Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The digital game industry and the academic world recognize that women play fewer video games than men. One theorized reason for this is that the sexualized portrayal of female game characters may dissuade women from wanting to engage with them. This sexualized portrayal consists of over-exaggeration of a female character's breasts while the waist is overly narrow, a costume of tight-fighting and cleavage-revealing uniforms, and even engaging in overtly sexual behavior. At the same time, it is believed this portrayal will increase a man's desire to engage with the game. These assumptions were tested as part of a larger study. In a 2x3 between-subject design of participant gender by avatar body shape, this experiment investigated how men and women perceive and react to female avatars that embody the hypersexualism body shape of big breasts, thin waist, and long, thin limbs. One-hundred and twenty men and women from a Midwestern university participated in the study. Participants were asked to describe a character after being presented an image of the avatar, and, after playing a computer game, were measured to gauge their levels of engagement with the game. Contrary to industry and academic contentions, it was found that men indicated more engagement with the game when playing as a voluptuous character while women indicated more engagement playing as the hypersexualized character. Implications for how women react to sexualized portrayals and men's preferences for digital game characters were discussed in terms of cultivation and social learning theories.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper employs data gathered in a 2006 national survey to study how the American electorate evaluates a tradeoff between competitive elections and winning to implement preferred policies. The results show that voters do not share in the prevailing elite consensus about the overriding virtues of competition. Analyses of a multilevel model of preferences for winning versus competition indicate that ideological extremism, partisanship, social trust and several other individual-level variables have predictable relationships with these preferences. Also, a contextual variable -- electoral margin in the 2006 congressional district election -- interacts with support for winning or losing candidates. Voters supporting candidates who lose big tend to take refuge in competition, whereas those who support big winners are prone to view victory as a means of implementing policy preferences. By emphasizing public involvement in policymaking, these voters are effectively echoing earlier "responsible party government" arguments that once were central features of democratic critiques of the American political system.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Detailed data-driven inquiry on semi-structured/focus group interview, and videotaped interaction data are used to specify how communicative troubles occur during face-to-face social interaction between sighted and visual impaired/blind people. The goal of the paper is to illustrate and analyze how an inability to adequately respond/attend to visible non-vocal gestures/behaviors, normatively displayed during face-to-face social interaction, leads to communicative distress for visually impaired/blind people. This research advances literature on conversation analysis by proposing visual impairment/blindness plays a role in the context-free turn taking system that organizes ordinary conversation. Conversation analysis literature identifies the turn taking system as a context-free organizational feature of ordinary conversation. In subsequent units of talk, people are able to communicate both understanding and misunderstanding of prior talk. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) propose that when misunderstandings occur, people are able to “repair” them. The theoretical goal is to use the conversational “repair” to speculate on whether communicative troubles – due to limitations in vision – impact the conversation analytic claim that the turn taking system is context-free. Research conjectures focus on illustrating the following troubles: 1) turn allocation and reception; 2) turn order; 3) talking about the wrong subject; and, 4) current-speaker interruption. Sampling procedures included criterion-based chain sampling and maximum variation sampling. Audiotaped narrative data on experiences with communicative problems informs videotaped interaction data. Transcripts of interview data are analyzed using pattern coding and factoring. Transcripts of videotaped interaction data is analyzed using conversation analysis. Completed analyses of interview data and videotape data confirm all four conjectures.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper discusses risk and resilience among a group of sixty homeless youth by examining in-depth interview narratives about their educational experiences. The authors profile those who have dropped out and those who have graduated high school, and illustrate the factors that predict these outcomes. The paper further outlines some of the obstacles that can derail youth in terms of education, and conversely the supports that can help homeless youth succeed. The authors conclude by offering a number of policy suggestions that can help homeless youth re-attach to education.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the differences among the four groups of bishops at who participated at the Second Vatican Council, with the goal of answering a simple, but key, sociological question about the Council: who wanted what, and why? In brief, I argue that in order to understand, explain and ideally even predict, the perspectives, interests and goals, or what I call organizational strategies, of religious leaders, sociologists of religion must broaden their understandings of the factors that affect them. Though supply-side theory recognizes that the presence of other religious institutions (i.e. religious pluralism) has powerful effects on religious leaders, I argue that in order to predict not only whether religious leaders will be open to reform, but also what reforms they will prioritize, we must consider not only the presence of other institutions in a society, but the relationship between those organizations, especially whether those relationships are stable.