Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / In this thesis we explore the potential for using content placed on the Internet as a vehicle for influencing public opinion. We conducted an experiment with 110 subjects to test whether subtle changes in a headline for a news article, without changing the content of the article, can affect a user's perception of the news event reported in the article. These online news articles were assembled from a number of major news organizations. The subjects were divided into three groups, each of which was exposed to a different version of the headline: positively biased, negatively biased, and unchanged from the original headline. Afterwards the subjects completed a survey to indicate their views on the news events. We then analyzed this data to determine the cause-effect relationship between perception of the news event and the version of the headline. We found a detectable influence when using positively biased headlines to lessen the impact of negatively biased news stories, although the influence was not statistically significant. No evidence regarding the influence of negatively biased headlines on negatively biased news stories was discovered. This research was focused on detecting the potential influence of subtle changes and does not address the potential influence of less subtle changes. / Ensign, United States Navy

Call number: LD2668 .P7 1973 R35

The following research attempts to determine the factors used by an individual to develop an attitude on the political issue of capital punishment. Using data from the 2000 National Election Study and ordered probit analysis, this research produces a multivariate, multi-stage model of death penalty attitudes. Demographic factors such as race, age, gender, and education level are included in the initial stage of the model. Attitudinal variables such as party identification, ideology, and religiosity are added, one-by-one, in the second stage of the model to determine their own individual effect on death penalty attitudes, and their effect on the preceding demographic variables. The result is a comprehensive model of death penalty attitudes.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

M.P.H., Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, 2011 / Introduction: Globally and locally, the status of nurses and their profession is diminishing, ascribed partly due to the image of nursing portrayed in the media of a profession with heavy workloads, poor pay and no longer considered a career of choice. In South Africa, the increased disease burden due to HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, together with a deteriorating health system and significant inequities in terms of nurse distribution, has led to grave public concerns about the profession. The media play a key role in national development, helping to shape public perceptions by influencing how society understands events. This cross-sectional study aimed to explore how nursing is framed in the mainstream press over a six-month period in 2010 using mixed methods of a quantitative content analysis and a qualitative discourse analysis. Methodology This cross-sectional study used a mixed method approach of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The content of all articles mentioning „nurse‟ or „nursing‟ from the press cutting agency Monitoring South Africa (1 January – 30 June 2010) was analysed, yielding a total of 242 articles. From these, 91 articles were purposively selected for the qualitative discourse analysis. A data coding sheet was developed to capture key dimensions from each article for the quantitative content analysis. Both descriptive and inferential analysis was carried out. For the qualitative discourse analysis press cuttings were converted and coded, and then thematic analysis was carried out Results The results of the quantitative analysis found that nursing is not well covered in the South African lay press, and when it is featured, articles appear in community publications with small circulations. Most articles on nursing were prominent (ie. full-length) and positive. International Nurses‟ Day (IND) was seen to influence the proportion of nursing articles with more than double the number of articles appearing in May compared to the total average of other months, and all coded „positive‟. However, when IND was excluded from analysis, negative articles were dominant, mainly around strikes and unprofessional behavior which featured in daily and larger circulation newspapers. In keeping with international literature, strikes as a theme received the most coverage, but unique to this study was the finding that nursing neglect or unprofessionalism received almost as much coverage as strikes, featuring in the majority of page 1 articles and in publications with large circulations. 5 Regarding voice, this study found that nurses were quoted in just over a quarter of articles which featured quotes, but that spokespeople were quoted twice as often, remarkably so even for IND. Most nurse quotes were around strikes and poor working conditions. Nurses were quoted more frequently in community newspapers and in Western Cape newspapers. Doctors were seldom quoted, and 90% of patient quotes were negative. While females were quoted first in the majority of articles, a third of their quotes were anonymous, mainly around negative topics such as labour, protest action and service delivery, indicating their fear of reprisal from their institutions. Males were quoted more often in second and third quotes of articles, with the extent of quotes approximately in proportion to their numbers in the profession. The results of the qualitative discourse analysis revealed a profession groaning under the weight of a crumbling health system. Articles on the working conditions, salaries and shortages of nurses were mostly sympathetic, but when nurses „went too far‟, they were portrayed as unprofessional, negligent and abusive. Nurses were also not taken seriously when they raised the alarm about deteriorating health systems, which is disturbing when they are at the forefront of healthcare delivery. Very few articles dealt with nursing as a profession or academic nursing in any detail. Although there were more positive than negative articles, and IND garnered significant positive coverage for the profession with nearly a third of all articles appearing in May when IND is celebrated, the lasting impression is that of negative coverage, particularly from the discourse on patient abuse, neglect or abandonment during strikes. Nurse voices are notably absent from these articles. Conclusion South African nursing would benefit from media advocacy and partnerships to promote the profession. As the majority workforce which undertakes essential, life-giving tasks, nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system and critical contributors to quality health care. Their place at the policy table and space in the press is well overdue.

Les milliers de messages publiés quotidiennement sur internet constituent autant d'indices de pratiques, d'attitudes et d'opinions exprimées sur de nombreux sujets, dont la politique. Ces messages peuvent être appréhendés comme un véritable matériau d'analyse du monde social. Ils présentent néanmoins une certaine spécificité par rapport à d'autres types de données : ils ne sont pas générés par et pour un protocole de recherche. De ce fait, le chercheur ignore bien souvent les propriétés sociologiques de leurs auteurs. Afin de pouvoir situer ces auteurs dans le monde social « réel », nous avons construit notre propre dispositif méthodologique de panélisation d'une population d'inscrits au réseau social Twitter. Les données générées par notre dispositif nous ont permis d'observer que, bien que politisés et dotés en capitaux culturels, les individus publiant des messages politiques ne le font que de façon très intermittente. Le niveau de production de messages politiques sur Twitter est en fait corrélé au niveau d'activité du champ de production de l'information et de l'opinion. On peut donc appréhender Twitter comme un observatoire du marché des opinions politiques. / Thousands of texts daily published on the Internet indicate practices, attitudes and opinions on plenty of issues, politics included. They can be considered a real material to analyze the social world. These digital texts are quite specific, with regard to other types of data: they are not generated by and for a research protocol. Therefore, the researcher ignores the sociological properties of their authors. In order to identify these authors in the real social world, I built my own methodological plans to panelize the members of the social network Twitter. The data generated by my method support the following idea : the individuals who publish political texts are politicized and have high cultural capital. Besides, they only do so on an occasional basis. The level of production of political tweets is in fact correlated to the level of activity of the field of production of information and opinion. Twitter can therefore be considered a monitoring tool of the political opinion market.

Norway is the only country which has turned down EU membership in two popular referenda. It occupies a unique place in the study of Euroscepticism due to its population's stable and persistent misgivings about European integration. The thesis seeks to find out what Norwegian Euroscepticism really is and how it can be explained. Adopting a theoretical framework drawn from the Norwegian and comparative literature on EU support and a sequential exploratory mixed methods research design, the thesis first examines how the Norwegian Eurosceptic discourse has played out in a major national newspaper and the party political arena in the last fifty years, through the three periods of heightened Euroscepticism (1961-62; 1970-72; 1989-1994) and one period of latent Euroscepticism (1995-2010). Subsequently, the results of the qualitative analysis are tested on the 1994 Referendum Study to ascertain whether the issues mobilized in the public debate do indeed resonate on the popular level. The thesis finds that there are essentially two broad types of Norwegian Euroscepticism, mainstream (centre/left) and right-wing Euroscepticism. It argues that concerns about postmaterialist Values, political Culture and Rural society (VCR) are at the heart of mainstream Norwegian Euroscepticism, that values (the desire to make Norway and the world a better place), political culture (selfdetermination) and rural attachment are much more potent explanations for the phenomenon than economic interest (wanting to make Norway a richer place) or national identity concerns. Right-wing Euroscepticism, however, has an altogether different structure. Although it shares the political culture element with its mainstream counterpart, it does not exhibit postmaterialist or rural society sentiments. Conversely, it is driven by economic utilitarianism and the view that the EU is not sufficiently neo-liberalist. The findings also suggest that perceived cultural threat might be relevant to right-wing Euroscepticism, but this is an issue which must be investigated further by future research.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

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