Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2024, Sociology

This thesis searches to find what the most influential factors on the development of political morals and motivations are for Generation Z students at Ohio University. In 2024, there are over forty states that have legislation in the process of becoming law, or already signed into law, that aim to restrict Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives or limit academic freedoms in some way. America is sorely lacking the research and literature on what is shaping the political mindsets of today's youths; literature that is essential in protecting academic freedom. This research study utilizes a survey and quantitative analysis to discover if students at Ohio University believe that going to college is making this generation more liberal or if outside factors such as climate change and social media are more influential than traditional education. The findings of this study indicate that study participants do not believe that traditional education is the most influential factor in the development of their political ideology. They instead look to current events, social media, and friends to shape their ideals. Further, this study proves that students at Ohio University value diversity in thought and the opportunity to have complex meaningful discussions within the classroom and therefore they are not supportive of academically limiting legislation such as Ohio's Senate Bill 83.

Committee: Dr. Paula Miller (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science; Sociology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

PHD, Kent State University, 2005, College of Fine and Professional Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

The present study deals with a continuum of presence of ideology in the music curriculum in Croatia before and after its independence. Music curriculum is viewed as a part of "social totality" and a reflection of complex patterns of political and economic processes. Special attention is given to music as an ideological category. The goal of the research is to examine how and why music curricula reflects the prevailing ideology. The focus of the interest is the relationship between political implications in music and specific aspects of socio-historical reality in Croatia prior to and after its independence. The study demonstrates the political role of music in defusing and eliminating ethnic conflicts and helping the promotion of national identity. In order to understand the relationship between music and decisions and events seemingly outside of the realm of music, the study deals with non-musical aspects such as anthropological perspectives on the war in Croatia, definitions of ideology, and cultural and educational policies. Such an approach is necessary in order to understand the relationship between music and society. A view of ideology in connection with music is presented on two levels: one is the change in the content and orientation of the music curriculum after Croatian independence, and the other is formation of Croatian music identity as an ideological category. The study traces the shift of ideology from the period when the role of music was to help produce unity among the different ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia, to the recent tendency of national rhetoric and the promotion of national music expressions. The study analyzes and compares the actions of pressure groups in exerting influence over the curricula and music promoted by the media in the periods prior to and after Croatian independence. Changes in the content of the music curricula in Croatia in the 1990s reflect the socio-political changes in the country. Emphasis on the socialist collectiv (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kazadi wa Mukuna (Advisor) Subjects:

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

African Americans have always had diverse opinions about different facets of American life, including how to solve America's problems. Diversity of ideology and solutions has persisted in the decades since the Civil Rights Era. Many Blacks report perceiving and experiencing racial discrimination in a variety of areas, including housing, employment, education and criminal justice system sentencing. Conversely, there is a notable segment of the African American community who are satisfied because they do not perceive or experience racial discrimination in America and these areas. However, there is a dearth of research into what is contributing to these divergent views within this community. This dissertation addresses this gap by assessing whether political ideology – particularly political conservatism -- predicts divergent perceptions and experiences related to African American experiences in America, broadly speaking, and the criminal justice system specifically. Given prior research, I expect to find that political ideology will be a significant predictor across outcomes, with Black conservatives holding more favorable views of America, race relations and the criminal justice system. Gender, age, income and education will be used as control variables because they can also predict experiences and perceptions on these topics. Results support both hypotheses. Ideology was a robust predictor of experiences and perceptions regarding America, race relations and the criminal justice system. The robustness remained strong even when controlling gender, age, income, and education. The most important implication is that ideology trumps race. Consequently, Blacks should be portrayed as an ideologically diverse group with a wide range of views on those three areas. The second implication is that Black conservatives resemble other conservative Americans. This is particularly true of holding favorable perceptions in those three areas. These more favorable perceptions (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Wright Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jay Kennedy Ph.D. (Committee Member); Francis Cullen Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sandra Browning Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

MFA, Kent State University, 2021, College of Communication and Information / School of Visual Communication Design

The data gathered through this study yields some insight into the psychographic and demographic of consumers who are likely to engage with visual messaging that leans toward a specific ideological view. Using perceptions of economy, religion, and culture, a series of promotions were created with distinct objectives in mind. Reviewing the use of political propaganda during World War I and memetic warfare in social media showed the impact short-form displays can have on persuading the masses. Ethnographic research gathered during a 2019 Trump event in Los Angeles, California and a pro-choice event in Columbus, Ohio provided many examples of how visual symbols correlate to public political expression. Case studies on the tonality and appeal of the branding for MyPillow and Purple demonstrated the consistency of corporate communication to conservative or liberal audiences. This research informed the way symbols were utilized in creating a series of visuals that promoted postage stamps and peanut butter from a political context. Two studies conducted via Facebook and Qualtrics measured manners of engagement with the branded content. Public engagement with promotional messages in areas of extreme political polarity was observed through Facebook's advertising manager. A survey completed by 135 students at Kent State University yielded a nuanced understanding of consumer choice through a brand comparison study. By investigating the relationship between political frameworks and visual identities, we began to understand how it informs consumer choice and brand loyalty.

Committee: Ken Visocky O'Grady (Advisor); Stephanie Smith (Committee Member); Jessica Barness (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Cultural Anthropology; Demographics; Design; Mass Media; Social Structure

Bachelor of Arts, Ohio University, 2021, Political Science

This thesis will discuss the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in its entirety, including the ideological battles and debates that have surrounded this legislation and the future actions that may be taken. In this thesis, I will examine whether or not political ideologies and special interests influenced the ACA in every step of its progression. From pre-passage agenda-setting to post-passage defense in the legislative and judicial branches, this policy history on the ACA provides the audience with an interesting and insightful account of this precedent-setting, landmark piece of healthcare legislation.

Committee: Lysa Burnier (Advisor) Subjects: Health Care; Political Science; Public Policy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Political Science

There are vast literatures in multiple subfields of political science pertaining to the ways in which democratic citizens think about politics. There are still more literatures pertaining to the ways in which these thoughts about politics do or do not translate into political actions. This dissertation makes three novel contributions spanning these themes. The first is purely theoretical, applying the principles of Robert Brandom's inferentialist philosophy of semantics to the concept of ideological belief systems to argue for changes to the way we think about and measure the organization of political beliefs in the mass public. Specifically, it argues that scholars of ideology should take seriously the relationships democratic citizens perceive between attitudes without strong assumptions regarding how they ought to go together based on major party conflict. The second examines the articulation of these ideological belief systems among political pundits, who through the combination of lacking of formal political power but being professionally involved in politics are arguably the most ideological class of democratic citizen. After sampling political pundits on Twitter and scaling them in two-dimensional preference space, I examine patterns in belief system polarization as the ability to correctly recover a pundit's scaled preferences based on the text contained in their tweets. Finally, the third chapter examines floating policy voters, who change their presidential voting behavior from one election to the next on the basis of policy issues they consider important to their vote, during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While the overall number voters who could conceivably cast floating policy votes was relatively small, these voters were significantly more likely than others to either vote for a different major party candidate than they did in 2012 or not vote at all.

Committee: William Minozzi (Committee Co-Chair); Michael Neblo (Committee Co-Chair); Vladimir Kogan (Committee Member); Seth Masket (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Business: Business Administration

Effective self-control often requires individuals to focus attention in a way that suppresses the influence of interfering information (i.e., inhibition) as well as incorporates the influence of novel insights (i.e., updating). Accordingly, self-control is construed as an adaptive executive function critical to foundational regulatory processes that hold direct import for consumer behavior. Yet this research will demonstrate that the cognitive processes which facilitate self-control can undermine performance on tasks that require updating the means that facilitate the initial self-control success. In doing so, this research will rely heavily on existing models of working memory, suggesting that individuals differentially excel at tasks of distinct working memory processes (i.e., inhibition and updating). Moreover, this effect is hypothesized to be rooted in different levels of cognitive flexibility, such that individuals who are cognitively rigid excel at inhibition, and individuals who are cognitively flexible excel at updating. This work will provide a framework by which to explore alternative cognitive costs elicited from the processes that promote self-control success and provide practical implications for the areas of self-regulation and consumer behavior, including diet and weight loss management, delayed gratification, impulse purchasing, and habit modification.

Committee: Joshua Clarkson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Chung-Yiu Peter Chiu Ph.D. (Committee Member); Frank Kardes Ph.D. (Committee Member); Noah Van Bergen Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Marketing

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1976, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, Sociology

Handgun ownership in the U.S. is associated with both risks and benefits with some research showing an increased risk of accidental death and suicide (Hemenway 2011) and other studies finding that crime and victimization reductions associated with handgun ownership are significant (Kleck 1988: Kleck 2004; Kleck & Gertz 2005). However, little of this research addresses a fundamental question about handgun ownership: Why do some people choose to buy handguns while most in the U.S. do not? Lack of knowledge about what motivates handgun ownership precludes an educated national discussion about gun ownership, gun control, and gun violence. Previous research on the motivations for handgun ownership has been hindered by a paucity of data, inconsistent measures of ownership, and consideration of only a limited number of possible motivating factors at one time. In the present study, I use multiple waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescence to Adult Health (ADD Health) to examine adolescent and adult correlates of handgun ownership in a nationally-representative sample of young adults. The motivations for gun ownership outlined in the prior literature include socialization (O'Connor & Lizotte 1979; Cao et al 1997), masculinity (Stroud 2012), victimization and fear of crime, (DeFronzo 1979; Hill et al 1985; Kleck et al. 2011; Turner et al 2015; Walllace 2015), political ideology (Cook and Ludwig 1997; Hepburn et al. 2007), and societal insecurities (Jiobu & Curry 2001l; Carlson 2015). Using logistic regression and multinomial logistic regression, I examine all of these correlates simultaneously in order to better understand handgun owners and the differences between “typical” handgun owners (i.e., those owning 1-2 handguns) and atypical owners (i.e. those owning 3 or more handguns). The findings showed that socialization, victimization, conservatism, and societal insecurity increase the likelihood of handgun ownership but none of the focal correlates differe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephen Demuth (Advisor); Raymond Swisher (Committee Member); Jorge Chavez (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2014, Antioch Seattle: Clinical Psychology

One hundred percent of evidence-supported psychotherapy treatments for trauma related disorders involve the therapist learning from and retaining fidelity to a treatment manual. Through a hermeneutic qualitative textual interpretation of three widely utilized evidence-supported trauma treatment manuals, I identified themes that suggested a particular constitution of the contemporary way of being—a traumatized self—and how this traumatized self comes to light through psychotherapeutic practice as described by the manuals. The manuals included: 1) a trauma focused cognitive-behavioral therapy for children; 2) an eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy for adults; and, 3) an early intervention and debriefing therapy series for post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma related problems of military service members. Through the interpretation, I conceptualized trauma as a way of human being in contemporary culture, and in particular, as an unacknowledged way of expressing enactments of dissociated, unformulated, or unarticulated political arrangements and events. I identified and interpreted the following shared themes and exemplars across the three manuals: mind-brain as protector and the political use of cognitivist ideology; the healed trauma survivor as functional worker; trauma as universal and culture-free; and, indoctrination into a social void of scientistic managed care. I discussed how trauma treatment manuals instantiate how to be human in contemporary society through compliance with managed care and the embodiment of scientistic and cognitivist ideology. I then discussed how the way of being that contemporary society creates and idealizes is one in which people easily assume the identity of trauma survivor: an enterprising, functional and fiercely individual member of a warrior cult. In the warrior cult society, to think or talk about social causes and public solutions to daily political suffering is thought of as either non-germane or dang (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Philip Cushman PhD (Committee Chair); Jennifer Tolleson PhD (Committee Member); Lynne Layton PhD, PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Therapy; Mental Health; Psychology; Psychotherapy; Therapy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Political Science

Spatial conceptualizations of ideology dominate the political science literature. In this dissertation, I challenge the comprehensiveness of such conceptualizations, and the standard self-placement measure associated with them, by analyzing the social identity components of ideological identification. My theoretical motivation for this analysis is Social Identity Theory (SIT), which posits that individuals often view valued social groups as extensions of self-identity, which in turn motivate group-based thought and action. SIT is highly influential within the social science literature, and it has become increasingly influential in political science. Yet scholars have never examined the potential for ideological social identity and what effects it might have on political attitudes and behavior, by itself and in combination with other politically-relevant social identities. In this dissertation, I use two original surveys and data from the 1984-2008 American National Election Studies (ANES) to study the credibility and empirical value of a social identity approach to ideological identification. My analysis indicates that ideological social identity (ISI) represents a distinct dimension of ideological identification not adequately captured by the standard ideological self-placement measure. In the mass public, and particularly among party elites, feelings of psychological attachment to an ideological in-group are common today and they have become increasingly common over the past quarter-century. For approximately one-quarter of the mass public, and one-third of party elites, ideological social identity even exceeds the strength of partisan social identity. What is more, ISI is somewhat stronger among conservatives and it clearly becomes stronger in response to electoral competition. Most importantly, ideological social identity influences a variety of important political attitudes and behaviors. ISI significantly impacts evaluations of political in-groups and out-gr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kathleen McGraw PhD (Committee Chair); Herbert Weisberg PhD (Committee Member); Paul Allen Beck PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Communication

This study examined the effects of mortality salience on the opinions and preferences of people with different religious or philosophical worldviews. Specifically, participants completed a religious fundamentalist scale, a post-materialist index, and a cultural creativity index. Each participant was then randomly asked to think about the concept of death or a control topic. Finally, participants were asked to provide their opinions on a number of topics regarding prayer efficacy, media preference, and risk assessment. This study found supporting evidence that reminders of one's mortality tend to exaggerate any distrust of modern medicine held by religious fundamentalists, even if those reminders are not related to the medical issue at hand. It also provided some evidence that similar concerns held by post-materialists may be generally exaggerated under similar conditions. In addition, it was hypothesized that participants would consider potentially risky driving behaviors to be less dangerous when mortality was salient. This study found supporting evidence that religious fundamentalists were less concerned about the risks of driving with multiple passengers when mortality was salient. If assessments of other, riskier behaviors (such as texting while driving) mirror these results, mortality salience and religious perspective must be considered when attempting to discourage such behavior. It was also hypothesized that participants in the mortality salient group would prefer to get their news from sources that shared their point of view. However, no evidence was found to support this hypothesis. In fact, politically liberal participants were less likely to prefer liberal news sources when mortality was made salient. Since so many news stories and television shows deal with issues of mortality, media selection may depend in part on a combination of philosophical perspectives and the content of the news.

Committee: Gerald Kosicki PhD (Advisor); Michael McCluskey PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Political Science; Psychology; Religion; Social Psychology; Sociology; Spirituality

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Political Science

There is very little empirical research completed on the connection of rap music to ideology. Similarly, extensive research on rap and gender or Black Nationalist ideology and gender is also lacking. Research on rap music focuses on various aspects of rap qualitatively and quantitatively. These studies have included topics as wide as rap as a form of information exchange, the psychological effects of rap on perceptions of women, and the effects of rap on propensity for violent behavior. However, the quantitative research on the affects of rap on political attitude formation or acceptance is very limited.This dissertation broadens the current research by considering the impact of political rap music on the acceptance and support of Black Nationalist ideology. This dissertation examines if political rap has an impact on the support of Black Nationalism while exploring the differences of this acceptance between gender and other demographic characteristics. This study utilizes a multi-method approach combining experimental research and survey data. Using data from the 1993-1994 National Black Politics Study, the findings demonstrate a relationship between exposure to rap and support of Black Nationalist ideology. Specifically, these results display that those who listen to rap have a higher significant relationship with Black Nationalist than those who do not listen to rap. Overall, there exist relationships between support of Black Nationalist sentiment age, listening to rap, and gender. Experiments demonstrate causal relationships between political rap music and the formation of Black Nationalist attitudes. Specifically, Chapter Four details that listening to political rap lead to increased support of Black Nationalism compared to listening to pop music, mainstream rap or listening to no music at all. The study also includes content analysis that illustrates specific nationalist messages that displayed in political rap lyrics. This research expands the knowledge of p (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. William E. Nelson, Jr PhD (Committee Chair); Dr. Harwood McClerking PhD (Committee Member); Dr. Thomas E. Nelson PhD (Committee Member); Dr. Wendy G. Smooth PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Behaviorial Sciences; Experiments; Mass Media; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Music; Political Science; Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Communication

There are disagreement and varied results in the research literature when it comes to the relationship between political ideology and support for censorship. In order to better understand how people's self-identification as more liberal or conservative relates to their opinions about expression rights issues, I draw on theory that explains political ideology in terms of ideas about the family. I begin by proposing a model wherein family values and family communication patterns contribute to ideological self-identification, and all three concepts contribute to support for censorship. I then provide detailed definitions of the support for censorship and political ideology concepts. I test the model using data from three samples, collected at different times, using different operationalizations of the concepts of interest. Cluster analysis of family variables and political ideology indicates two groups of respondents that replicate across data sets. Members of the first group come from families with relatively greater conversation orientation in their communication, they also have relatively nurturant family values, are relatively liberal, and support censorship relatively less. Members of the second group come from families with relatively greater conformity orientation in their communication, they also have relatively strict family values, are relatively conservative, and support censorship relatively more. Consistent with the proposed model, individuals who are more strict in terms of their family values tend to be more conservative and support censorship more, whereas individuals who are more nuturant in their family values tend to be more liberal and support censorship less. Additionally, those who come from families where communication is relatively more conformity oriented tend to be relatively more conservative as well. However, family communication was not directly related to support for censorship. Political ideology mediates the relationship between fa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrew Hayes PhD (Advisor); Carroll Glynn PhD (Committee Member); Gerald Kosicki PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Families and Family Life; Journalism; Mass Media; Political Science; Social Psychology