model performed the best overall compared to the other machine learning models. This study concludes that the VLMP is a beneficial and comparable tool when coupled with the ALMP + ICLP data for HAB monitoring in Illinois.

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Civil society is a widely discussed concept, often proposed as a means to address problems associated with a weakening of the social fabric. Nearly all civil society literature works from the notion that creating more or richer discourse around any given issue will help build agreement about the key values and in so doing, civil society will emerge. What this literature has not yet turned its attention to is, what is necessary for a strong social bond, which is a prerequisite for the possibility of social discourse in the first place, to exist. Historically, the social bond has been built on common religious, cultural and/or political perspectives. However, the constitutive power of the institutions that comprise each of these areas has diminished substantially. This research draws on concepts developed in the field of environmental psychology to understand how place can serve as the basis for the development of a social bond and subsequent emergence of civil society. Two concepts drawn from environmental psychology -- place attachment and place identity -- are used to demonstrate how individuals and groups become connected to place, and how such a connection shapes and contributes to social relations. Specifically, this study contributes to the body of civil society literature by illuminating how a public agency can foster the development of the social bond by drawing explicitly and symbolically on place and in doing so, contributes to the emergence of civil society -- or on the other hand, fails to foster it as effectively as it could by being attentive to the role that place can play in creating the social bond. / Ph. D.

Over the past decade the movement of natural gas drilling operations toward more suburban and urban communities has created unique policy challenges for municipalities. Municipal response is manifest in a variety of institutional arrangements, some more enabling than others regarding citizen access to public hearings. This observation lead to the main research question, “How are variations in citizen participation affecting policy outcomes?” The argument is made that institutions affecting citizen participation, in turn affect policy outcomes. If the general public is given access to public hearings, their preferences for longer setbacks will be taken into account and the approved gas wells will have greater distances from neighboring residences – effectively providing for greater safety. Given the paucity of research on the topic of natural gas drilling, the research first begins with the presentation of a theoretical framework to allow for analysis of the highly complex topic of gas well permitting, emphasizing the rule-ordered relationships between the various levels of decision making and provides a typology of collective action arenas currently used by Texas municipalities. The research uses paired case studies of most similar design and employs a mixed methods process for the collection, analysis and interpretation of the municipal level gas well permitting process. The investigation includes a complete census of 185 approved gas wells from four North Texas cities between the years 2002-2012; 20 interviews comprised of city officials and drilling operators; and archival records such as gas well site plans, ordinances, on-line government documents and other public information. The findings reveal that zoning institutions are associated with a 15% longer gas well setback than siting institutions and institutions without waivers are associated with a 20% longer gas well setback than institutions with waiver rules. The practical implications suggest that citizen participation has a positive effect on public safety within gas well permitting decisions.

Yes / Sluggish adoption of emerging electronic government (eGov) applications continues to be a problem across developed and developing countries. This research tested the nine alternative theoretical models of technology adoption in the context of an eGov system using data collected from citizens of four selected districts in the state of Bihar in India. Analysis of the models indicates that their performance is not up to the expected level in terms of path coefficients, variance in behavioural intention, or the fit indices of the models. In response to the underperformance of the alternative theoretical models to explain the adoption of an eGov system, this research develops a unified model of electronic government adoption and tests it using the same data. The results indicate that the proposed research model outperforms all alternative models of technology adoption by explaining 77 % of variance in behavioural intention, with acceptable values of fit indices and significant relationships between each pair of hypothesised factors.

No / The study explores the adoption of an electronic government (e-government) system called online PAN card registration system (OPCRS) in context of India. The study validates the extended theory of reasoned action (TRA) to understand the impact of some of its factors on the citizen's intention to adopt this system. The proposed research model is extended with the variables including perceived usefulness, perceived trust, and self-efficacy as antecedents of attitude and subjective norm, which are the core constructs of the TRA. The eight hypotheses were formulated between six constructs of the proposed extended TRA. The proposed research model is validated using the usable sample of data gathered from 377 respondents. The data was analysed using AMOS 22.0. The empirical findings of the proposed research model indicated the significant relationships of all proposed hypotheses. The study also provides its limitations, future research directions, and implications for theory and practice toward the end.