Tag: Poster 99

Emotional Experiences of Women with Chronic Pelvic Pain

Presenter(s): Annalise Cameron − Sociology

Faculty Mentor(s): CJ Pascoe

Poster 99

Research Area: Social Science

This study explores the highly complex emotional experiences of women who have chronic pelvic pain. Women who suffer from chronic pelvic pain disorders or undiagnosed chronic pelvic pain, often face many obstacles in their medical care, close relationships, emotional health, and life in general. The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of women with chronic pelvic pain and attempt to draw commonalities in their emotional dispositions. Through original semi-structured interviews with 25 women, this study successfully identified commonalities that in turn have sociological meaning. While there were commonalities in almost all areas that are complicated by pelvic pain, the most striking findings come from an analysis of female sexual identity in the context of this pain, and the emotional dispositions stemming from this female sexual identity specifically. This research contributes to the limited body of work concerning this topic, and holds value as a resource to women who experience this type of pain, the people close to them, the medical community, and society in general.

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.