Master of Arts / Department of Speech Communication, Theatre, and Dance / Timothy R. Steffensmeier / On August 17, 1959 a jazz album entitled Kind of Blue hit record store shelves nationwide and changed the music forever. Recorded by the Miles Davis Sextet, the album popularly introduced a new sound, modal jazz, and has become one of the best selling jazz records of all time. A week after the release, following a concert promoting the album at the Birdland in New York, Davis was walking a white female friend to a taxi when he was stopped by a policeman. The officer told Davis to move along, and the two exchanged a few words and looks before the cop clubbed Davis over the head and arrested him. Davis was released shortly, but this incident is illustrative of a time in history where African-American music was embraced while the people themselves were treated as second-class citizens. This study explores rhetorical connections between jazz music and American democracy as it existed during the late 1950s. Using Sellnow & Sellnow's (2001) 'Illusion of Life' Rhetorical Perspective, this study analyzes the music of Kind of Blue as it connects with the political upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement. It concludes that the incongruity between the political and social tension of the country and the relatively laid-back sound of the music correlates with the non-violent resistance strategies used in the Movement. Implications are drawn about Sellnow & Sellnow's (2001) methodology, jazz music's potential in promoting/maintaining an inclusive democracy, and areas for future study.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre, and Dance / William Schenck-Hamlin / According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overweight and obesity rates in the United States continue to increase. And yet, despite their resources to encourage healthy lifestyles, college campuses reflect the national trend. Colleges and universities often utilize health campaign strategies such as social norms marketing and peer health education to encourage campus-wide health initiatives. However, based on an application of effective health communication attributes, both strategies demonstrate limitations that must be addressed in future collegiate health campaign approaches. I analyzed the effectiveness of adopting an induced hypocrisy health campaign to encourage nutrition. The induced hypocrisy paradigm has resulted in successful behavioral change by having participants create a pro-attitudinal message. Then, participants are reminded of their past failure to engage in the behaviors they advocated. It was hypothesized that hypocritical subjects would purchase more nutrition bars than subjects in any of the other conditions. The results indicate that, although more hypocritical subjects purchased more nutrition bars than subjects in the other conditions, the findings were not found to be statistically significant. Interpretations of the study findings as well as implications for future nutrition campaign initiatives are discussed.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies / Sarah Riforgiate / Internships provide students with valuable learning experiences in their chosen fields. Considering that one of the most important components of students’ learning experiences during an internship is learning how to socialize and assimilate into organizational settings, an internship stage model should be able to account for this particular process – organizational assimilation. This study contends that existing internship stage models overlap and can be enhanced by organizational assimilation theory (Jablin, 1987). Therefore, this qualitative study includes data from 13 semi-structured interviews with students who participated in formal internships in order to explore students’ assimilation experiences during the course of their internships. Additionally, how interns view the host organization’s identity and its impact on their assimilation experience was examined. Findings indicate that students are more adaptive to socialization than individualization in terms of their responsibilities and roles during organizational assimilation. Further, the concept of organizational identity was so complex and intricate that students could not grasp their host organizations’ identity during the course of their internships; instead, through their organizational assimilation experience, participants learned the culture of the organizations.

Master of Arts / Department of Communications Studies / Soo-Hye Han / The rise of partisan political news over the past two decades has influenced how political candidates discursively construct their image. While there is an extensive literature devote to presidential discourse, little is known about what gubernatorial discourse looks like and how they construct their image. This study examines how gubernatorial candidates discursively construct their image in a hyperpolarized electoral environment. An extensive content analysis of gubernatorial political interviews (n = 94), and specifically the utterances arising from those interviews (n = 1,524), was conducted. Findings show that gubernatorial candidates discursively construct their own image as a savior to the state, while creating their opponent’s and the DC elite’s image as a villain. Additionally, gubernatorial candidates do not adhere to the image bound by their party, and construct an image that is unique to their environment. Consequently, the environment that a gubernatorial candidate is situated influences how they communicate and construct their image and their opponent’s image. By examining gubernatorial discourse through political interviews, this study offers theoretical implications into understanding the influence of polarization, issue ownership, and tone in gubernatorial discourse. Practical implications examine the role of media outlets in gubernatorial discourse. This study contributes to scholarly understanding of gubernatorial discourse in a changing and polarizing political environment.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre and Dance / Timothy R. Steffensmeier / Social Identity Theory has long held that group affiliation plays a predominant role in how we interact with others and the types of communication strategies that we deploy. Traditional scholarship on Computer Mediated Communication maintains an excessively interpersonal focus, detracting from its ability to theorize intergroup communication and conflict. This research study, conducted at the Internet bulletin board Americanwx.com, investigates the role that group identity plays in the everyday discourse of online message boards. In an ethnographic study spanning the course of 8 months and thousands of exchanges, research found that the structure of message boards themselves is implicated in the formation and maintenance of groups, and that once formed, groups tend to act in a manner that is consistent with Social Identity Theory.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre, and Dance / Charles Griffin / Interpersonal hurt in romantic relationships describes many every day interactions couples have. However, these instances of hurt are difficult to identify, talk about, and react to, making the study of such interactions immensely difficult as well. This in-depth literature review of current scholarly work is compiled in an effort to provide groundwork for understanding what hurt is, how individuals conceptualize the hurt they feel, and the coping strategies used to overcome what some scholars call a communicative and social phenomenon. Further, a discussion of future avenues of research and the implications of an expansion on the current research aims to guide future scholars to better understand what so many scholars are attempting to get a handle on.

Master of Arts / Department of Speech Communication, Theater, and Dance / Timothy R. Steffensmeier / This work explores the emergence and evolution of the rhetoric choice rhetoric as it pertains to contemporary American abortion politics. <Choice> is explored from an ideographic perspective, borrowing from the theoretical framework for ideographic rhetorical criticism established by Michael Calvin McGee. The analysis begins with a diachronic analysis of the emergence of the ideograph of <choice> within the law with an investigation of the written decisions in four Supreme Court cases central to the construction of the right to choose: Roe v. Wade (1973), Maher v. Roe (1977), Harris v. McRae (1980), and Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989). This investigation reveals a synchronic relationship between <choice> and another higher order ideograph, <liberty>. The criticism continues with an investigation of the usage of <choice> by pro-choice advocates in two documents published by NARAL Pro-Choice America, Choices: Women Speak About Abortion is a collection of women's narratives about their experiences obtaining an abortion, and Breaking Barriers, a guide for the development and implementation of proactive policy campaigns for pro-choice advocates. McGee's method is employed to investigate the ideographic usage of <choice> within these documents, revealing the ideographic abstraction that associates the alleged idea content of ideographs. This ideographic analysis reveals the inability of <choice> to live up to its alleged idea content as a result of the limitations inherent in the grounding of <choice> within the higher order ideograph of <liberty> and the impact of these limitations on particular populations, mainly indigent women in the United States.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre, and Dance / Nicole M. Laster / The adoption of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy affords a company with the opportunity to engage with stakeholders in a manner that is not necessarily tied directly to a company’s business as usual. CSR research has burgeoned in the last several decades, keeping pace with companies worldwide and their steady incorporation of CSR policies into their business models. To that end, research has been primarily focused on CSR policy perception from external stakeholders or managers. This research project examines the sensemaking processes related to an environmental sustainability-related CSR policy among a diverse group of internal stakeholders at a mid-sized electric utility company. An analysis of the data suggests that hierarchical divisions of employees are non-existent when the CSR policy is enduring, consistent, and upholds company values. Moreover, employee enactment of CSR policies operates as a mechanism whereby employees internalize the promoted corporate values. Such environmental CSR policies tacitly reinforce an organization’s cultural values among its employees. Additionally, environmentally sustainable CSR policies supported by environmentally exhausting companies induce a minimal justification hypothesis when dissonance is present between the nature of a company’s industry and practices related to sustaining the environment.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies / William Schenck-Hamlin / Many critics and scholars (e.g. Lippman, 1927, Putnam, 2000, Entman, 1989, McChesney, 2004, Funigiello, 2005), have argued that news media coverage of major political affairs and policy often fails to provided citizens with the information they need to engage in these issues in a thoughtful manner. The style of news utilized by networks as well as choices in framing have been found to have a significant impact on what is covered and how audiences perceive coverage (Bennett, 2005, Patterson, 2000, Prior, 2003, Zaller, 2003, Cappella & Jamieson, 1997, Ibrahim, 2010, ‘T Riet et al., 2009, Bizer & Petty, 2005, Ben-Porath & Shaker, 2010, Domke & Shah, 1995, and Esposito, 1996). According to the PEW Foundation (2010) a large portion of the 2009-2010 healthcare coverage focused on politics and not how the healthcare system functions (policy). This paper explores the coverage of the 2009-2010 heath care issue by the Network Nightly News through the use of a content analysis. For the purpose of this study, the proposed method of Budge et al. (2001) political party platform categories were used to code the content of the broadcast. These 46 codes contained issues that dealt with the policy of health care and the politics surrounding healthcare, as well as positive vs. negative framing. 30 broadcasts were randomly chosen, one day for each month, from the three nightly news networks during the ten months of highest coverage. Each broadcast was divided into “quasi-sentences”, where each sentence was broken down into individual actions. Results illustrate the frequency between policy and political content, and positive and negative content surrounding the 2009-2010 health care issue. KEYWORDS: Framing, Policy, Politics, Health Care Reform, Network Nightly News, Content Analysis, Quasi-Sentence

Master of Science / Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering / Steven Warren / The continuous and autonomous real-time monitoring of cattle state of health can provide major benefits for the U.S. livestock industry and lead to a higher quality beef product. Complete real-time monitoring could not only lead to earlier detection of disease in individual animals and reduce the spread of disease to a larger herd, but it could ultimately reduce the cost and frequency of on-site veterinary consultations. This thesis details a wearable device that is mounted on cattle to collect data from a network of internal and external sensors. In addition to the basic data collection, this thesis will describe the infrastructure to communicate these data sets to a central database for permanent storage and future analysis. Physiological, ambient environment, and physical activity data are acquired by the various sensors to give a good indication of the state of health of an animal wearing the device. The communication of data from internal sensors to an external wearable receiver is of particular interest since tissue is not an ideal medium for radio-frequency data transmission. Past research has attempted to use such links with little success due to large signal attenuation at high frequencies and a package that becomes much too large to be usable at low frequencies. As a result, a wireless communications method employing magnetic inductance at relatively low frequencies over short distances is described here.