Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 Overexposed: How a Media Market's Total Volume of Political Information Affects the Persuasive Power of Campaign Ads(2018) Turitto, Candace; Hanmer, Michael; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The popularity of televised political advertising has continued expanding over recent years, and now frequently attracts candidates for lower-level offices such as the House of Representatives, and even State Senate or Representative. Among its effects, this is leading to targeted voters being increasingly inundated with political solicitations in the weeks before an election. Political science has been creative, but limited, in overcoming many of the challenges presented in the field of media effects as it has endeavored to understand the basic effects generated by political media campaigns. One dearth of knowledge is a proper understanding of how varying levels of surrounding political volume might impact voter behavior and candidate evaluations. To that end, this research aims to uncover evidence of wider media market effects on the persuasive power of campaign ads. By merging voter opinion surveys with observed campaign media activity leading up to the 2014 midterms, and fielding a first-of-its-kind laboratory experiment which manipulates the amount of political information viewed, I find evidence that increasing volume and diversity of the surrounding political information in a media market significantly reduces the persuasive power of political ads. As campaigns spend more money on television advertising, these results suggest the need for a serious shift in how campaigns target and speak to voters in crowded market environments, expanding their view of relevant competition from the activity of their electoral opponent to all political actors in the greater media market. Moreover, these results suggest that some congressional candidates may need to “own” large majorities of their media market’s total political advertising to have any hope of counteracting these overexposure effects. This research also has major implications for how academics study campaign media effects, suggesting that results from isolated examinations of individual candidates or contests may be distorting our predictions of expected persuasive lift on broadcast television.Item Screening Diversity: Women & Work in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture(2016) Brunner, Laura; Bolles, A. Lynn; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti-racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift.Item Tuning Into the Gospel: How the Growth of Sports Television Popularized Public Prayer Among Athletes(2012) Goldenbach, Alan M.; Hanson, Christopher; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Whether the game is played among friends in a community park or in front of tens of thousands inside a packed stadium with millions more watching on television worldwide, prayer has become an omnipresent tool for athletes of all ages and skill levels. No longer do players invoke their spirituality in private or among themselves off the field; they do it in front of whoever is watching. While the ties between religion and sports date to ancient times, the public display of their union has become a phenomenon in the current generation. This book proposal will trace how public prayer among athletes has evolved. It will ultimately show that the boon of sports television programming over that span has given athletes a platform to use as a pulpit, while also exposing viewers to content they had not previously received through other mass media.Item Media Influences Explored: What High School Students Say About the Power of Newspapers, Television and Magazines(2005-11-28) Henry, Tamara Maxine; McAdams, Katharine C.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A body of theoretical works on media, their effect and impact shows that the ubiquitous nature of media messages tinges the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of media consumers (Katz and Blumler 1974; Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur 1976; Shoemaker and Reese 1991; and, Gerbner 1995). To investigate high school students' awareness of media, a survey of 355 Florida and Pennsylvania students was conducted during the 2004-2005 school year. Focus groups in both states in May and June 2005 followed up on survey responses. Both the survey and the focus groups sought to answer a central research question: How cognizant are high school students of media influences on various aspects of their lives, particularly the impact of newspapers, television and magazines? Today's youth are multi-billion dollar consumers, so the goal of the research project was to understand how well students identify media messages, comprehend the purposes and sources of the messages, recognize the strategies of media to win conformity to their messages and appreciate why media suggest certain actions, beliefs and behaviors. This type of understanding is popularly known as "media literacy," a relatively new, fast-developing field of study. Past media surveys and studies typically have focused on children and students' exposure to and use of media, rather than on media literacy. The dissertation's cogent theme is that students need a sophisticated knowledge of how media function in society, a grasp of media's disparate languages and the skills to successfully navigate their terrain. Data showed, however, that these high school students do appear to have an elementary understanding of the power of the media with the majority denying media's influence in their choice of clothing, snacks and beverages or their opinions about such things as what makes teens popular or cool. These students do acknowledge media's influence with intangible things like the issues that they consider important. In conclusion, the study found unequal effects of media on different racial and ethnic groups and suggests that further research is needed to develop specific ways to empower students to understand, enjoy and challenge the media, while avoiding unpropitious influences.Item Televising the Space Age: A Descriptive Chronology of CBS News Special Coverage of Space Exploration From 1957 to 2003(2005-05-04) Hogan, Alfred Robert; Gomery, Douglas; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the liftoff of the Space Age with the Earth-orbital beeps of Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, through the videotaped tragedy of space shuttle Columbia's reentry disintegration on 1 February 2003 and its aftermath, critically acclaimed CBS News televised well more than 500 hours of special events, documentary, and public affairs broadcasts dealing with human and robotic space exploration. Much of that was memorably anchored by Walter Cronkite and produced by Robert J. Wussler. This research synthesizes widely scattered data, much of it internal and/or unpublished, to partially document the fluctuating patterns, quantities, participants, sponsors, and other key details of that historic, innovative, riveting coverage.Item A Costume Design for Bill Irwin's "Scapin"(2004-08-12) Sivigny, Debra Kim; Huang, Helen Q; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this thesis is to document and analyze the process of the costume design for Bill Irwin's SCAPIN as it was produced at the University of Maryland's Department of Theatre in November of 2003. The role of the costume designer is to support the conceptual vision of a director alongside a design and production team. Presented in Chapter 1 of the thesis contains information regarding the three creators: Moliere, Bill Irwin, and Mark O'Donnell, pertaining to the text and production of SCAPIN. Chapter 2 discusses the visual research for the production, in conjunction with scenic and lighting designers. Chapter 3 covers the execution of the design through each step of its realization. Chapter 4 completes the thesis with an analysis of the process and production in regards to the costume design. The appendices document the major visual sources used and illustrate the phases of the design.