Spring 2025

For decades, “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going” reflected passengers’ trust in the aerospace giant known for manufacturing reliable aircraft. This reputation was compromised when two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft crashed within five months. The similar accidents resulted in 346 fatalities, forcing a crisis response. This study uses content analysis to evaluate the communication strategies employed in Boeing’s press releases following the crashes. The strategies were assessed based on four communication principles: response timeliness, victim care, transparency/factual communication, and responsibility. The results indicate that Boeing’s response was more effective after the second crash, as the company incorporated more of the recommended strategies. However, none of the press releases were entirely effective, as Boeing failed to propose actions to support victims and deflected blame. This research highlights the role of crisis communication in helping companies manage crises, restore trust, and minimize harm to victims.

Mentor: Don Grady

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As Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) opportunities redefine college athletics, social media has emerged as a critical tool for athlete self-marketing. This study explores marketable college football players’ content strategies on Instagram and TikTok, examining how these platforms serve distinct branding purposes. The researcher used content analysis to sort 15 college football players’ social media posts into different self-marketing categories and tracked engagement on each post. This research showed that players posted mainly athletic content on Instagram and mostly behind-the-scenes content on TikTok. Similarly, frontstage content reaped more engagement on Instagram, and backstage content received more engagement on TikTok. Additionally, individual trends showed variations in platform preference, content emphasis, and the impact of brand partnerships. Overall, these results supplemented prior research and were congruent with self-presentation theory.

Mentor: Bill Anderson

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Presidential debates are pivotal events in elections, shaping public opinion and voter behavior. Since the advent of televised debates in 1960, candidates have adapted their strategies to align with emerging media. In the modern era, social media, particularly TikTok, has become a crucial platform for political messaging, influencing discourse, and voter engagement. This research examines how 2024 presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, used TikTok to report on the debate. Content analysis was used to assess the messaging strategies used by both Trump’s and Harris’s campaign teams, primarily inspecting the posts’ primary messaging and framing, tone, intended target audience, and reach/engagement. The results indicated that the majority of posts from both candidates verified TikTok accounts negatively framed their opponent and adopted an overall negative tone. In addition, the posts with added production value generated more views and likes than those that simply posted a clip from the debate. Findings suggested that political TikToks aligned with TikTok trends or Gen Z humor were more successful than those not. Furthermore, the analysis highlights an increasing polarization in political campaigning as strategies centered heavily around attacking the opponent.

Mentor: Daniel Haygood

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Sitcoms are a major part of American culture, known for their comedic value and large viewership. While some, like The Office, Friends, and Parks and Recreation, have enjoyed great success, others, such as Cavemen, 1600 Penn, and I’m With Her, were canceled after one season. This study examines the categories of humor in successful versus unsuccessful sitcoms by analyzing six shows using both quantitative and qualitative methods. A typology of 41 humor types was used, grouped into five major categories: physical, verbal, situational, character-based, and playful humor. The first three episodes of each show’s first season were analyzed for frequency and context of humor. Findings reveal that verbal and linguistic humor is the most common in both successful and unsuccessful shows, but successful sitcoms also favored character-based and situational humor, while unsuccessful ones leaned more towards physical and playful humor.

Mentor: Qian Xu

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Queer themes in film have a history of representing the political climate at the time, often with hyper-visible stereotyping, inferiority, silencing, demonizing, or even comedic relief. Characters were portrayed to be sympathetic and identifying with dominant heterosexual ideology. Often, characters were also limited to specific identities: outside of white main characters, white-washing characters who were based on real non-white people also occurred. In a changing political climate, this study investigated five films released post-Obergefell v. Hodges to identify how the representation and intersectionality of queer characters has changed in Hollywood. A qualitative content analysis was conducted by randomly selecting films from the top 20% highest-grossing queer films and analyzing for themes within four main categories: (1) portrayals of identity, (2) authentic casting, (3) visibility, and (4) social interaction. Findings suggest that there is an increasing social awareness of intersectionality, yet many of the discussions around it were not fully formed. While there was also an increase in the amount of diversity, themes of wealth and whiteness were still in majority. Half of the queer cast were played by openly queer actors, but the only queer identities represented were gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Results also suggest that the roles queer characters were given, while more prominent, still often landed as either villains or victims — either demonized or sympathized. The study found that films have a “model queerness”: the type of acceptable queer portrayal to audiences.

Mentor: Daniel Haygood

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