Hispanic-oriented advertising is a growing area in the advertising industry. Findings reported in this research examined agency strategies for advertising in Hispanic-oriented advertising. Interviews with agency practitioners involved in the planning, creation and media selection provided insight into agency best practices in Hispanic-oriented advertising. In-depth interviews at two Hispanic-oriented agencies revealed that a focus on cultural understanding, client relationships, and opposition of common stereotypes and segmentation practices were key in creating successful advertising that connected to Hispanic mindsets. Research results suggest that growth in the U.S. Hispanic population will not only affect the advertising industry, but will also create changes in American culture.

The purpose of this study is to examine the manner in which the media covers mens and womens athletics and how it may affect the publics perception of womens athletics. The study also seeks to examine how the hegemonic devices and primes that the sports media use can affect viewers enjoyment of womens athletic coverage as well as the effect that sports fandom plays on viewers perceptions. Using an experiment exposing participants to heavy mens college and womens college basketball coverage, the results showed that sports media coverage did not elicit negative perceptions toward womens athletics.

This study presents a content analysis of Twitter posts tagged with one of six institutions to establish uses and gratifications with this medium and the art museum industry. Due to industry norms, copyright law, museums traditionally do not permit photography and therefore may limit the advancement of their mission through misuse of the social media. This study establishes a baseline by seeking to understand how museums and individual account holders engage on Twitter within the art museum space as well as begin to unearth whether museums are misusing this media outlet and limiting their potential to educate the public while providing access to objects and information entrusted with their institution.

Entertainment media represent a primary source of health information, making it a prime area of research for wide-spread health issues such as chronic pain. Chronic pain conditions can elicit stigmatization due to pain representing a subjective experience; coming to understand the experience of a person in pain can reduce stigma for that person as well as the entire group of people with chronic pain. Entertainment media, through the use of an engaging narrative and characters, can portray an illness experience that potentially elicits empathy and reduces stigma for chronic pain conditions. This study is among the few to employ empathy and stigma measures for chronic pain. In a mixed experimental design, participants watched either a healthy or chronic pain media depiction from the television series House, M.D. and subsequently read an article about Smith, a stigmatized depiction of a man who experiences chronic pain after a vehicular accident. Empathy was divided into affective and cognitive components, and measured at baseline, post-video, and post-article times. Results from a repeated-measures ANOVA found that Gregory House was highly stigmatized and Smith moderately stigmatized. Additionally, empathy diminished for both healthy and pain depictions with no statistical difference. However, significant gender differences were found between baseline, post-video, and post-article scores for both empathy and stigma. Females experienced greater changes in empathy and stigma than males, expressing both higher baseline scores and lower post-video scores. Implications for cultivation theory are explored.

When Helis Oil & Gas Company announced it was interested in drilling for oil in Louisianas St. Tammany Parish, it ignited a firestorm. The proposed drilling project would use hydraulic fracturing or fracking causing some residents to voice their concerns for the parishs wellbeing. My thesis looks to framing theory to analyze how local media covered the issue, as well as the effects those frames might have on public policy and the lawsuits that arose out of the proposed drilling operation. I performed quantitative and qualitative content analyses of local media coverage of this issue from April 2014 through December 2014. I found that the media focused the most on the public backlash frame. The media coverage showed that public opinion has already had an impact on public policy; it could also influence litigation in this matter.

In this paper I tested the effectiveness of a biomimetically designed classifier algorithm in an effort to support a new argument for the systemic application of biomimetic design principles to mass communication technology. To supplement the purely system-level test, I conducted a series of interviews with interface-level designers regarding their own design strategies, generally accepted design strategies in the field of mass communication technology design, new design strategies, and the landscape of the field in general. The findings of my test lend strong credence to biomimicry's potential systemic contribution to mass communication technology design, and the tone of the interview responses suggests that the practices of interface-level design are congruent with this contribution. I argue that the placement of biomimetic design principles at the systemic level would enhance the user-interface design practices already in place, given their congruency with biomimetic design principles. I argue that to improve usability, interactivity, and security, and to improve our consumption, storage, and transmission of information on a massive scale, the most prudent course of action is to concentrate biomimetic design strategies systemically--into our hardware, networks, and systems in general--and that user-interface design would not only accommodate the changes to our system-level designs, but that it would thrive on them.

The nonprofit sectors adaptation and implementation of digital media is one that has received surprisingly little exploration. While some research has been conducted in this area, these studies tend to generalize results across all organization types within the nonprofit sector. Often, these studies overlook specific advantages nonprofits of varying types, sizes, and locations may potentially have in regard to fostering relationships with their communities. This study explores how these differences may impact organizational use of digital media, and how organizations can potentially use these media to more efficiently achieve their goals. Specifically, this study focuses on the use of narratives in organizational blogs and the varying appeals nonprofits can make to build stronger relationships with their publics. This study utilized a 2 (appeal type: rational vs. emotional) X 2 (issue proximity: local vs. broad) X 2(issue type: adult literacy vs. at-risk youth) mixed factorial experimental design was implemented to test the hypotheses and research questions, with issue proximity and appeal type being between-subjects factors and issue type being a within-subjects factor. Dependent measures included perceived local impact of an issue, levels of organizational trust, levels of organizational commitment, and supportive behavioral intentions. This experimental study was conducted online with a sample of undergraduate and graduate students (N = 268). Participants were randomly placed into one of four possible conditions, viewing a narrative organizational blog for each issue type respectively. Results were analyzed using a repeated-measures mixed-factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA). While the study did not find main effects for issue proximity or appeal type, it did find significant main effects for issue type. The results revealed a significant main effect for issue type across all outcome measures, as well as several significant interactions between issue type and both issue proximity and appeal type respectively. These results would suggest that the specific mission of the organization plays a major role in the effectiveness of localization and the use of particular appeals on respective target publics. These results and their implications are discussed.

Reports of sexual violence should be written from a public health perspective approach to appropriately frame the occurrence and encourage accurate understandings of sexual assault as a larger societal issue. This research consists of two studies to investigate the way universities do (and should) communicate about sexual violence with their students. For Study 1, interviews were conducted with a random sample of public state Universities regarding their emergency alert processes and template usage to determine current emergency communication practices. The majority of universities contacted do not have a template or best practice guidelines in place for creating timely warnings. For Study 2, an experimental test asked participants to read a hypothetical university timely warning message about a sexual assault on campus and take a post-test survey about their perceptions of sexual assault and personal estimation of threat. The experiment tested whether the inclusion of contextualizing statistics and information in the message changed their reported perceptions of rape overall. Results from the study show that a combination approach incorporating both statistics and personal safety strategies had the greatest influence on both threat perception and reported preventative behaviors. This research has significant public policy implications for best practices concerning institutional communication about sexual assault.

Studies show that the vast majority of people have no problem voting for a woman and that when women run they win as often as men, yet female representation remains startlingly low in the U.S. Women are 50.8 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for merely 19.4% of the 535 seats in Congress, 24.5% of statewide executive positions, 24.2% of state legislatures, and 17.6% of mayors in cities with populations over 30,000 (Center for American Women and Politics 2015). There is certainly much research dedicated to gender and politics. But what is missing from current literature is an organized compilation of relevant research that can be easily used for practical purposes. While many books and articles have been written on various pieces of this puzzle, there is not a comprehensive manual for practical use drawing from a range of research. I intend to build on existing literature by organizing it in topical categories and presenting the findings of current research with some practical implications. My hope is that it can serve as a reference guide tailored to both researchers and practitioners.

With more and more sports organizations reaching saturation points in their current home markets, the search for new, untapped, international audiences is on. Reaching out to these new markets has been made much more simple by the digitization of communication, and particularly the global spread of social media. The NFL, as the United States most popular sports league has been targeting the United Kingdom as its next market since the mid-2000s, and has gone as far as setting up a separate UK branch of their communications division (NFL UK). The NFL faces several challenges in engaging new fans in this fresh and culturally dissimilar market, and therefore their communication efforts need to be highly engaging to help bridge the gaps between the two cultures. This two-part study examines whether Grunig and Hunts (1984) public relations models, can be traced from offline communications to online Twitter communications, specifically those of the NFL UK. The study also explores whether another facet of excellence theory, the inclusion of culturally specific concepts, is present in messages targeting a new marketplace, and whether this inclusion impacts the engagement levels with those messages. The findings demonstrate that Grunigs (1992) assertions that two-way symmetrical messages are the most engaging type, while press agentry/publicity and public information messages are least engaging, are not supported in the case of the NFL UKs use of Twitter. Instead the results of this study show that it is one-way communication models that receive the highest levels of engagement from new audiences. The findings do, however, support the case put forward by Grunig, Grunig & Dozier (2006), Wakefield (2007), Rhee (2009), and others, that organizations should attempt to incorporate in their messages terms and concepts specific to the culture that is being targeted. This study concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. Elements of Grunigs (1992) set of public relations best practices, as laid out in excellence theory, do not easily translate to the world of digital communication, and often do not reflect at all in the messages of certain digital platforms, such as Twitter. An advancement of excellence theory is needed, particularly in relation to public relations best practices for the constantly changing world of social media, as well engaging international audiences. The results of this study also indicate some practical implications; organizations hoping to engage audiences embedded in a culture differing to their own should attempt to incorporate elements of this culture into their messages. In the case of Twitter, instead of focusing on the type of tweet, communications departments should emphasize the importance of diverse but relevant content in their messages when attempting to engage these new publics.