Date of Award

2-18-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

School of Communication

First Advisor

Phillip Chidester

Abstract

There has been no previous research analyzing coming out videos published to YouTube

by content creators in relation to discourse dependency, online community building, and co- cultural theory. Galvin’s (2006) discourse dependent communication has been used in family communication research to examine how non-normative families have to use communication to prove their identity as a family unit. Orbe’s (1998) co-cultural theory is used to study interactions between members of the dominant culture and members of co-cultures, specifically looking at the strategic ways in which members of co-cultures communicate with dominant group

members. In this study, I aimed to analyze how content creators on YouTube, in their coming out videos, utilized the four external boundary management strategies of discourse dependent communication: labeling, explaining, legitimizing, and defending. I also examined how the content creators and viewer comments constructed an online community. I used co-cultural theory to analyze the interactions happening in the comments section between viewers to see what co-cultural strategies were being used. I selected five coming out videos to watch in order to complete this study.

Comments

Imported from ProQuest Kimmell_ilstu_0092N_11631.pdf

DOI

http://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2020.Kimmell.F

Page Count

100

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