Surviving Survivor: A Content Analysis of Antisocial Behavior and Its Context in a Popular Reality Television Show

The scope and nature of reality television has changed since researchers last conducted a content analysis of the antisocial behavior for this type of programming. This study examines the content of seven seasons of Survivor, one of America's longest running reality television programs, to determine the types, frequency, and context of antisocial behavior presented in the series as well as the possible effects of the program on longtime viewers using social learning and cultivation theories. In the 76.4 hours of programming analyzed for this study, 4,207 antisocial acts were documented in the coding database. Indirect aggression and verbal aggression were found to be the most frequently occurring types of antisocial behavior. The number (4,207) and the rate (45.7 acts per hour) of antisocial acts in the seven seasons of Survivor analyzed in this study is higher than the findings of a previous study of antisocial behavior in reality-based television conducted in 1997. This study clearly demonstrates that longtime viewers of Survivor get a higher dose of antisocial behavior than did regular viewers of news programming and other reality-based programs that aired slightly more than 10 years ago.     

A Comparative Content Analysis of Anti- and Prosocial Rap Lyrical Themes Found on Traditional and New Media Outlets

Previous studies investigated the content of rap music within the context of traditional media and found that rap often contains antisocial themes associated with negative effects. The current content analysis investigates whether rap’s lyrical themes consumed and shared online are more diverse and less anti-social than rap aired on traditional outlets. The analysis revealed that songs shared on Facebook were less antisocial and more prosocial than the songs that made the Billboard charts. Additionally, online lyrical themes were more diverse than traditionally distributed lyrics. Rap consumption and sharing behaviors will be discussed in light of the theory of selective exposure     

Taboo or Not Taboo? That is the Question: Offensive Language on Prime-Time Broadcast and Cable Programming

This investigation of offensive language on prime-time broadcast and cable programs found that 9 out of 10 programs contained at least one incident of profanity, and viewers were exposed to 12.58 cuss words per hour in 2005. Viewers of broadcast programs were exposed to slightly less than 10 objectionable words per-hour compared to 15 words-per-hour on cable programs.     

Advocating for controversial issues: The effect of activism on compliance‐gaining strategy likelihood of use

Previous research has demonstrated that compliance‐gaining strategies can he arrayed on an unidimensional continuum, anchored by positive, pro‐social strategies and negative, antisocial strategies (Hunter & Boster, 1987; Rolojf & Barnicott, 1978, 1979). Individual differences, including argumentativeness and verbal aggression (Boster & Levine, 1988), have been shown to affect one's ethical threshold. This ethical threshold is consistent with a Guttman simplex and determines both how many, as well as how antisocial, compliance‐gaining strategies individuals may consider using. Activists, who are highly involved and committed to their cause and who tend to be less verbally aggressive and more argumentative than the general public (Campo, 1999), are likely to have a lower threshold and to use more strategies. This study examines to what extent activism predicts one's ethical threshold, when controlling for the known effects of argumentativeness, verbal aggressiveness, and sex. Participants (N = 454) at two separate universities completed a repeated measures questionnaire that asked them to indicate their likelihood of use of 25 separate compliance‐gaining strategies. Based on respondents’ likelihood of use of these 25 strategies, the data were consistent with a Guttman simplex. A multiple regression model was tested, and indicated that one's ethical threshold is directly predicted by level of activism and verbal aggressiveness. Sex and argumentativeness were not found to be significant predictors in this revised model. In addition, activists used more strategies than non‐activists. Implications for advancing research related to activism and compliance‐gaining strategy selection are discussed.     

Formal features in children's science television: Sound effects,visual pace,and topic shifts

This study analyzes the auditory, visual, and information‐presentation pace of children's science television programs. These half‐hour programs averaged more than 19 sound effects per minute, 14 visual changes (cuts, wipes, and fades/dissolves) per minute, and more than 27 topic shifts per program. These results indicate that the current crop of programs presents content at a pace that may reduce their effectiveness.     

“He sounded like a vile,disgusting pervert …” An Analysis of Persuasive Attacks on Rush Limbaugh During the Sandra Fluke Controversy

This article examines the persuasive attacks made against Rush Limbaugh after his insults of Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke. The persuasive attacks against Limbaugh attempted to increase perceptions of his responsibility for the acts, but the majority worked to increase the perceived offensiveness of his acts. The most successful attacks extended Limbaugh's attacks to the audience, pointed out Limbaugh's own inconsistencies, applied pejorative labels to Limbaugh's words, and linked Limbaugh to the positions and ideologies of the Republican Party. The analysis found that the attacks were successful in the short-run, but less so in the long-term.     

Judging the Degree of Violence in Media Portrayals: A Cross-Genre Comparison

This study tests the relative importance of different factors of television narratives in how they influence people's judgments of how violent those narratives are. After watching 1 of 3 videotapes of a violent narrative, 99 college students answered a series of questions about their interpretations of the violence. It was found that participants' judgments about the degree of violence in the narratives were more strongly associated with their perceptions of the graphicness of the violent acts and the harm to the victims than with other factors such as the number of violent acts or the seriousness of those acts. Thus, people's judgments of the degree of violence in television programs differs from researchers' conceptualization. Implications of these differences are discussed.     

The Composition and Sequencing of Communicative Acts to Solve Social Problems: Functionality and Inventiveness in Children's Interactions

A close examination of peer interactions of children between the ages of 5;0 and 7;0 reveal occurrences where children composed and sequenced their communicative acts in intricate ways that were functional as solutions to a suddenly emergent social dilemma. Their acts and act sequences functioned to place constraints on what followed in the interaction, such that they opposed the other's unwanted actions by making the other's cessation of the unwanted actions relevant, and interpretable in a socially positive way. These same acts and act sequences simultaneously steered the interaction away from conflict by not making a conflictful response relevant. Besides their dual functionality, these communicative acts were so tailored to the immediate context and situational dilemma that they have an inventive aspect. These data raise the theoretical question of what basis the children had for composing and sequencing communicative acts in situ that anticipate their interactional consequences and promote desired ones. A proposal is made in the concluding discussion that the basis for this capability is acquisition of “knowledge” of a set of Principles of Relevance in interactions and discourse.     

网络舆情突发异常识别及关键算法研究

本研究采用实验法,利用三个可衡量关注度的变量设计规则算法,以每天和每小时作为检测周期,对逸仙时空BBS中的主题帖进行筛选并预警,达到实时监控网络舆情突发异常的效果。     

Electronic monitoring of in‐home television RCD usage

This study electronically‐monitored in‐home RCD activity. The frequency of channel changing and other RCD behaviors were recorded and discrepancies between self‐reported and actual RCD use are examined. This is one of a few academic studies of RCDs that does not rely on a survey (respondent recall) or on observation, but rather records actual behaviors in the participants’ home. This study also examines viewers’ uses of RCDs within the framework of selective exposure.

Slightly over 374 hours of television viewing by 44 participants yielded 13,680 channel switches. It was found that viewers made an average of 36.6 channel changes per hour. In other words, they watched channels for an average of one minute and 38 seconds between switches. Further analyses revealed an audience of “rapid‐fire”; channel grazers as 80% of the switches took place after a channel was on for less than five seconds.     

Pathways for Communicating about Objects on Guided Tours

Abstract Guided tours offer special opportunities for lively and varied presentations that match the methods of interpretation to the characteristics of the participating visitors. Most tour guides rely on rather limited, unidirectional (guide‐to‐visitor) communication. Instead, this paper outlines six different pathways of communication that are possible among guide, visitors, and object. Each pathway offers several specific types of communicative acts. In addition, 35 guided tours in several different kinds of venue were examined to identify the pathways and types of acts that were used. The professional literature describes other types of acts, and more have been developed at the writer's home museum. All in all, the 58 different types of communicative acts described here present a wide range of opportunities for guides to communicate with visitors.     

A pentadic analysis of ideologies in two gay rights controversies

The application of Kenneth Burke's pentad in rhetorical criticism can reveal ideologies at work in a controversy. This paper is an example of how to use the pentad to understand ideology. Rhetoric in favor of gay rights is informed by an ideology that features agents as primary and acts as derivative. Rhetoric opposed to gay rights features acts as primary and agents as derivative.     

Shared Entertainment,Shared Opinions: The Influence of Social TV Comments on the Evaluation of Talent Shows

The present research investigated whether co-viewer comments in social TV interactions are able to enhance or weaken media effects. With the example of talent shows, the valence of co-viewer comments (pro/contra/none) as well as the type of content (antisocial behavior vs. conventional performance) were varied in an experiment (N = 117). Results showed that participants’ own comments and their private attitudes about the judges varied in line with comment valence. Findings suggest that social TV viewers are prone to social influence of their co-viewers, which might amplify problems regarding the portrayal of antisocial behavior in reality TV.     

Special District Libraries and Operating Costs: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with Discretionary and Non-Discretionary Inputs

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to assess the technical efficiency of special district libraries in the United States with respect to three cost-related outputs: operating cost per hour, program costs per visit, and program costs per attendance. A set of discretionary and non-discretionary inputs were used to obtain the technical efficiency scores of 999 special district libraries. The DEA input-oriented analysis shows that 30% of the libraries were technically efficient with respect to the use of the inputs to achieve their level of operating costs in 2015. The DEA analysis also shows that inefficient libraries need to make proportional reductions in the level of discretionary inputs to become technically efficient.     

State Standards,Planning, and Public Library Size

Data from a 1992 survey of compliance by Ohio public libraries with state standards were used to examine relationships between achievement of a planning standard and each of 22 size variables. Significant but. weak correlations were found between planning scores and population of the service area, volumes per capita, number of ALA/MLS employees per capita, interlibrary loans to the library, and interlibrary loans from the library. Findings suggest that library size as traditionally measured may not have a substantial influence on a library's capacity to engage in long range planning.     

State of the library and information science blogosphere after social networks boom: A metric approach

A metric analysis of blogs on library and information science (LIS) between November 2006 and June 2009 indexed on the Libworm search engine characterizes the community's behavior quantitatively. An analysis of 1108 personal and corporate blogs with a total of 275,103 posts is used to calculate survival rate, production (number of posts published), and visibility via such indicators as links received, Technorati authority, and Google's PagePank. Over the study period, there was a 52% decrease in the number of active blogs. Despite the drop in production over this period, the average number of posts per blog remained constant (14 per month). The most representative blogs in the discipline are identified. The emergence of such platforms as Facebook and Twitter seems to have meant that both personal and corporate blogs have lost some of their prominence.     

Measuring Exposure to Media with Antisocial and Prosocial Content: An Extended Version of the Content-based Media Exposure Scale (C-ME2)

The present research developed a measure for exposure to both antisocial and prosocial media content by revising and extending a previous Content-based Media Exposure Scale (C-ME). The validity and reliability of the C-ME2 was tested in two independent samples (N = 678), among young adults (Study 1) and adolescents (Study 2). Results of Confirmatory Factor Analyses showed good fit, in both studies, for both antisocial and prosocial dimensions of media content, and for both males and females. Furthermore, the C-ME2 explains unique variance beyond previous measures of violent and general media exposure. Evidence is presented of reliability, discriminant and predictive validity of the C-ME2, measuring both frequency and exposure to specific content of media. The C-ME2 covers all media platforms, is easy to use in all research designs, and allows for standardization and systematic comparisons across studies.     

Citation Help in Databases: The More Things Change,the More They Stay the Same

In 2005, the authors reviewed citation help in databases and found an error rate of 4.4 errors per citation. This article describes a follow-up study that revealed a modest improvement in the error rate to 3.4 errors per citation, still unacceptably high. The most problematic area was retrieval statements. The authors conclude that librarians should include citation features in the evaluation of databases and should open a dialogue with vendors about the importance of providing accurate, reliable information about citations to students.     

虚拟电子政府对市民投诉服务补救的影响因素研究——基于重庆市县级虚拟电子政府的案例分析

首次提出“政府服务补救”概念,借鉴“企业服务补救”理论,运用访谈方法进行案例实证,探讨虚拟电子政府服务补救的影响因素。研究表明影响因素为谨慎、关注、及时性、简易性、补偿、道歉、解释等维度,其中谨慎维度是研究发现的新维度。