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In February 2022, a fertilizer plant fire burned for four days and displaced thousands of residents, who were mainly low-income and Black or Latino, from their homes in Winston Salem, NC. In partnership with Black and Latino residents and nonprofit organizations, we sought to understand Black and Latino resident perceptions of the chronic and acute health risks, as well as the emotional and financial effects that resulted from the fire, which included the release of nitrous dioxide. We used the Environmental Health Disparities Framework to guide this community-engaged research study, capturing through semi-structured interviews: 1) how residents perceived their community before and after the fire, 2) how the fire impacted physical and mental health, and 3) how individuals coped with stress. We used thematic analysis to analyze the data and identified seven major themes. Participants: 1) perceived their neighborhood positively, 2) were unaware of the potential dangers of the fertilizer plant before the fire, 3) experienced adverse health and financial effects from the fire, 4) took action to protect themselves from the impacts of the fire, 5) raised concerns about the environmental impacts of the fire, 6) raised concerns about the city's response to the fire, and 7) provided recommendations for future city response.

This study applied the extended parallel process model (EPPM) to evaluate the crisis messages employed by the mainstream media and the government during the 2006 diethylene glycol (DEG) poisoning crisis in Panama. Messages were content analyzed for its use of tenets of the EPPM. Overall, the findings reveal that the news coverage clearly emphasized the threat of DEG poisoning over the efficacy of avoiding being poisoned. In addition, quantitative analyses showed that the information provided by Ministry of Health of Panama (MINSA) and the local news outlets were widely divergent. These data indicate that the majority (82 per cent) of MINSA press releases included a balance of both threat and efficacy elements, compared with only 29 per cent of Panama newspapers. Panama newspapers tended to emphasize threat alone.

Higher education courses with large student enrollments are commonly offered in multiple sections by multiple instructors. Monitoring consistency of teaching activities across sections is crucial in achieving equity for all students, and in developing strategies in response to emerging patterns and outliers. To address this need, we present an approach to analyze the multivariate data of sections, assignments and student submissions collected by a learning management system (LMS) using a new data exploration framework that we call linked data summaries. Data summaries are a unit of exploration with uncluttered, analytical, comprehensible visualizations of aggregations of data records attributes. Data browsers link multiple summaries and record lists, and enable flexible and rapid data analysis through tightly coupled interaction. Our analysis approach, developed in collaboration between analytics researchers and university instructors, reveals patterns across many aspects, including assignment and section structures, submission grading and timeliness. We present findings from an analysis of three semesters of an introductory oral communication course with over 1,750 students and 90 sections per semester.

Human health risks and environmental risks are different and are perceived differently; health risks primarily threaten human health, whereas environmental risks threaten both human and environmental health. Nonetheless people tend to view environmental risks as impersonal, primarily threatening nonhuman elements or distant others, making it difficult for risk communicators to motivate target audiences to take risk-mitigating actions. This dissertation argues that because environmental risks threaten both health and the environment, messages about this category of risk can be framed in either a health or an environmental context as a means of altering risk perceptions. It is further asserted that, all things being equal, message features that are more or less relevant to either the health or the environmental frame will achieve different results depending on which message frame is used. As a means of investigating this claim, two types of similarity (demographic similarity and scene similarity) were manipulated in a 2 (risk frame: health, environmental) × 2 (demographic similarity: high, low) × 2 (scene similarity: high, low) between-subjects experiment ( N = 568), in which participants were exposed to a message about drought framed as either a health or an environmental risk. The results show that scene similarity interacts with the two message frames (health and environmental) for narrative persuasion and behavior-related variables. Specifically, high (versus low) scene similarity resulted in better persuasive outcomes for the health frame than for the environmental frame, whereas low (versus high) scene similarity resulted in better persuasive outcomes for the environmental frame than for the health frame. Additionally, the study found that framing an environmental risk as a health risk increased behavioral intention and behavioral expectation. Furthermore, high (versus low) personal relevance improved risk perception, narrative persuasion, behavioral intention and expectation, and response efficacy. The study has implications for health and environmental risk communication, particularly for impersonal risks that people perceive to be of low personal relevance, and opens up new avenues for research and practice in areas such as climate change communication and entertainment-education. Limitations, implications, and recommendations for replications and extensions are discussed.