The Voices Among Us is a three-episode podcast series exploring podcasting as a way to tell the stories of elderly individuals in assisted living facilities in Phoenix. The project chronicles my journey trying to create this podcast series, addressing the technical challenges of learning how to podcast and the personal challenges I encountered in trying to find a way to connect the elder's stories to millennials. The podcast episodes, hosted at www.thevoicesamongus.weebly.com, include interviews with 3 men at Bethany Gardens Assisted Living and Oakmont Luxury Assisted Living in Phoenix, a caregiver at Bethany Gardens, the CEO of a Phoenix-based podcasting app, and the hosts of the Absolute Geek Podcast, a Phoenix-based production. The project was inspired by my grandmother, who I talk to weekly on the phone. I realized that I've gained so much insight, perspective and wisdom from these phone calls with my grandmother and I wanted to create a way for other millennials to have a similar experience. The millennial generation comprises the majority of podcast listeners, making podcasting my medium of choice to share these stories and advice of the elderly. The Voices Among Us highlights the beauty and benefit that comes when people make a conscious choice to engage with our society's elders. It is a project that combines the valuable information provided by all of the interviewees with my own personal insights and reflections as a journalist and a millennial, proving that there are voices and stories all around us that are incredibly valuable to our entire society.

Currently, there has been limited research on evaluating the social media use and

competency level of registered dietitian
utritionists (RD/N). With health information increasingly sought on social media, it is imperative to understand the social media competency of health professionals. The social media use, reach, and competency level of a nationwide RD/N sample was assessed utilizing an online survey. The sample (n=500) while mostly female (97%) was representative of RD/Ns compared to the nationwide statistics from the Commission on Dietetic Registration. The sample included RD/Ns from forty-six states with California (n=44), New York (n=42), and Texas (n=34) having the largest proportion of respondents. The majority of RD/Ns engage in social media for personal use (92.4%) and 39.2% engage for professional use. One hundred and twenty-five RD/Ns reported 777 ± 1063 (mean ± SD) social media followers. As compared to non-millennial RD/Ns, millennial RD/Ns engaged significantly more in social media for personal and professional use (+10% and +13.5% respectively, p<0.001) and scored significantly higher for social media competency (p<0.001). Additionally, food and nutrition management and consultant/private practice/industry RD/Ns had significantly higher competency scores than clinical RD/Ns (p=0.015 and p=0.046, respectively). RD/Ns who use social media personally and professionally had a significantly higher competency score than RD/Ns who did not (p<0.001). There were significant associations of Facebook, Twitter, total followers and total average followers with the social media competency score (r=0.265, 0.404, 0.338, & 0.320, respectively) in RD/Ns. Specifically, the social media competency score, was found to explain 16% of the variation in the number of Twitter followers and 10% of the variation in the average number of followers by platform. These data suggest an opportunity to increase RD/Ns’ social media reach (i.e. following) by improving competency level.

Scholars have identified that journalists have a strong occupational identity, leading to ideological conceptions of the rules of the field. However, while journalists are often the first to embrace technological change, they often do so in different ways than most people. With the arrival of digital technologies, journalists are often faced with practices that run contrary to long-established ideology, and they often carry traditional practices over to new media. Using the theoretical lens of Giddens’s structuration theory, this research identifies traditional journalism structures that encourage or discourage journalists to interact with their followers on the social network Twitter. Using constant comparative analysis to interpret 23 interviews with contemporary journalists, this study identified multiple dualities between the use of Twitter and traditional newsgathering. It also recognized a cognitive dissonance among journalists who use Twitter. Though they can see advantages to using the platform to engage with followers, particularly other journalists and members of their audience, journalists do not seek out Twitter interaction and often avoid or resist it. Finally, this dissertation suggests three walls that block journalists from engaging in the Internet’s facilitation of personal connectivity, engagement, and a true community forum with followers. Although a wall of objectivity has somewhat been broached by Twitter use, walls of storytelling and routine and traditional news values continue to hold strong.

In the delivery of a public service, meeting the needs of its users through cocreation has generated considerable research. Service users are encouraged to engage with public services through dialogue, sustained interaction, and equal partnership, wherein the role of the user changes from passive to active. As the relationship between service provider and service user evolves, researchers have sought to explain how resources, time, accessibility, and bandwidth may affect such relationships, specifically concerning the economically disadvantaged. While many researchers have focused on the logistical barriers that inhibit cocreation among the economically disadvantaged presented by such factors as cost and transportation, limited research has examined the relationship between the service provider and economically disadvantaged service user. Combining previous research, this study examines what economically disadvantaged service users actually do when they cocreate value with a public service by conducting 12 in-depth interviews with participants of SNAP-Ed, nutrition education for persons eligible for government assistance. The study's findings suggest that cocreation exists through relational characteristics of collaboration, isolation, acceptance, connection, and guidance that help in the development and maintenance of relationships, and that a relationship between service provider and user could be further typified by equality. This finding suggests that equality is an independent construct not necessary in the process of cocreation--a departure from previous research--but rather a way to approach the service provider/user relationship. This study is intended as a step toward examining cocreation through the development of organization-public relationships.