Browsing by Author "Cooks, Eric"

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    Developing FAITHH: Methods to Develop a Faith-Based HIV Stigma-Reduction Intervention in the Rural South
    (Sage, 2018) Bradley, Erin L. P.; Sutton, Madeline Y.; Cooks, Eric; Washington-Ball, Brittney; Gaul, Zaneta; Gaskins, Susan; Payne-Foster, Pamela; Centers for Disease Control & Prevention - USA; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disproportionately affects Blacks/African Americans, particularly those residing in the southern United States. HIV-related stigma adversely affects strategies to successfully engage people in HIV education, prevention, and care. Interventions targeting stigma reduction are vital as additional tools to move toward improved outcomes with HIV prevention and care, consistent with national goals. Faith institutions in the South have been understudied as partners in HIV stigma-reduction efforts, and some at-risk, Black/African American communities are involved with southern faith institutions. We describe the collaborative effort with rural, southern faith leaders from various denominations to develop and pilot test Project Faith-based Anti-stigma Initiative Towards Healing HIV/AIDS (FAITHH), an HIV stigma-reduction intervention that built on strategies previously used with other nonrural, Black/African American faith communities. The eight-module intervention included educational materials, myth-busting exercises to increase accurate HIV knowledge, role-playing, activities to confront stigma, and opportunities to develop and practice delivering a sermon about HIV that included scripture-based content and guidance. Engaging faith leaders facilitated the successful tailoring of the intervention, and congregation members were willing participants in the research process in support of increased HIV awareness, prevention, and care.
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    Hostile Media Perception in the Age of Social Media: The Role of Social Identity
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2020) Cooks, Eric; Bissell, Kimberly; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    In an effect known as hostile media perception (HMP), a perceptual bias believed to be driven by social identity processes, partisans tend to view objective news media as hostile towards their position. As advances in digital technology increase online news use, the inherent features and communicative properties of these technologies can influence how we express ourselves online and how we perceive online news content. This dissertation examined the impact of identity-related heuristics within social media comment on the HMP. Taking a social identity approach, a series of experiments tested the effects of audience position on the issue of arming teachers and perceived comment identity on the HMP. Audience position had a significant effect across studies as supporters of arming teachers reported greater HMP; evidence points to religiosity as a potential moderator of this relationship. Results for comment identity were mixed. Outgroup comments generally led to increased HMP; however, the difference was not significant across studies. There was also evidence of associations between outgroup comments and affective responses of defensiveness and negative emotion. The findings of this study offer support for the self-categorization explanation of the HMP, while contributing methodologically to the study of the HMP in the context of mobile social media. Results are discussed in light of literature on social identity and biased perception of online news.