My research question is “How does corporate image influence young adults in deciding which companies they want to work for?”

I know many people, including myself, who have chosen to apply for jobs with a positive corporate image. But I also know individuals who ignore this in their job search and apply to companies that will simply pay more regardless of their perceptions of the organization. So my overall aim for this research is to explore the relationship, if any, between corporate image and young adults seeking to apply for employment. Previous research has been done on this topic and basically concluded that corporate image does have a strong influence on application intentions of potential employees.

So I decided to use the phenomenology approach to describe what all the participants have in common as they experience the process of applying for jobs and what influence corporate image has on their intentions. In particular I will be looking at Fox News and ABC News and see if their corporate image has any influence on the participants; on their overall experience in the job application process.

At first I had trouble deciding what approach to use, and but I think phenomenology is a good fit. Now, I am trying to figure out what questions to ask in order to gain the information I need.

In my undergraduate studies, I was fortunate enough to take a First Amendment law class taught by Lee Bollinger, a noted FA scholar. While Bollinger never imparted his personal POV onto the class, I got the impression through my studies that more speech was better – essentially, when Congress makes a law abridging speech, that’s bad. The less restrictions on speech there are, the happier we’ll all be, right?

The decision for Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is ostensibly a victory for more speech. It removes a restriction on corporations and unions to spend money running independent campaign commercials. (The idea that money equals speech has long been established by the courts.) Sure, there are corporations that will now be able to spend unlimited amounts of money to share messages I disagree with, but corporations and associations closer to my point of view (and this ruling includes unions and organizations like the NAACP) could spend just as money as well. The end result is more ideas in the public marketplace.

Not everyone shares this viewpoint, and for many, the Citizens United decision was mistake and a setback for democracy. While there has been a lot of talk about the uproar against the decision, there has been very little discussion as to why there is opposition.

I’m using content analysis to determine how Reddit users on a specific reaction thread frame the Citizens United decision in an effort to understand, for at least this small population, why this decision may (or may not) inspire antipathy. I’m searching the text to find relevant themes and patterns to make these assessment. I have begun to analyze the comments, and already some interesting themes have begun to emerge.

My challenge now is to ensure that the codes I’m seeing are actually valid.

I have found that framing theory has, at least somewhat, rooted my research in an area of study. Framing theory holds that people construct meaning and opinions about something based on how the issue is framed – by their own values and perspectives (frames in thought), as well as how the idea is portrayed (frames in communication).

I am loathe to rely too much on the theory however, as I don’t know how the Supreme Court case was framed to the commenters (e.g. what news site they first read) or their own personal views on the matter (e.g. their perspective on the First Amendment, campaign finance, etc.). As such, I do still have questions on how much theory I should include, and how to determine validity for my results. I have already found one study that discusses framing theory and campaign finance,* but the search continues for more!

*Grant, J., & Rudolph, T. J. (2003). Value Conflict, Group Affect, and the Issue of Campaign Finance. American Journal Of Political Science, 47(3), 453.

The issue about whether Taiwan should be independent has been discussed for more than six decades. My chief purpose, here, is to figure out whether the businessmen would change their attitudes or business strategies toward each other once the political relationship changes (i.e., in this research, Taiwan becomes independent).

There are several reasons for me to be interested in doing this research. First, the selected topic is an important and historical issue for all the Chinese in the region and I am one of them. Second, this political issue has vital impacts on the regional economics. Third, I am interested in Corporate Communication in various cultures.

There is almost no literature on this specific study. And I am a kind of green hand. Any subtle pitfalls might appear in the whole research without notice. Also, since I am inexperienced, both the interview and content analysis were not comprehensive. In addition, the research interview was holding during the managers’ lunch break, an informal and rush time. The participants were distracted a lot during the group interview. They didn’t really pay attention to the group unless it was their self-sharing time.

I would like to expand this minis study and make it as my thesis paper. Good suggestions from lovely colleagues last night. Wondering whether I should do both Quantitative and Qualitative for my thesis though. No idea yet. Please help me a bit. Thanks!

Last semester I had the privilege of taking a course focusing on work-life policy and and work-life balance with Professor Caryn Medved. While conducting research for my term project on the positive role that sponsorship (and to a lesser degree, mentorship) can play in advancing women’s careers, I stumbled across the idea of the unconscious bias. The unconscious bias, as defined by Halpern and Cheung in their 2008 book Women at the Top, is a deeply entrenched set of values or norms that reinforces traditional gender stereotypes in the workplace that results in women being promoted at lesser rates than men.

Although the unconscious bias against women has been studied and found to exist in the workplace, I am curious to see how far the bias extends into the public mental schema, and in particular, how an unconscious bias might occur on the Internet. This study will focus on the unconscious bias towards women in the workplace, and how that bias manifests itself within in the anonymity of the public domain of Internet comments. This issue also touches on Lewis’s Law. Helen Lewis, a British journalist and the current Deputy Editor of the New Statesmen, commented on Twitter in 2012 that, “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism” which has since become known as “Lewis’s Law”. Although the articles and reviews of Lean In and subsequent publications surrounding female leadership may not expound the values of feminism, they appear to touch the same nerves within the Internet’s consciousness. So far, research and observation shows that there is an unconscious bias against women in the workplace, and that Lewis’s Law potentially identifies this unconscious bias within a larger framework.

For this project, I am currently conducting a content analysis, rooted in social constructivism and transformative feminist research theories, on the comments (total: 63) that appear on two articles discussing the merits of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Through coding and deep analysis, I am hoping to understand if the unconscious bias extends beyond the workplace, and if so, how it manifests in anonymous public opinion.