Tag: David Markowitz

Local vs National Restaurants: Localness Drives Greater Rates of Engagement on Twitter

Presenter(s): Kelly Kondo

Co Presenter(s): Bella Conferti, Yuhui Li, Yuwei Shi, Tyler White

Faculty Mentor(s): David Markowitz

Poster 99

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

In this study we analyzed how Twitter engagements, such as likes and retweets, differed between local Eugene, Oregon restaurants and comparable national chains. Drawing on Construal Level Theory from psychology (Trope & Liberman, 2010), which suggests that people are more psychologically attached to proximate objects rather than distant objects, we predicted that the local restaurants would have greater online engagement than national restaurants. To test this, we matched local and national chains based on ten food categories (local chain/national chain): (1) Track Town Pizza/Pizza Hut; (2) Little Big Burger/Wendy’s; (3) Joe’s Burgers/Burger King; (4) Burrito Boy/Qdoba; (5)Ambrosia/Olive Garden; (6) The Sandwich League/Panera; (7) Dutch Bros Coffee/Starbucks; (8) Off the Waffle/IHOP; (9) Elk Horn Brewery/BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse; and (10) Prince Pucklers/Baskin-Robbins. We used data science techniques in the R statistical environment to automatically scrape engagement data from each chain’s Twitter feed. The results suggest that local restaurants have significantly more likes proportional to their follower count compared to national restaurants (p < .001). However, there was no significant difference in the average number of retweets proportional to followers between local and national restaurants (p = .31). This discrepancy between likes and retweets likely stems from different media affordances and how these features contain unique social meaning for users. We will discuss how localness affects the psychological attachment that people have to businesses.

A Social and Psychological Analysis of Fatal Police Violence

Presenter(s): Adriane Hershey

Faculty Mentor(s): David Markowitz

Oral Session 3 SW

Police brutality has been a consistent problem in the United States since inception, but has become more salient due to its intrinsic connections to political and social movements, including the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter beginning in 2013. Today, police violence against armed and unarmed citizens is pervasive: between 2015 and 2018, almost 4,000 people were killed by the police. Only 58 of the officers involved in shootings since 2005 were charged according to the Washington Post and 24 were convicted of wrongdoing. While prior work has largely evaluated how often police shootings occur and where shootings are most prevalent, less work has determined if there are signals identifying the type of officer who is convicted or not convicted of brutality. Drawing on research compiled by the Washington Post, we created a database of 75 police officers who killed a civilian and developed demographic and psychological profiles of each officer in search of characteristics that predict if they will be convicted or unconvicted of a crime. The data suggest that officers with over 10 years of experience on the force are less likely to be convicted (p = .032). Officers were marginally more likely to be convicted if there was a suspected cover-up (p = .07) and less likely to be convicted if the officer was in plain clothes at the time of the incident (p = .076). These patterns emphasize the importance of understanding police brutality from institutional, social, and psychological perspectives.

Asexual Representation on Television and its Effects on Public Knowledge

Presenter(s): Olivia Dozois

Faculty Mentor(s): Dean Mundy & David Markowitz

Oral Session 2 O

While LGBTQ+ representation in the media has greatly improved in recent decades, asexuality remains underrepresented and misunderstood. While there are several examples of LGBTQ+ characters across many channels and streaming services, there have only been two recurring asexual TV characters to date. This lack of asexual representation could be having an effect on public knowledge of the asexual identity. I explore this question using a multi-method approach. First, I do a content analysis of the two recurring asexual characters. I analyze a single episode from each of the shows the characters are featured on. Aside from the content analysis, I conduct a short online survey to evaluate anonymous respondents on their media consumption and knowledge of the asexual identity. My continued research, analysis, and data collection aims to determine if there is a connection between TV representation and general public knowledge of the asexual identity. This study is an attempt at extrapolating the television industry’s current circulation of information regarding the asexual identity, and how a greater understanding of asexuality may be achieved through a greater asexual character presence on television.