Bernabo, Laurena, and Jennifer Turchi. “So You Think You Can Parent: Dual-Screen Responses to Single Fathers Tropes in Single Parents.” Men & Masculinities.
Abstract: As the U.S. single-father population expands, we explore how fans of Single Parents (ABC, 2018-2020) responded to its three single-father characters, each of whom evoke a distinct trope. Viewers use Twitter to engage in television programs, and so their tweets provide insight into societal expectations surrounding evolving gendered parenting norms. Using qualitative content analysis, we analyze viewers’ tweets (N=834) and explore the ways viewers addressed these characters’ relationships with children, with their fellow single parents, and with romantic partners. Fans celebrated the new millennial approach to fatherhood and challenged the traditional trope of “inept father,” yet hoped the single fathers would re-couple and therefore cease to be single parents. We conclude that Single Parents fans embraced modern, expanding cultural norms for fathers and caregiving while ultimately demonstrating a preference for two-parent households.
Xuerong Lu (PhD Alum), Yen-I Lee (PhD Alum), and Yan Jin. (Forthcoming). “Understanding crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data: The role of celebrity and emotions in the virality of #MeToo social media activism messages.” Narratives in Public Communication (Eds: Fuyuan Shen and Heidi Hatfield Edwards). Routledge.
Abstract: This study, grounded in the perspective of public-centric crisis communication and narrative, conducted a computer-assisted content analysis, using the Latent Dirichlete Allocation (LDA), to identify what and how different crisis narratives about the #MeToo social movement made Twitter users spread the #MeToo campaign message quickly and widely. The results showed: First, celebrities made the issue of the #MeToo social movement become salient and evoked Twitter users to share and comment on celebrities’ posts. However, tweets with celebrity stories did not trigger Twitter users to create their own #MeToo stories to mutually share stories among each other. Second, when different crisis narratives are examined, blame-based narratives tweets motivated higher sharing while renewal-based narratives tweets led to both higher sharing and commenting. Third, gender stereotype was detected in tweets about the #MeToo social movement. Our findings suggest that, for social movement driven public communications aimed to increase public discourse and foster dialogues on Twitter, renewal and blame narratives, with celebrity figures highlighted, seem to be most effective in enhancing social issue engagement among users. Practically, this study provided guidance for organizations to engage in social media activism, telling compelling narratives and reaching a mutual beneficiary relationship between organizations and the public.
Abstract: This study investigates the types of humor embedded in funny scientific posts on social media and their effects on engagement. We mapped the landscape of such posts on Twitter and Instagram through content analysis of their message attributes. Regression analyses were then conducted to examine how different humor types, communicative functions, and visual attributes were associated with liking, retweeting, and commenting. On Twitter, wordplay and satire were found to be positively related to posts’ engagement levels, while anthropomorphic humor was negatively associated with the presence of comments. On Instagram, humor had no relation to engagement.
Abstract: The use of humor is increasingly advocated as a means of enhancing the effectiveness and visibility of science messages on social media. However, the influence of humorous scientific content on user engagement is empirically unknown. The contribution of this study is threefold. First, we conduct a content analysis of humorous scientific posts on Twitter and Instagram to shed light on the poster qualities (number of followers and number of accounts following), technical attributes (presence of emojis and visuals, and number of hashtags), and content characteristics (presence of message purposes and humor types). Second, using regression models, we examine how these poster and message attributes are associated with multi-dimensional engagement with the posts in the form of liking, retweeting, and commenting. And third, this study investigates subtypes of humor (e.g., satire, wordplay, and anthropomorphism) embedded in funny scientific messages and their effects on engagement. These findings have implications for science communication practices on social media.
Abstract: Due to prevalent misinformation and low coverage rates for flu vaccination, the role of health departments to address uncertainty and increase awareness of flu vaccination facts in their messaging became crucial. Utilizing Twitter data generated during the peak of the 2017-2018 flu season, this study suggests that people presented negative attitude toward flu vaccination when they perceived lower self-efficacy from CDC tweets and experienced anger when they perceived lower level of uncertainty in flu risks.
Abstract: Social movements are increasingly using social media, and Twitter in particular, to reach existing and new publics and advance their mission. While historically movements had to rely on traditional media to connect with such publics, via social media any user can share content, helping to connect the key players within the movement to new publics. The quality of highly shared content, however, has been under scrutiny. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, one of the most prolific and popular hashtag movements on twitter, is examined as a case study, in order to determine the role of content importance and emotion on the virality of the movement. Four aspects of importance were examined – Policy or Action, Group, Social Actor and Politics– as well as direction of sentiment. Findings suggest important tweets were more likely to be retweeted, where tweets associated with policy or action showing the strongest relationship with retweeting. Tweets with expressed emotion were more likely to be retweeted than neutral tweets. When tweets contained important content related to Policy or Action or a Group as well as sentiment, these tweets were most likely to be retweeted, revealing a method for social movements to increase effectiveness. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
