UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item FRAMES, CLAIMS AND PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN ONLINE MEDIA COVERAGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN VIETNAM: EVALUATING EMERGING THEMES AND ACTION.(2020) Nguyen, Hoa Thanh; Yaros, Ronald; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Vietnam is a country already being affected by the consequences of global warming and climate change. By 2030, the World Bank predicts that climate change will continue to impact Vietnam, with an estimated 400,000 to one million people living in poverty (Rozenberg & Hallegatte, 2016). Of the 84 coastal countries investigated, Vietnam ranked first in the predicted severity of sea-level rise and its GDP loss. The country also ranked second (to the Bahamas) in the magnitude of climate effects on the land and second to Egypt in the impact of agriculture (Duong, 2010). At the same time, Vietnam continues to depend on export and other labor-intensive industries, which consume the lion's share of the nation's energy and natural resources that are not yet environmentally friendly. This content analysis examines online media coverage of climate change in Vietnam through frames, claims, and public participation. The study explores the relationships between the Vietnamese media and their audiences through the lenses of public engagement and actions related to climate change issues. Results suggest that solutions, actions, and remedies were the dominant frames in news stories, supporting a blend of development journalism and a nation-building journalism model. The mainstream media in Vietnam determines, in part, the growth of the nation's public sphere because the media facilitates discussion and the dissemination of information among the stakeholders. However, public voices were represented only to a limited degree in mainstream media. Alternatively, self-funded and corporate-sponsored online media facilitated more public interaction and promoted the most public voices. This study contributes to the public sphere theory in a developing Asian country where climate change is being covered as a newly revived social issue. In that sense, climate change should increase the opportunities for - but challenges to - the governance of Vietnam’s administration.Item WHERE DOES NEWS ABOUT PRESCRIPTION DRUGS COME FROM?: EXPLORING HOW ORGANIZATIONS BUILT AND FRAMED THE NATIONAL NEWS MEDIA AGENDA FOR HORMONE THERAPY FROM 1995 TO 2011(2013) Weissman, Paula L.; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT This longitudinal study explored how health and medical organizations used public relations techniques to influence news content about postmenopausal hormone therapy (HT) from 1995 to 2011. A theoretical framework that combined agenda building, information subsidies, and framing guided the study (Zoch & Molleda, 2006). Quantitative content analyses were conducted on 675 press releases about HT distributed through PR Newswire and EurekAlert!, and 429 news stories about HT in the Associated Press Newswire (AP), The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Supplemental qualitative content analyses of organizational websites, annual reports, and scientific publications explored financial relationships and potential collaborations between ten organizations that emerged as the most successful agenda builders. Six types of health and medical organizations produced press releases about HT: pharmaceutical companies, academic/medical institutions, nonprofit health advocacy organizations, medical/scientific journal publishers, U.S. government agencies, and other for-profit organizations. A positive, statistically significant relationship was found between the quantity of press releases and news stories over time (r = .55, p<.001). Findings also supported the transference of specific objects, such as brand-name HT products, and attributes, such as risks and benefits, from the public relations to the news media agenda. Academic/medical institutions and nonprofit health advocacy organizations were significantly more likely than pharmaceutical companies to identify non-FDA approved, "off-label" benefits. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, manufacturer of leading HT brands Premarin and Prempro, financially subsidized most of the top-ten, agenda-building organizations, including four academic/medical institutions and two non-profit health advocacy organizations that were frequently cited in news stories. Additionally, a substantial degree of synergy was found between these organizations in terms of how they framed menopause and HT over the study period. This study supported and extended the theoretical framework used by offering insights into how organizations may collaborate through funding arrangements and third-party communication techniques to influence news content in a health and medical context. The findings also contributed a new and important dimension to scholarship on pharmaceutical promotion of prescription drugs, which has neglected the role of public relations and focused almost exclusively on more overt, paid-promotional efforts like direct-to-consumer advertising.Item Building Shared Understandings in Introductory Physics Tutorials Through Risk, Repair, Conflict & Comedy(2012) Conlin, Luke David; Hammer, David M; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Collaborative inquiry learning environments, such as The Tutorials in Physics Sensemaking, are designed to provide students with opportunities to partake in the authentic disciplinary practices of argumentation and sensemaking. Through these practices, groups of students in tutorial can build shared conceptual understandings of the mechanisms behind physical phenomena. In order to do so, they must also build a shared epistemological understanding of what they are doing together, such that their activity includes collaboratively making sense of mechanisms. Previous work (Conlin, Gupta, Scherr, & Hammer, 2007; Scherr & Hammer, 2009) has demonstrated that tutorial students do not settle upon only one way of understanding their activity together, but instead build multiple shared ways of understanding, or framing (Scherr & Hammer, 2009; Tannen, 1993a), their activity. I build upon this work by substantiating a preliminary finding that one of these shared ways of framing corresponds with increased evidence of the students' collaboratively making sense of physical mechanisms. What previous research has not yet addressed is how the students come to understand their activity as including collaborative sensemaking discussions in the first place, and how that understanding develops over the course of the semester. In this dissertation, I address both of these questions through an in-depth video analysis of three groups' discussions throughout the semester. To build shared understandings through scientific argumentation and collaborative sensemaking, the students need to continually make repairs of each other's understanding, but this comes with the risk of affective damage that can shut down further sensemaking discussions. By analyzing the discourse of the three groups' discussions throughout the semester, I show how each group is able to manage this essential tension as they each build and maintain a safe space to sensemake together. I find that the three groups differ in how soon, how frequently, and how deeply they engage in collaborative scientific sensemaking. This variability can be explained, in part, through differences in how the groups use hedging, irony, and other discourse moves that epistemically distance the speakers from their claims. This work highlights the connection between students' epistemology and affect in face-to-face interaction.Item The Mainstream Outsider: News Media Portrayals of Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney and His Mormonism, 2006-2008(2011) Williams, Lane Daniel; McAdams, Katherine C; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how news media framed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his Mormonism during his unsuccessful quest for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The study's central finding is that, in the aggregate, news accounts framed Mormonism as outside the American religious and cultural mainstream. This framing emerged as part of campaign's "horse-race" coverage, which focused on who was ahead in the nomination race, who was behind and why. That coverage naturally highlighted aspects of Mormonism that caused Romney electoral problems. Journalists zeroed in on the church's history of polygamy, on whether the church is a Christian faith and on current church beliefs that may appear outside the mainstream. Basic beliefs that Mormons share with other American faiths, such as helping the poor, were mentioned, but less frequently. Romney himself was framed as a generally mainstream candidate whose central problem was his faith. This dissertation also describes how news media relied heavily on an analogy between Romney's struggle to overcome his "Mormon problem" and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's struggle to overcome anti-Catholic sentiments in 1960. Implications of these conclusions are discussed for candidates of other minority religions and further research is suggested. The study proposes a "horse-race influence model" that highlights a candidate's weaknesses, providing voters with reasons to vote against a candidate, which is reflected in the next set of horse-race coverage polls. Horse-race coverage, therefore, may create a feedback loop that increasingly harms a candidate's chances. Quantitative findings are based on a content analysis of 205 news articles that appeared in eight prominent American news outlets between January 2006 and Romney's withdrawal from the race in February 2008. Articles in the sample mentioned Mormonism at least four times and Romney at least once. The content analysis obtained a mean intercoder reliability of .84.Item Essays on the Determinants of Pension Savings and Retirement Management Decisions(2011) Lara-Ibarra, Gabriel de Atocha; Kearney, Melissa S; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In recent years, governments have become increasingly concerned about the low levels of households wealth accumulation upon retirement, and the capacity of individuals to keep the standard of living they had during their working lives. Among the reasons behind these concerns are the high relative poverty rates among elderly households, the low replacement rates provided by compulsory pension systems, and the higher responsibility placed on individuals to fund their retirement due to changes in pension systems and the increased complexity of financial instruments. Government officials in various countries have developed a series of policies that aim at encouraging retirement savings among the population. The evaluation of the effectiveness of such policies has been a continuous objective of economists. This dissertation contributes to the public economics literature in accomplishing this objective via two cases whose analysis will hopefully inform policy makers and help better design policies geared towards improving individuals' retirement wealth accumulation. In chapter 2, I investigate the effect of the introduction of tax free retirement accounts on the savings behavior of Mexican households. This chapter contributes empirical evidence to the debate about whether preferential tax treatment is an effective policy tool to encourage household savings. The empirical strategy is a difference-in-difference approach that utilizes an arguably exogenous change in access to tax free accounts for a well-defined set of workers. The data provide evidence of heterogeneous effects across demographic subgroups and across quantiles of the savings distribution that accord with predictions of a standard model of savings behavior. In particular, the data show an increase in the savings rate of treated workers in the year following the introduction of the accounts. The effect is driven by prime age workers and by high income workers. Among prime age workers, the lower savers experience the largest effects of the policy change. I perform multiple robustness checks on these findings, including estimating propensity score matching models and tests for potential confounding factors such as changes in retirement accounts' returns or fees, or changes in workers' income. In chapter 3, I analyze whether information framing related to the performance of Pension Funds Administrators affects the retirement management decisions of Mexican workers. I conduct a survey to collect information on recommendations for Fund Administrator made by Mexican workers when faced with randomly framed scenarios. The scenarios feature framing based on choice avoidance and framing exploiting loss aversion. I find evidence that reducing the number of possible choices increases the probability that individuals choose a Fund Administrator with a higher net return or with lower fees. A loss aversion framing increases the probability that individuals choose a Fund Administrator with a higher net returns. Finally, I find evidence that higher levels of financial literacy decrease the effects of framing on Fund Administrator choice.Item MEDIA FRAMING OF TERRORISM: VIEWS OF "FRONT LINES" NATIONAL SECURITY PRESTIGE PRESS(2010) Epkins, Heather Davis; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research investigates a critical tier in the global flow of information about terrorism. This qualitative study employs 35 in-depth interviews with national security journalists in the Washington, D.C. prestige press (Stempel, 1961) to explore their perceptions surrounding the collection, interpretation and dissemination process of terrorism news content. This study includes a review of the recent rhetorical shift from the Bush Adminstration "War on Terrorism" to "Overseas Contingency Operation" attempted by the Obama Administration. Rarely studied, but extremely influential, these particular "front line" reporters offer substantial insider knowledge on evolving trends in the news media production process on terrorism and national security. Their unique geographical position allowing for daily interaction among American governmental leadership, combined with their responsibility to cover what could be argued as one of the most influential topics of our time - terrorism - offers readers an inside view of the daily constraints, strategies and perceptions of this elite group. Data analysis adhered to grounded theory methods. Findings include evidence of new and evolving journalist routines with implications for public policy and the evolving integrity of journalist practices. Moreover, extending the published literature in the mass communication theory and national security realms, this research offers value by analyzing and describing the news production processes and perceptions - for the first time - of the D.C. national security prestige press. Reported results should also offer practitioners new insight into best practices and an opportunity for information users to better understand and evaluate what they are receiving.