Marriage Equality: Media Coverage and Public Opinion

The struggle for equality is nothing new in this country. Every minority group has faced it’s own hardships when trying to advocate for the advancement of their people. One of the most recent struggles has involved the LGBT community and their pursuit of equal marriage laws nationally. Currently the campaign for marriage equality has had success in nine states and the District of Columbia, each of which now grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. However, thirty states have enacted constitutional bans on same-sex marriage (NCLS 2013). Currently 49% of the population endorses full and equal marriage rights for same sex couples while only 44% oppose it (Pew Research Center, 2013). The campaign has gained supporters from influential politicians, actors, and advocates nationwide. With the recent hearings in the Supreme Court national media attention is at an all time high. This increased media coverage presents an interesting question for researchers. When telling a story the media chooses how to present the facts of the event to its viewership. The two main tools the media utilized when reporting an event are the tone and frame of the story. Tone refers to if the story is covering a “positive” event or a “negative” event. Tone is created through use of specific language that conveys these conditions to the audience. The frame of the story is the subject the story revolves around. Researchers James Avery and Mark Peffley (2003) found that the tone and frame of media coverage affected the opinions of individuals regarding welfare policy. They found that negatively toned articles elicited negative feelings about welfare policy. They also found that the framing of the story (whether the subject was a white or a black mother) affected how the public viewed the success/ failure of the policy. I attempt to use the techniques of Avery and Peffley’s experiment to determine if media coverage of same-sex marriage affects public opinion on policy issues relating to same-sex couples. Participants were given one of five articles to read: a control article, a positively toned article framed around a gay couple, a positively toned article framed around a lesbian couple, a negatively toned article framed around a gay couple, and finally a negatively toned article framed around a lesbian couple. Immediately following the reading of the article participants were asked to complete a survey, which evaluated their attitudes towards issues such as same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting as well as evaluative statements regarding the couple featured in the article. The two hypotheses for this experiment are that participants exposed to the negative stimuli will express a less favorable attitude towards same-sex policies than those who were exposed to the positive stimuli. The secondary hypothesis is that participants who receive stimuli framed around the lesbian couple will be more sympathetic to the couple than those participants who received the stimuli framed around the gay male couple. This experiment presents a valuable opportunity to further study the influence of media coverage on public support for policy. Expanding the current body of research to include the effects of media on social changes such as marriage equality is crucial for the understanding of political scientists, politicians, and advocacy groups. Understanding the relationships associated with media influence and public support can help campaigns predict the likelihood of success (if noticeably more negative attention is being given to the story of example) as well as allow these campaigns to better craft stories that will positively influence the likelihood of success within their desired outcome

Gandhi, the spirit of the nationalist movement

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Fear of Victimization in Rural Middle School Students

School safety has gained national attention in recent years due to school shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas; Conyers, Georgia; West Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; Springfield, Oregon; Edinboro, Pennsylvania; and Littleton, Colorado. According to the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll (1998), school safety is the public\u27s top concern in education

Chamber music as a factor in public school music

We have found that the more progressive music supervisors in the larger city school systems have already seen its value, as they testify, and we predict that, like all other developments in music education, it will spread to the smaller cities as they become able to take on this phase of the music program. We have seen evidences that the financial stress of the moment has somewhat curbed advance in this direction as it has in many other instances, but everyone seems to be looking forward to resuming the practice as soon as possible. In conclusion let us say that chamber music in the public school music program is definitely a thing of the future. Its true effectiveness can be judged only after it becomes a universal practice and after teachers are especially trained for that line of work

Coleridge: the influence of his friends

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1938. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

A study to increase educational interaction between the adult/child within the Treehouse at the Philadelphia Zoo

The purpose of this project was to conduct a study assessing adult/child interaction in the TREEHOUSE that will yield a series of recommendations to assist in meeting the educational objectives of the TREEHOUSE. The author conducted a naturalistic study employing adult/child observations and interviews. The groups studied consisted of between two and five individuals, including one adult and one child. Twenty-two groups were observed and eleven groups were interviewed, four of which were both observed and interviewed. Data was recorded and analyzed. Major findings were presented in the form of text, graphs and charts. Interaction between adults and children did occur in the TREEHOUSE, but the observations did not support that it was educational interaction. Findings also indicated that interaction was initiated by the child over fifty percent of the time as opposed to a quarter of the time by the adults

Using the XCS classifier system for multi-objective reinforcement learning problems

We investigate the performance of a learning classifier system in some simple multi-objective, multi-step maze problems, using both random and biased action-selection policies for exploration. Results show that the choice of action-selection policy can significantly affect the performance of the system in such environments. Further, this effect is directly related to population size, and we relate this finding to recent theoretical studies of learning classifier systems in single-step problems. © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Dartmouth College Case: History and Sequence

Presented for the Degree of Bachelor of Laws

Optimizing Component Selection In Synchronous Motor Compressor Trains Based On Technical and Financial Considerations

Tutoria