Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item WAR OF THE WORDS: STRATEGIC NARRATIVES IN NEWS COVERAGE OF COVID-19 TRAVEL POLICIES IN U.S. AND CHINESE MEDIA(2024) Wong, Ho Chun; Oates, Sarah S; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates how a global shock such as the COVID-19 pandemic creates challenges and opportunities for the projection of strategic narratives. Sitting on the intersection of the literature between journalism studies, political communication, and international relations, the strategic narratives framework provides a comprehensive approach to evaluate the stories told by political actors that are aimed at influencing perceptions. The author proposed a narrative-centric perspective to enrich the theoretical framework. While the conventional policy-centric perspective evaluates strategic narratives as a means to legitimize political behaviors, the narrative-centric perspective considers strategic narratives as tools for shaping the identities and characterization of political actors. A global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity to frame pandemic responses in service of strategic goals. While political actors could legitimize policies in the name of health amid the lack of scientific authority in the infodemic where problematic information overwhelmed the global information environment, the situation also enabled political actors to frame policies such as travel restrictions for enhancing or renegotiating actor identities and worldviews. This dissertation analyzes the projection of COVID-19 strategic narratives and how they responded to foreign strategic narratives in the U.S. and Chinese English-language national news. A large sample of online news (N = 263,014) was sampled from the GDELT Coronavirus news dataset (The GDELT Project, 2020). This dissertation employed mixed methods of human-in-the-loop machine learning, conventional content analysis, and Granger causality tests to identify and examine strategic narratives, as well as evaluate the interactions between strategic narratives. Findings suggest that Chinese strategic narratives were responsive to offensive strategic narratives from the U.S. and depicted the U.S. as an immoral actor who intentionally smeared China. The U.S. reinforced the identity-level strategic narrative that China lacks transparency through issue-level strategic narratives about travel policies and virus origin. Two patterns of strategic narratives projection were found. Chinese strategic narratives maintained coherent storylines in the three years and between news outlets. They projected a clear Chinese story to the international audience but found it difficult to address the rapid changes in pandemic situations and policies. Meanwhile, strategic narratives from the U.S. were less coherent and were contested domestically between news outlets. Although it might have weakened a unified U.S. story, the flexibility allowed strategic narratives to transform and adapt to evolving pandemic realities. U.S. strategic narratives were able to frame stories about travel restrictions and virus origin as a manifestation of the lack of transparency from China. This dissertation demonstrated the feasibility of studying the dynamics of strategic narratives through a large dataset. The mixed method approach offered a thick analysis of strategic narratives and illustrated their interactions, thus consolidating the theoretical and methodological foundation for future research on strategic narratives contests.Item Disproportionality, Discourse, and the Debate over Coal-Fired Power(2018) Galli Robertson, Anya M; Fisher, Dana R; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Following Freudenburg’s framework of the “double diversion,” this dissertation aims to understand environmental inequality as the product of two interrelated processes: (1) inequality in the generation of environmental harm, or “disproportionality,” and (2) inequality in the ability to shape discussions about environmental harm through discourse, or “privileged accounts.” I employ a mixed-methods approach in order to assess both disproportionality and discursive power in the debate over coal-fired power in the United States. First, I analyze emissions data at the facility and parent company levels to assess whether a minority of producers is disproportionately responsible for the majority of CO2 generated in the sector. Results indicate that inequality in the generation of emissions is more extreme at the parent company level than at the facility level, with only three companies responsible for the worst 25% of emissions in 2015. Second, I analyze qualitative data from in-depth interviews (n=209) with policy elites at the federal level and in the state of Ohio to identify the dominant narratives and discourse coalitions that shaped the debate over coal-fired power surrounding the 2016 election. I identify the “legitimating discourses” used in support of coal-fired power, then compare these “privileged accounts” to anti-coal counterframes. Discourse analysis findings illustrate how pro-coal interests shifted their discursive strategies to adapt to changing policy contexts, as well as the shortcomings of the anti-coal narratives that sought to shift the discourse toward environmental interests. Finally, to understand the connections between patterns of disproportionality, I explore how the “extreme emitters” identified in quantitative analysis appear within interview data. Together, these analyses illustrate the influence of privileged accounts over the debate, definition, and response to persistent environmental problems.Item The Media-Policy Relationship: Anti-Hunger Policy in America as an Example of Bridging Media and Policy Theory Through Better Definitions(2017) De Munbrun, Ronald Noah; Oates, Sarah; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A central purpose of journalism is to inform the public. Public policy is one area where such information is critical to citizens. With respect to hunger, many credit media reporting in the 1960s with creating the political will to implement anti-hunger policies such as the Food Stamp program. Fifty years later, the media’s role is different. In 2014, the number of Americans receiving aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) rose to almost 15% of the population. The bi-partisan Congressional response was to cut SNAP funding. The editorial boards of the New York Times, USA Today and Washington Post response to this apparent disconnect between need and funding was to support the cuts. Anti-hunger advocates fault the media’s framing of hunger for the cuts to SNAP and imply the public is not being properly informed. To investigate these claims required filling a major gap in both public policy and framing research: the lack of precise definitions of the unit of study. Though media framing theory is useful in explicating the “media-policy link,” neither the public policy nor the media literature consistently identify frames in terms meaningful to both disciplines. This dissertation argues that grouping existing definitions of key public policy concepts into the collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories of public problem, public policy, public policy tools, public policy goals, and public policy ends resolves the inconsistency problem and fosters communication across disciplines. Using key points in the last 55 years of anti-hunger policy in America, it explores how utilizing these categories to group media “frames” allows for generalizable results for future studies as well as the ability to reorganize the results of data from previous studies in both disciplines. They also provide the means to operationalize what is meant by “informing” the public by explicating the media’s relationship to the interactions between these categories in the policy process. Using these categories, the study reveals that the media focus on anti-hunger policy tools while ignoring the problem of hunger they are intended to remedy.Item Guided Probabilistic Topic Models for Agenda-setting and Framing(2015) Nguyen, Viet An; Resnik, Philip; Boyd-Graber, Jordan; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Probabilistic topic models are powerful methods to uncover hidden thematic structures in text by projecting each document into a low dimensional space spanned by a set of topics. Given observed text data, topic models infer these hidden structures and use them for data summarization, exploratory analysis, and predictions, which have been applied to a broad range of disciplines. Politics and political conflicts are often captured in text. Traditional approaches to analyze text in political science and other related fields often require close reading and manual labeling, which is labor-intensive and hinders the use of large-scale collections of text. Recent work, both in computer science and political science, has used automated content analysis methods, especially topic models to substantially reduce the cost of analyzing text at large scale. In this thesis, we follow this approach and develop a series of new probabilistic topic models, guided by additional information associated with the text, to discover and analyze agenda-setting (i.e., what topics people talk about) and framing (i.e., how people talk about those topics), a central research problem in political science, communication, public policy and other related fields. We first focus on study agendas and agenda control behavior in political debates and other conversations. The model we introduce, Speaker Identity for Topic Segmentation (SITS), is able to discover what topics that are talked about during the debates, when these topics change, and a speaker-specific measure of agenda control. To make the analysis process more effective, we build Argviz, an interactive visualization which leverages SITS's outputs to allow users to quickly grasp the conversational topic dynamics, discover when the topic changes and by whom, and interactively visualize the conversation's details on demand. We then analyze policy agendas in a more general setting of political text. We present the Label to Hierarchy (L2H) model to learn a hierarchy of topics from multi-labeled data, in which each document is tagged with multiple labels. The model captures the dependencies among labels using an interpretable tree-structured hierarchy, which helps provide insights about the political attentions that policymakers focus on, and how these policy issues relate to each other. We then go beyond just agenda-setting and expand our focus to framing--the study of how agenda issues are talked about, which can be viewed as second-level agenda-setting. To capture this hierarchical views of agendas and frames, we introduce the Supervised Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation (SHLDA) model, which jointly captures a collection of documents, each is associated with a continuous response variable such as the ideological position of the document's author on a liberal-conservative spectrum. In the topic hierarchy discovered by SHLDA, higher-level nodes map to more general agenda issues while lower-level nodes map to issue-specific frames. Although qualitative analysis shows that the topic hierarchies learned by SHLDA indeed capture the hierarchical view of agenda-setting and framing motivating the work, interpreting the discovered hierarchy still incurs moderately high cost due to the complex and abstract nature of framing. Motivated by improving the hierarchy, we introduce Hierarchical Ideal Point Topic Model (HIPTM) which jointly models a collection of votes (e.g., congressional roll call votes) and both the text associated with the voters (e.g., members of Congress) and the items (e.g., congressional bills). Customized specifically for capturing the two-level view of agendas and frames, HIPTM learns a two-level hierarchy of topics, in which first-level nodes map to an interpretable policy issue and second-level nodes map to issue-specific frames. In addition, instead of using pre-computed response variable, HIPTM also jointly estimates the ideological positions of voters on multiple interpretable dimensions.Item Framing the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.: A Comparative Analysis of Mainstream and Alternative Newspaper Coverage, 2007-2008(2015) Morganfield, Robbie Rene; Beasley, Maurine; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This case study examined through qualitative textual analysis how a group of mainstream and alternative publications framed their coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. during the historic 2008 U.S. presidential primary campaign when Wright was the pastor of Barack Obama, who emerged from the campaign to become the nation's first black president. Prior to the campaign's conclusion, Obama parted ways with Wright as a result of heightened news coverage of statements Wright had made about the nation's politics and treatment of black people. The study analyzes 216 news stories, commentaries and editorials produced by The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times and The Washington Post, which are mainstream daily newspapers, as well as the Chicago Defender, Washington Afro American and The Christian Century, which are alternative news publications. The analysis of their coverage of Wright was further explored by the use of two framing theories to determine what values might have influenced the ways journalists made sense out of Wright's religious speech and practices. Mark Silk's "Unsecular Media" theory posits that journalists typically rely on a set of religious values to frame their reports of religious issues and figures. Herbert Gans' "Enduring Values" theory posits that journalists typically rely on mainstream secular values to frame their reports of news subjects. The study's findings showed that on the whole the mainstream publications included in the sample produced coverage that strongly correlated with Gans' secular theory, which holds that subjects often become news worthy because they deviate from mainstream values associated with moderatism and ethnocentrism. The study's comparative analysis concluded that coverage of Wright produced by journalists working for alternative publications consistently reflected values identified by Silk, whose original study was only focused on mainstream publications. The present study's findings demonstrated that mainstream journalists rarely relied on religious sources to produce their reports while many of the writers for the alternative press were themselves religious officials or experts. The study points out ongoing challenges faced by the mainstream press in covering religion as well as the challenges religious figures face when they become the subject of coverage.Item Epistemological Authenticity in Science Classrooms(2008-11-20) Hutchison, Paul; Hammer, David; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A scientifically literate individual understands important characteristics of both the nature of scientific knowledge and the activity that produces it, scientific inquiry. (NRC, 1996; AAAS, 1993) In support of these goals the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) envisions science classrooms where students engage productively in activity that is similar to scientific inquiry. It is presumed that by engaging in this kind of activity students will come to deeper understandings of scientific inquiry and scientific knowledge. For this instructional approach to be successful it is necessary students not only engaging in activity that "looks" like science in important ways, but also view their own activity as authentically using knowledge for the purpose of making sense of natural phenomena. Notably the determination of what is authentic is problematic in a science classroom. There are two different possible arbiters "present" in a classroom, the students themselves and the discipline of science. And what is authentic to one might not be to the other. This work provides perspectives on classroom and teacher professional development implications of this view of science instruction. Chapter two articulates a conceptualization, epistemological authenticity, of the nature of student activity necessary to achieve these instructional goals. Such activity involves students engaging in scientific practices with the same purposes as scientists. Chapter three uses a case study of a science classroom to illustrate some of the features of student activity that provide evidence of more and less productive student expectations about the purposes of their own participation in a science class. It also discusses the role teacher instructional choices play in influencing how students perceive the purposes of classroom activity. Chapter four considers teacher professional development, specifically images of exemplary science classrooms in the Standards and a supplement to it (NRC, 2000). The depictions in those documents provide little insight into student activity, instead focusing on the pre-planned instructional sequence. This is poor preparation for teachers who must pay close attention to students. An alternative depiction is presented and contrasted with the images in the supplement to the Standards.Item An Epistemic Framing Analysis of Upper Level Physics Students' Use of Mathematics(2008-07-11) Bing, Thomas Joseph; Redish, Edward F.; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mathematics is central to a professional physicist's work and, by extension, to a physics student's studies. It provides a language for abstraction, definition, computation, and connection to physical reality. This power of mathematics in physics is also the source of many of the difficulties it presents students. Simply put, many different activities could all be described as "using math in physics". Expertise entails a complicated coordination of these various activities. This work examines the many different kinds of thinking that are all facets of the use of mathematics in physics. It uses an epistemological lens, one that looks at the type of explanation a student presently sees as appropriate, to analyze the mathematical thinking of upper level physics undergraduates. Sometimes a student will turn to a detailed calculation to produce or justify an answer. Other times a physical argument is explicitly connected to the mathematics at hand. Still other times quoting a definition is seen as sufficient, and so on. Local coherencies evolve in students' thought around these various types of mathematical justifications. We use the cognitive process of framing to model students' navigation of these various facets of math use in physics. We first demonstrate several common framings observed in our students' mathematical thought and give several examples of each. Armed with this analysis tool, we then give several examples of how this framing analysis can be used to address a research question. We consider what effects, if any, a powerful symbolic calculator has on students' thinking. We also consider how to characterize growing expertise among physics students. Framing offers a lens for analysis that is a natural fit for these sample research questions. To active physics education researchers, the framing analysis presented in this dissertation can provide a useful tool for addressing other research questions. To physics teachers, we present this analysis so that it may make them more explicitly aware of the various types of reasoning, and the dynamics among them, that students employ in our physics classes. This awareness will help us better hear students' arguments and respond appropriately.