Research
Included below are various research projects I have taken part in at Hope College. As you will notice, some projects are focused on communication studies while others are focused on political science.
Popular Cultural Analyses
This project is a combination of four different comprehensive research papers condensed into one website. You will find the four different analyses broken down into digestible case studies with individual focuses on reading ideology, analyzing gender, analyzing race, and analyzing social class.
Each analysis looks at a different popular culture symbol and striving to uncover the hidden forces shaping the messages and the often times unknown impact they have on the viewer.
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This analysis was completed for a capstone Cultural Communication course, which focused on how identities and power structures play a role in shaping contemporary society and popular culture.
The Effects of COVID-19 On Exclusive Dating Relationships in College Students
This research project was completed in the fall of 2020 in conjunction with two other classmates for a Qualitative Research Methods course. After conducting interviews, coding and analyzing data, we found that relationship satisfaction decreased when distance between the couple increased, which was often the case for college couples when schools were shut down during the Covid pandemic.
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As a result of this project, I learned how to conduct qualitative research interviews and how to code the subsequent data for important patterns and themes. Further, I learned the richness that qualitative data can add to a study, a type of in depth analysis that can be missed through quantitative data alone.
Analyzing the Impact of the 2008 Financial Crisis on the Rise of Global Populism
This research paper, conducted for Global Political Economy, a 300 level political science course, looks at the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis & aftermath and the effect on the rise of global populism.
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Although it is a highly nuanced subject and nearly impossible to link one causal factor alone to the rise of global populism, my analysis found that populist movements in part stemmed from unhealthy financial environments, which can be attributed to the global recession of 2008.
