Thesis (M.S. in Systems Technology)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): James Bret Michael, Raymond Buettner. Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-94). Also available online.

This study employs an experimental design to test the effects of branding,presence of opinion, and gender on news credibility. A history of credibility theory in social science research is explored in order to contextualize investigation of truth and objectivity in the contemporary fragmented news landscapes. The goal is to contribute to the academic methodologies employed in the exploration of credibility in news as well as make practical suggestions to news makers. Results of the empirical methods in this thesis showed that belief in the news organization from a pretest was positively correlated with the credibility ratings of the individual story conditions but previously held beliefs about story topic were not. Neutral stories were rated higher in terms of credibility than those with opinion statements regardless of brand or belief in the news institution. A scale for personal acceptance of opinion in news is proposed to provide credibility theorists a way to unobtrusively measure predilection for opinion news. While no differences in gender were found using the newly-proposed scale, an individual’s propensity to trust was positively correlated with acceptance of opinion in news. Audience specialization in news should lead to specialized studies of credibility, particularly the roles of gender information processing in relation to objectivity, opinion, and credibility. / text

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A study was conducted to measure the effects of misanthropic attitudes towards physicians on the avoidance of health care for both treatment and preventive purposes. Demographic and other attitudinal and behavioral variables were also measured. Results indicated that income, age, health status, cancer preventing and detection beliefs and health care misanthropy were all related to subjects' health care avoidance for treatment-oriented purposes. Age, sex, use of blood pressure screening tests, and objective health status were significantly associated with avoidance of health care for preventing purposes. As well, those who rated high on misanthropy measures were more likely to patronize non-traditional health care providers than traditional medical doctors. A discussion of communication theories which may provide some explanation for health care avoidance is also given.

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<p>Public opinion tools are used to look at voter motivations to engage in clientelistic practices and their variation across structures of competition.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis investigates the state of Canadian public opinion concerning the war in Vietnam from the time of Canada's initial involvement on the International Control Commission in 1954, to the final pullout of Canadian observers in 1973. The Canadian Institute of Public Opinion polls will form the basis of this examination, but various media publications and government statements will also be used to portray the nature of public debate on this issue. This study is broken down into two periods; from 1954 to 1964 and from 1965 to 1973. The conclusions reached show that fear of communism contributed to significant Canadian public support for American intervention i n Vietnam in the early years of the conflict. It was only near the end of the war, when Canadians began to consider U.S. actions as more dangerous to world peace than revolutionary communism, that support for American policy declined. However, throughout the entire period of this study there was always a large percentage of Canadians who were undecided about the war. This most likely reflects the general apathy of Canadians when confronted with foreign policy questions that had little direct impact on their daily lives. Nevertheless, there was a considerable percentage of the population that was strongly opposed to the American intervention and to what was considered the Canadian government's complicity in prolonging the war. Overall, Canadian attitudes changed slowly and even then only very little.

This study examines the impact of perceived personality traits of the political party leaders on voting decisions in the 2000 Canadian federal election, replicating Richard Johnston's research that is based on the 1997 election. Employing data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study (CES), the research uses Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis to estimate how evaluations of leader personality traits over two aggregated dimensions - competence and character - moved votes. The changes in the design of the 2000 CES from prior years created many difficulties in assessing voters' evaluations of the party leaders and limited the comparability of the results from the study. The key methodological differences are: (1) leaders were not evaluated individually; (2) it did not measure the degree of applicability of the trait labels; (3) it included significantly fewer leader personality questions, and (4) the "new ideas" variable does not fall squarely into either the competence and character domains and seems to favour the new Alliance Party leader. This study finds that leader effects are more critical to the parties struggling for their political survival. A counterfactual party leader-switching exercise suggests that the distance between the frontrunner parties and the others was too great for leader-switching effects to make a difference in determining which parties would form the government and the Official Opposition and whether the winning party would form a majority or minority government. Joe Clark improved his party's standing during the campaign and helped it to retain its official party status while evaluations of Stockwell Day declined. The relevance of judgements of Day and Clark on pre-election vote intentions moved in the same direction as voters' respective evaluations of the leaders over the campaign. This study confirms that campaigns can have an effect on voters. The study supports earlier research findings that suggests that Canadian elections are vulnerable to leader effects. Conventional wisdom that is driven by the media's focus on the personalities suggests that leaders are significant factors in Canadian federal elections, but the empirical research reported in this study and others before it suggest otherwise.

This study is centered around examining the impact that the recent welfare reform has had on front-line workers in the welfare bureaucracy and the clients of the welfare system. In 1993 the government in British Columbia began implementing sweeping policy and procedural changes that altered the way in which welfare services were provided and limited the services available to the poor. The impetus for these changes is situated in the widespread media coverage of welfare fraud and abuse throughout 1993 and 1994. The media, by targeting certain sub-groups of the welfare client population, was able to substantiate their claim that the welfare system was not only being undermined but that it was also operating on the basis of policies that were flawed and therefore easily abused. This study begins with a presentation of the policy and procedural changes that have occurred within the Ministry of Social Services in British Columbia from 1993 to 1996. The second section of this study examines the media's response to the "welfare fraud crisis" and the way in which a moral panic was created around the "problem" of welfare fraud. This analysis draws upon moral panic and social constructionist theory to examine not only the media's presentation of the "crisis" but also the government's response to the public concern that had been generated. The final section of this study presents a discussion of the front-line worker's response to the changes that have taken place within the Ministry of Social Services over the last four years. The analysis is centered around examining how these front-line government workers cope with the restrictive and regulatory policies they are responsible for enforcing. The study concludes with suggestion for further research on this topic.