Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item ONLINE AND REAL LIFE COMMUNITIES OF LESBIAN, GAY, AND BISEXUAL PEOPLE: INTERNALIZED HOMONEGATIVITY, LIFE SATISFACTION, AND SEXUAL RISK TAKING(2019) Welch, James Christopher; Shin, Richard Q; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous research has demonstrated potential benefits provided to LGB people through affiliation with a larger LGB community (Sheets & Mohr, 2009; Halpin & Allen, 2004; Davidson et al., 2017). However, LGB people living in rural areas or who otherwise lack access to LGB communities may have difficulty accessing these benefits (De La Cruz, 2018; Oswald & Culton, 2003; Bachmann & Simon, 2014). With the advent of the digital age, humans are able to interact in new, virtual spaces that circumvent many of the difficulties associated with gathering in real-world spaces (boyd & Ellison, 2008). However, the ways humans are able to interact in virtual, online spaces remains relatively understudied. This study sought to explore potential similarities of benefits provided by real life and online communities as they relate to internalized homonegativity and life satisfaction, and to explore how sexual risk taking may be associated with affiliation with online communities in an internet recruited sample of LGB people. LGB persons’ affiliations with online communities of LGB people were not significantly related to sexual risk taking, life satisfaction, or internalized homonegativity. Affiliation with real life LGB community was significantly related to only life satisfaction. Life satisfaction was significantly related to sexual risk taking. Online and real life LGB community affiliation were significantly correlated. Limitations, implications, and future directions are discussed.Item Reclaiming Black Beledi: Race, Wellness, And Online Community(2015) Velazquez, Maria Inez; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I analyze love, affect, and embodiment online. I specifically focus on belly dance because of its history as a kind of conscious and public laboring on the self. By situating belly dance as an imperial legacy of U.S. military engagement in the Middle East, I unveil its critical utility to bloggers’ discussion of wellness, self-care, and the affective consequences of living within imperialist and racist societies. I conclude by introducing the concept of a digital praxis of love, paying particular attention to digital black feminisms, wellness blogging, and dance. This project draws its exegesis from current scholarship on corporeal, physical feminisms, and digital feminisms in order to point towards a definition of praxis online as incorporating critical reflection, critical action, and everyday public life. This exploratory dissertation incorporates a variety of methodologies in order to investigate the movement of wellness, self-care, and critique as these concepts move through overlapping knowledge worlds, spaces, and sites of consumption. By doing so, this dissertation highlights the connections between conversations about wellness and conversations about politics. Analyzing these connections offers an important intervention in wellness studies, the digital humanities, and American studies by illustrating the role wellness (and its digital objects) plays in performing citizenship, group membership, and social justice activism.Item Building online communities after crises: Two case studies(2014) Janoske, Melissa; Liu, Brooke F; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Building community in a crisis situation offers individuals a chance to not just survive, but potentially thrive through a disaster. Communities offer a unique benefit in a crisis by expanding beyond the geographic to include virtual spaces, particularly when other media are not available for survivors. This project applies theoretical frameworks from both complexity theory and the community of practice model to explore how individuals form online communities after crises, how those communities impact crisis recovery, and how the model can be used to understand communities' crisis communication. This project used a qualitative case study method, including content analysis of two communities that formed online after two crises, and interviews with nine members, including the founder, of one of the communities. The first case is the Jersey Shore Hurricane News Facebook page, formed during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. The second case looks at a hashtag-based (#batman and #shooting) community on Twitter after the shooting at a Colorado movie theater in July 2012. The results show that instead of a typical one-to-many communication model and organizational focus, utilizing a community of practice allows for both a one-to-one model and a consequent focus on affected individuals. The community of practice model accommodates findings which suggest that location is important in building community, a need for adapting information needs to the community, and the acceptance of multiple relationship types. A new, alternate final dimension of communities of practice, continuation, is suggested and exemplified. This project argues for developing these online communities prior to a crisis. There are also specific suggestions for tools within technology that would be most useful to crisis-based communities of practice, and both benefits and drawbacks to the platforms studied. Practically, social media platform designers need to spend time thinking through how people connect during a crisis, and to make it easier for them to get the information they need quickly. In showcasing how to integrate social media, crisis communication, and a community-based model, this dissertation offers theoretical and practical suggestions for altering and improving current understandings of the best way to aid individual crisis response and recovery.Item The Role of Social Presence in Online Communities(2006-07-11) Caples, Robert Kelly; Druin, Allison; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Online learning is emerging as a solution for professional staff development in public school systems that are looking for ways to improve the capacity of their teaching staffs. As teachers begin to take more online courses as a way of improving their skills, we must continue to study the dynamics of teaching and learning in an online environment. To that end, there is a need to examine the various factors that affect online courses and professional staff development for teachers. This dissertation explores the role of social presence in an online professional development course for teachers. It focuses on the threaded discussion of 26 teachers enrolled in an online course and compares their self-reported online behaviors with the written discussion threads. The data were analyzed based on a modified version of Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2001) indicators of social presence. In addition, this research focused on the written responses of the online moderators to understand the relationship between their responses and the ones provided by the teachers as online community members. Content analysis of the discussion threads revealed that there was a range of social presence in the textual responses of the community members. The results of the study showed that there are levels of social presence in the written communication of the online community. In this research the levels of social presence appeared to be affected by outside influences such as the governing policy of the community itself and the more expansive district-wide policy of the school system. The results also suggested that moderator behaviors in this research had an effect on the policy governing the members of the online community. These results confirm previous research findings that suggest the purpose of the community and the types of questions used in asynchronous discussions can have an effect on the levels of social presence within the online community.