Culverhouse School of Accountancy

Permanent URI for this community

https://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/25

Browse

Browsing Culverhouse School of Accountancy by Subject "Communication"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Clicking and sharing health risk information on social media: how perception and emotion affect behavioral intentions
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Zhang, Xueying; Zhou, Shuhua; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    The dissemination of health risk information is a topic of key importance in health communication. With an explosion of information, health risk messages on social media need to elicit users’ intention to click and to forward to be useful. This study aimed to examine how fear appeal message and individual differences combined to drive users’ intentions to click and share health risk messages on Social Networking Sites (SNSs). Two experiments were conducted online to test the predictors of intentions to click and share respectively, with participants recruited from Mturk. The results suggested that (1) fear appeal message influenced intentions to click and share in a different way than the risk related perceptions did; (2) cognitive elaborations of the risk played a more important role in motivating click and share; (3) individual’s characteristics predicted the intentions to click and share significantly; (4) information processing styles moderated the influence of efficacy perception’s influence on intention to share and (5) the intention to follow the message significantly predicted intention to share. The theoretical and practical implications for health risk message design were discussed.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Cowboys, fathers, and everyone else: examining race in the walking dead through the myths of white masculinity
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Pressnell, Levi Addison; Bennett, Beth Susan; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    This study offers an analysis of three different series within The Walking Dead franchise: the comics, the AMC television series, and Telltale’s video games. The critical and commercial popularity of all three make them particularly worthy of study, and the franchise’s focus on characters invites a rhetorical study based on mythic figures across these three different media forms. While critical comparisons have been made either between the comics and the television series or between the comics and Telltale’s video game series, a comprehensive look at the series across all three media has so far escaped critical attention. The study explores characters in The Walking Dead media primarily through two dominant myths of White masculinity: the cowboy with his rugged individualism and the good patriarch with his care for his family. These mythic figures shift across different media, finding incarnations in many different characters and often revealing opposing perspectives that cannot find representation within the myths themselves. Critical analysis reveals the emergence of a general trend among the three series, one of increasing critique and eventual rejection of these myths of White masculinity. Alongside this trend, in character development, analysis across the three media forms suggests that increased interactivity, as seen in the video game franchise, encourages consumers to respond more directly to the myths on display. This factor was especially evident in confronting the racism that was directed at the protagonist of the first game, Lee Everett. Suggestions for future studies include how to adapt other pop culture franchises across different media, the expansion of interactivity with television viewing and second-screen services, and the continued evolution of zombie media.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A theory-centered model of debate assessment: the rhetorical judging paradigm
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Corbit, Ken W.; Bennett, Beth Susan; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    This study investigated collegiate debate and the ways in which it is judged. Debate has long been considered an academic process used to advance argumentation theory and critical thinking skills in its participants. However, over the last half-century, many scholars have determined that, as it is practiced, has become exclusionary to those outside of the debate community and no longer provides educational benefit (Guerin et al., 2005). A review of scholarship on the historical background of argumentation, rhetorical theory and collegiate debate over the last century, provides a foundation for examining extant debate judging paradigms and their impact on participant behavior. Specifically, the 2014 CEDA National Championship final round was used as a case study to confirm two problems discovered within the review of literature: the impact of shifting judging paradigms on competition and the dominance of gamesmanship. The case study revealed how the judging paradigms have a direct effect on the way competitors prepare for the round. In addition, the case study illustrated how feedback reinforced technical debate, jargon, spreading, and speed. Through synthesis of traditional rhetorical concepts, a new judging model was developed, the rhetorical judging paradigm (RJP), and was discussed as a tool for use in a debate round. Once the model was created, it was used to examine the 2014 CEDA National Championship round. This was done to show how the theory could positively impact the debate community. The primary conclusion of the study is that the RJP be applied more broadly and researched in a quantitative methodology.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Understanding organization environmental sustainability messages on social media and testing the communication effectiveness
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Shin, Sumin; Ki, Eyun-Jung; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Organizations have communicated about their environmental protection activities with publics via various media channels. As social media have become popular in the past decade, organizations have begun to communicate about environmental issues using these channels. This dissertation aims to understand the current nature of organizations’ sustainability messages on social media and to test the effects of the messages on audiences’ attitude, belief, and behavioral intention. To achieve the purposes of the study, three series of studies were conducted. Study 1 analyzed the green message content of for-profit and nonprofit organizations on a popular social media platform, Twitter. Study 2 used attribution theory to examine how the substantiation and specificity of green messages influence receivers’ attribution and attributional processes. Using a scenario of green messages on Twitter and Facebook, Study 3 investigated the effects of message substantiation and specificity on affective and cognitive responses (attitudes toward message and organization, credibility of both the message and organization, and perceived organizational green image) and the effects of the affective and cognitive responses on green behavioral intentions (intention to engage in the green campaign and intention to purchase the organization’s green product) and social media reaction intentions toward the green message (like, share, and comment intention). The results showed that associative and vague messages were more prevalent than substantive and specific messages on Twitter. In particular, for-profits’ messages tended to be substantive and specific, while nonprofits’ messages were generally associative and vague. For for-profit organizations, messages about environmental facts led to more likes, shares, and comments than other green message orientations. Furthermore, a specific message increased perceived intrinsic motivation and decreased perceived extrinsic motivation of the organizational environmental communication. The perceived intrinsic motivation was positively and the perceived extrinsic motivation was negatively associated with message attitude, organization attitude, message credibility, organization credibility, and green image. The results of this study attest that substantive and specific messages positively drove the affective and cognitive responses which positively predicted green behavioral intentions and social media reaction intentions.