Black male teachers in PK-12 make up less than 2% of the teacher workforce with an undetermined representation in elementary education. Although there have been efforts to increase their representation in the field, there remains a lack of Black males entering the classroom as teachers. In addition, there has been limited research examining…

The current study aims to contribute to knowledge by examining the effects of high school and college relative standings on the self-esteem and academic self-concepts of Texas college students. Texas is a special context for high school students where class rank is especially salient. Currently, high school graduates within the top 6% of their…

Although the recent annual growth rate in the U.S. paramedical field has been 4%, Latino and African American men have been significantly underrepresented in the field compared to their proportion in the U.S. population at large. This problem threatens both the quality and quantity of available emergency health care. The purpose of this study was…

When teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their audiences, instructors often find it challenging to find pedagogical strategies that are at once effective and responsible. For students not accustomed to horror, the shocking nature of the texts can sometimes be difficult to handle, while even the horror…

The purpose of this study was to understand the college students' perceptions of slut-shaming discourse. The research indicated that there was a strong correlation between cultural expectations and slut-shaming. According to the results, the perceptions of slut-shaming are influenced by aspects such as: class, culture, media, gender, feminism,…

Research among adults has demonstrated concurrent and prospective negative associations between TV viewing and mental health, yet little research has examined these associations among African American and Latino youth or examined the role of children's involvement with TV and parental mediation of TV viewing via coviewing. The purpose of the…

The current analysis examines the relationship between measures (R-scores, S-scores, faculty productivity) utilized in the recently published National Research Council NRC report and communication doctoral programs' centrality in the faculty-hiring network. Correlations among the network indicators and the NRC ratings were generally moderate and…

Just as participation in social networking has grown, so has media coverage of inappropriate activity online. Teacher-student relationships and cyberbullying are just a few of the stories that seem to make the news on a regular basis. For educators, this is particularly troubling, considering how few students know what is appropriate when using…

Objectives: The aim of this content analysis study is to characterize the TV advertisements aired to an at-risk child population along the Texas-Mexico border. Methods: We characterized the early Saturday morning TV advertisements aired by three broadcast network categories (U.S. English language, U.S. Spanish language, and Mexican Spanish…

Popular media is a social phenomenon, especially for young audiences. This qualitative study examined how eleven Latino/a high school students and a Latino teacher understood the impact of media messages in an animated children's film. Findings suggest participants identified negative cultural messages embedded throughout the film regarding…

This article discusses the impact of changing student demographics on financing education and on our national wellbeing. We begin by examining the research of current student demographics and their relationship to learning and education costs. We then calculate a 1% cost factor from the average per-pupil expenditure based on the 2011 "Digest…

The purpose of this study was to explore areas of research in regards to how students learn about violent crime on university campuses and what level of awareness they hold regarding their personal safety. A combination of databases was used to measure reported rates of violent crime on campus and in the community and these were compared with…

The content of violence within media has significantly increased over the years and has been approached using a diverse empirical research representation. Within these empirical attempts, the area of music violence has only been approached through the utilization of randomized experiments and thereby presses the need to explore the alternative…

Theory-driven, mass media interventions prevent smoking among youth. This study examined effects of a media campaign on adolescent smoking cessation. Four matched pairs of media markets in four states were randomized to receive or not receive a 3-year television/radio campaign aimed at adolescent smoking cessation based on social cognitive theory.…

The word "suburbia" evokes a wealth of imagery such as model homes, spacious yards, and minivans from movies, commercials, print advertisements, and television shows. These Utopian ideas of suburbia are partly truth and partly myth. Popular media's powerful portrayal of suburbia can be traced back to the wholesome 1950s' and 1960s'…