Dear Students: very sorry for the delay in posting this. The due date has been moved to before midnight (by 11:59pm) on Saturday, April 21st.
BLOG CHALLENGE:
Part II of your textbook explores the methodological variety with which crises are studied. It notes four distinct approaches:(1) case studies, (2) textual analysis, (3) content analysis, and (4) experimental (pgs. 91-242).
1. After you feel comfortable distinguishing between the different methodological types, search the internet (google scholar is good!) and find one RECENT (within the last ten years) example each of THREE of the four approaches. Cite the title and location (url, etc.) of the journal article or news source you found each study in.
2. Give a brief explanation of the BACKGROUND and the FINDINGS of each article. SUMMARIZE the benefits of using the methodological approach employed by each article relative to each of their research goals. Keep this second, explanatory part of your blog post limited to 400 words or less (I highly recommend that you work through this in a word docx first–and save a copy before posting to the blog). Be sure to demonstrate you understand each study and why the methodological approach was used in each.
REMINDER: Be sure not to repeat what other bloggers have already posted. Additionally, all studies mentioned in Part II of your textbook are not eligible as examples for posting (but they could give you good ideas about where to find other studies). There are plenty of studies “out there”–strive to find something that interests you and offers you a unique vantage point on crisis communication research.
crisiscapstone.wordpress.com 
1: Case study – Groves, D., Griffin, J., & Hajiamiri, S. (2008). Denver Water Case Study. In Estimating the Value of Water-Use Efficiency in the Intermountain West (pp. 5-10). Santa Monica, CA; Arlington, VA; Pittsburgh, PA: RAND Corporation. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ewu.edu/stable/10.7249/tr504hf.10
This case study is designed to “demonstrate how an economic framework can be used to evaluate water use”. It looks at estimated water demands and supplies in Denver and surrounding areas. It concludes which water supply areas would be most beneficial for Denver to utilize. This is a case study because it compares a current occurrence and its effect on daily affairs. This case study uses a “comprehensive research strategy”, thus fitting of the description in the textbook.
2: Content analysis – Who Uses International Newspapers? A Content Analysis of Dissertations and Theses. https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/newspapers/SLC/2014_ifla_slc_feeney_-_who_uses_international_newspapers_.pdf
This is a dissertation I found on Google, it looks at “what disciplines use newspapers, and the time periods and origins of the newspapers used”. It uses the results of graduate student’s research in which the students looked at “newspapers published outside of the United States and how that compared to researchers in this study who used only U.S. newspapers”. This is a content analysis because it is a “controlled, objective, and systematic collection of data”, as the textbook puts it. The results and predictions from this can be drawn from formal research done by the graduate students. The results of this study found that newspapers were used by scholars in many disciplines including linguistics, geology and archaeology, among others.
3: Experimental – Jennings, J., Monk, T., & Van der Molen, M. (2003). Sleep Deprivation Influences Some but Not All Processes of Supervisory Attention. Psychological Science, 14(5), 473-479.
I used this article in an assignment earlier in the year for a different class, it was used to discover whether or not sleep deprivation affected mental processes such as attention. It studied the patients for 24 hours, with one night of no sleep and how that effected their ability to accurately complete a mundane task for a computer program, searching to find how long it takes before the lack of sleep begins to effect the body. This study concluded that even mild sleep deprivation influenced perceptual-motor processes and alertness. It used quantitative methods for data recording and is considered an experimental method since it was conducted in a laboratory and consisted of the researchers control over the variables, participants, and costs.
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Good examples, Molly! Can you offer a brief, one sentence each, rationale for how these examples “offer you a unique vantage point on crisis communication research”? Just need you to tie the methods to studying crisis communication. A reply to your own post would work. THANK YOU for being first with this. –pc
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https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/12/health/chicago-water-lead-report-bn/index.html
Case Study- This article was researching the amount of toxic lead in Chicago’s water, which was announced by the Chicago Tribune as, “70% of 2,797 homes across Chicago in the past two years”. The article goes further to show an expert on environment pollution on children’s response to the epidemic, advising Chicago to not worry too much about their lead problem and to look for alternatives such as bottled water. This is a case study because it compares a current occurrence and it’s affect on daily affairs in Chicago. I thought the city of Chicago utilized “strategic responses” by using an expert in the field of environmental pollution as the spokesperson when approaching crisis communication.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/health/implicit-bias-philadelphia-starbucks/index.html
Experimental- This article takes a experimental approach to the term “implicit bias” after the recent Starbucks incident. The article explains the term implicit bias and questions if we as humans can be “trained” to not be implicitly bias after years of individual exposure to different upbringings. The reason I categorized this article as experimental was because it was used as the book explains, “to further our understanding of effectiveness of crisis communication strategies”. This study provides several suggestions for future research, the most important being if “implicit bias training” truly has any long term, meaningful effects.
Content Analysis- This experiment in the New York Times attempts to prove that diesel vehicles with the latest technology are cleaner than the smoky older models, all while not knowing the Volkswagen beetle had been rigged to be less polluting in the lab than they are on the road. The automakers’ research group set out to show that new diesel vehicles were better. It hired the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, to conduct a study that would compare emissions from a late-model Volkswagen with those of a 1999 Ford diesel pickup. The experiment utilized the gas from the cars, it was diluted and fed into chambers containing the monkeys. To keep the animals calm during the four hours they breathed fumes, lab workers set up a television showing cartoons. I believe this was content analysis because even though Volkswagen had unknowingly rigged the system, the study was still, “controlled, objective and a systematic collection of data” as stated in the handbook. I believe this also relates to crisis communication because of the underlying scandal which lead Volkswagen to pay $26 billion in fines already, then to have the research be released that the company had purposely engineered the beetle to perform with lower emissions in a lab versus the roads was a crisis disaster for the company image.
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Strong examples of each type, focused on crises and aligned with the method. Well done!
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Case study
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061211124129.htm
“Drivers Ignore The Risk Of Mobile Phone Use”
In this case study we see how high the risk of a car accident is by high rates of phone usage behind the wheel. The most common adverse effects of mobile phone use while driving were taking eyes off the road, slowing down, lack of concentration, failing to indicate, lane drift and sudden braking. Although the use of hand-held mobile phones while driving is illegal, almost 40% of drivers continue to use a hand-held phone while driving. Seventy percent of drivers felt that they were unlikely to be caught by police for using a hand-held phone while driving.
Content analysis
http://criminology.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-23
“Content analysis in the crime, media and popular culture”
In content analysis, media and popular culture portrayals of crime issues are the primary sources of data. These portrayals include a range of sources, such as newspapers, movies, television programs, advertisements, comic books, novels, video games, and Internet content. Depending on their research questions, researchers draw samples from their selected sources, usually with additional selection boundaries, such as timeframe, genre, and topic (e.g., movies about gangs released from 1960 to 1990).
Experimental analysis
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/09/lack-sleep-puts-you-higher-risk-colds-first-experimental-study-finds
“Lack of sleep puts you at higher risk for colds, first experimental study finds”
Of the 164 participants, 124 received the actual virus instead of the control, and 48 of them got sick. By checking the sleep duration of the sick participants, researchers report in the current issue of SLEEP that individuals who slept fewer than 5 hours a night were 4.5 times more likely to get sick than those who slept 7 hours or more. Those who slept 5 to 6 hours were 4.2 times more likely to get sick, but those who slept 6 to 7 hours per night were at no greater risk of catching the cold than those who slept 7 hours or more, suggesting that there’s a sleep threshold for potent immune defense.
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Good job!
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https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/casestudies/case-study-critical-controls-prevented-target-breach-35412
1. Case Study: I found this case study speaking about the Target data breach that occurred in 2013. The data breach was very costly not only to Target, but to banks, employees, and customers. The research displayed here emphasizes how Target failed at risk management. In this scenario, Target was not prepared for the blind spot hackers were able to find in order to breach their systems. The article then goes on to state that performing organization-wide risk management activities are for more valuable than mandated checklists. The already put in place regulations that Target relied on failed them as they were outdated and not constantly checked for backdoors. Re-evaluation is necessary as threats and technologies are always changing. As a result of this breach which stole data from 70 million customers, many people at Target, including former CEO, lost their jobs and banks had to pay over $200 million to refund and replace credit cards.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02650487.2017.1323406
2. Content Analysis: Last year in 2017 Pepsi released a controversial commercial staring Kendall Jenner. The commercial revolved around a protest where peace is found when Kendall Jenner hands a police officer a Pepsi can and he drinks it. There was a lot of backlash to this commercial causing Pepsi to be in a state of crisis. In Pepsi’s efforts to promote unity through this advertisement, they failed to consider many different possible outcomes and this is what the content analysis of this paper speaks about. This piece highlights how Pepsi completely dismissed the basic model of communication- encode a message, send through a medium, decode the message. The purpose of the message was to promote youth, excitement, and unity. Their encoding was not concise enough as it left room for multiple interpretations. Pepsi failed to consider how different groups will decode their commercial as different groups interpret things differently. The commercial was removed as controversy arose from people saying it simplified issues such as Black Lives Matter.
http://fortune.com/2018/01/08/hm-racist-hoodie/
3. Textual Analysis: This article is about the H&M crises that occurred earlier this year when they made a hoodie with the words “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” written across the chest. If that’s not bad enough already, they modeled it with a young African American male. I really don’t know what they were thinking here but clearly they failed miserably to anticipate how the many different audiences would decode their message , similar to the Pepsi crises but on a much, much worse, level.
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Excellent examples, all crisis-related…and seemingly preventable. Well done!
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1.) Case Study- http://missoulian.com/news/local/children-in-crisis-missoula-state-grapple-with-increasing-child-abuse/article_f946c998-c407-55d0-bb6d-4951b4df4258.html
There is a crisis where in 2015 this article was published because of the rapid increase of children that had been abused which is the potential link to the massive increase of suicide rates. “Child abuse is showing no signs of letting up. If anything, it’s getting worse, according to Missoula County and state data. The increase in child abuse and neglect cases parallels a rise in meth cases – not a coincidence, people in the child protection systems say.”, this article goes on to explain the direct comparison to drugs and financial issues within Montana’s economic status statewide as being low incomes than surrounding states. They also believe that suicide rates are related directly to child abuse because I am also studying this myself in my criminal justice degree that supports this hypothesis. This is a case study because it is affecting daily life of individuals that has been an area of study where they can conduct information on a certain variable.
2.) Experimental- https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/19/opinions/marijuana-black-and-brown-communities-opinion-forman-rajagopalan/index.html
This is a huge topic today with more and more states making marijuana legal to consume for recreational use as well as medically. This article explains where the date 4/20 came from and what the significance was. In today’s day and age, many people rally together to support the use of marijuana whether in a legal state or not. I believe this article is prime for experimental because they explain on what the day and use of marijuana really means and what they can expect in the next few years especially if the Federal Law makes it legal to consume marijuana. What can this possibly mean if we metaphorically live in a society that gets high in everyday life and there is no punishments for actions? This could open a lot of dispute here in the next few years in my opinion.
3.) Content Analysis- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4025619/
In this article, it is more related in my major of criminal justice and how even though you say to get an article within the last 10 years, I can relate it. This article brings a lot of evidence to distinguish a child is born with predisposed criminal genes. This study has ever new evidence then the original back in the late 18th century because within women prisons we see that certain women that were reckless in their pregnancy, they expose their children to be criminal in a way. For example, if a woman that is pregnant and takes medications that could be considered a narcotic or other pain meds even though it is prescribed, this action makes the child being born much more likely to be given addictive personality traits where they are more susceptible to get addicted to drugs in their future. This can also relate to parental figures teaching crime as if it were a gene. What kind of small but serious steps can the United States make to reduce these factors from happening.
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1.Case Study: Volkswagen emissions scandal (2015)
In September 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency accused Volkswagen of manipulating its engine controls to be able to pass laboratory emissions tests. Not only did this recall lose Volkswagon millions of dollars and recalled millions of cars, but how they dealt with the crisis after left the company and brand with lasting effects. The company failed to hold executives accountable for the emissions fraud, breaking the law and losing the trust of the public also failed to reimburse some paying customers. Some of this could have been avoided if they would have taken accountability for their wrongdoing and keep their responses consistent with the media.
2. Experimental Study: The study of effects on schoolchildren of exposure to point-of-sale cigarette advertising and pack displays
https://academic.oup.com/her/article/21/3/338/615022
605 Ninth grade students were randomly chosen and asked to view an advertisement for cigarettes at a local convenient store. The advertisement was manipulated where some teenagers saw the advertisement with a cigarette in it, and some saw an advertisement without a cigarette in the photograph. Students were then asked to fill out a questionnaire. Compared with those who viewed the no cigarettes, students either in the display only condition or cigarette advertising condition perceived it would be easier to purchase tobacco from these stores. Those who saw the cigarette advertising perceived it would be less likely they would be asked for proof of age, and tended to think a greater number of stores would sell cigarettes to them, compared with respondents who saw no tobacco products.
3. Content Analysis: Dove Racist Ad
http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/7-biggest-campaign-fails-2017/311664/
This ad failed to consider how some would interpret an African American lady stripping herself of her shirt after using the dove body wash and turning into a white woman as possibly racist, but the ad did just that in 2017. the ad was meant to show “the diversity of real beauty,” but instead got ugly as social commentators weighed in.
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