Joshua Woods
Biographic Data
| ID | 3939386 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joshua Woods |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joshua |
| FAMILY NAME | Woods |
| SIGNATURE | WOODS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | West Virginia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3047-5555 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The popularity myth: A Bourdieusian analysis of true crime media consumption in the United States
This study draws on Bourdieu’s field theory to critically examine the production and consumption of true crime media in the United States. Using multiple sources of viewership data, true crime’s popularity is assessed across three subfields: theatrical documentary film, television and the Netflix streaming platform. Contrary to many journalistic and scholarly assessments, the findings indicate that increases in true crime’s popularity have been m…
Beyond the sage on the stage: Testing a reciprocal storytelling model to cultivate empathy in college classrooms
This mixed-methods study tested whether reciprocal storytelling can foster empathy across lines of difference in a college setting. A total of 118 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to either an Open Book or a control group condition. In the Open Book condition, reciprocal storytelling was operationalized through three core components: first-person narrative sharing, facilitated reciprocal dialogue using reflective prompts, and volunta…
Counterterrorism and Freedom of Information: What Stands in the Way of Data Access
Data is difficult to access for researchers in the fields of terrorism and counterterrorism studies. This can be improved through using Freedom of Information Requests. However, these are under-utilised, and we know little about request success rates. This article investi- gates the use of FOI requests to get data on UK counterterrorism practice. We submitted requests to 55 local authorities asking them to release their information sharing polici…
The Sociology of Digital Inequality: The Stratification of Social Media Popularity in College Sports
Many scholars view social media popularity as a resource gained through self-branding and strategic communication. The reach of a social media account held by an individual or organization rises or falls depending on how well it meets an audience’s demand for information, identity, or entertainment. This assumption stands in contrast to sociological theories of power and stratification. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital, this st…
The Popularity Gap: Effects of Social Status on the Visibility of Lifestyle Sports Stars on Instagram
Social media provides athletes with opportunities to enhance their personal brands, engage with fans, and access professional opportunities. Several studies have examined how athletes use social media to attract and engage large audiences. Less is known about the social forces that enable and constrain their popularity. Drawing on expectation states theory, this study considers how athletes’ social status affects their follower counts and engagem…
Centering the Self, Doing the Sport, and Being the Brand: The Self-Branding of Lifestyle Athletes on Instagram
Several scholars have examined how sport stars and other celebrities establish personal brands on social media, but few studies have used a longitudinal research design to study the self-branding process itself and measure changes in self-branding behaviors over time. Based on a content analysis of 6,240 images posted on Instagram by 112 top-ranked professional disc golfers, this study shows how self-branding is a common practice even among the p…
What Color is a Golden Boy? The Glorification and Disparagement of Male Superstar Athletes in Sports Illustrated
This study examined media representations of male superstar athletes over more than three decades. Some journalists portrayed their subjects as smart, physically attractive young men at the top of their games. Other writers emphasized their flaws and told stories of tarnished heroes. Based on an analysis of 140 references to sports stars in Sports Illustrated magazine articles, the results showed that favorable and unfavorable framing of athletes…
A Systematic Literature Review of Predictors of Social Media Popularity
A growing area of research has examined the individual behaviors and social antecedents that enable and constrain the popularity of social media users. This systematic review gathers and summarizes 68 naturalistic studies that measure popularity based on users’ reach (e.g., followers, fans and subscribers) or engagement (e.g., likes, comments and shares) on multiple platforms. It draws on Barnlund’s (2008) transactional model of communication to …
Introduction to the Special Issue on Emerging Sports
The evolving self-presentation of the Islamic State, from Dabiq to Rumiyah
In 2016 the Islamic State (IS) dramatically altered the centerpiece of its Western outreach, shuttering Dabiq magazine and replacing it with Rumiyah. While Dabiq was marked by twin appeals to themes of chaos and civilization, the publication run of Rumiyah finds IS experiencing significant setbacks. Utilizing a quantitative content analysis of images in Rumiyah reveals IS adapting its framing to better reflect its present abilities and outlook. D…
Normative Bridges and Barriers in the Framing of Emerging Sports Movements
Why have some small, emerging sports communities grown faster than others? To begin answering this question, the analysis presented here considers the case of disc golf, a flying disc sport that has grown rapidly since the early twenty-first century. This research conceptualizes the disc golf community as a new social movement and examines how the news media has influenced its development. Drawing on a large, diverse sample of local and national …
“Fights Happen . . . It’s Just What Drunks Do”: Alcohol and the Situational Normalization of College Student Fighting
Fights are common at many U.S. residential universities and colleges and often seen as “normal” by students who witness them. This study explores the normalization of college fighting by using a situational learning approach that highlights definitions as learned and shared within a drinking context. Exploratory analysis of survey data finds that nine in 10 fights at college occur when at least one participant is intoxicated, and more than half o…
Normal Violence: The Case of Fighting on a College Campus
This study examines the normalization of violence using the case of fighting on a college campus. Undergraduate participant observers witnessed 150 physical altercations (fights), and gave detailed descriptions of them. They also described their thoughts and feelings as they witnessed the fights. We identified seven distinct reactions to fighting. We then classified these reactions into one of three categories (normal, disturbed and other) and ca…
Debating Immigration in the Age of Terrorism, Polarization, and Trump
This book offers a broad interdisciplinary approach to the changes in the U.S. immigration debate before and after 9/11. A nation’s reaction to foreigners has as much to do with sociology as it does with political science, economics and psychology. Without drawing on this knowledge, our understanding of the immigration debate remains mundane, partial, and imperfect. Therefore, our story accounts for multiple factors, including culture and politic…
The Effects of Perceived Threat, Political Orientation, and Framing on Public Reactions to Punitive Immigration Law Enforcement Practices
This study explores variation in people's reactions to a punitive immigration law enforcement practice. Using a vignette-styled framing-effects experiment, we examined whether reactions to the practice depend, in part, on who receives its consequences. More than 500 undergraduates from a large Mid-Atlantic university read a brief vignette about an immigrant motorist who is stopped by a police officer for a broken taillight violation and then deta…
The Impression Management Tactics of an Immigration Think Tank
Interest groups or “think tanks” influence how people and policymakers understand public policies in part by using impression management to enhance their credibility as information sources. Using immigration policy as a case study, this research examines the impression management tactics of one interest group (the Center for Immigration Studies), compares its coverage of immigration issues to that of large-circulation U.S. newspapers, and determi…
The Op-ed Sociologists: The Matthew Effect in Op-ed Publication Patterns
The Threat of Terrorism and the Changing Public Discourse on Immigration after September 11
This article uses articles from the opinion-leading press to investigate how the news media's repertoire of negative portrayals changed after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is based on a systematic random sample of 360 articles from two, opinion-leading newspapers—one known for its liberal slant (New York Times) and one known for its conservative slant (Wall Street Journal). The sample is drawn from a large population of articles publishe…
The Contextual Presidency: The Negative Shift in Presidential Immigration Rhetoric
Party platforms from 1993 through 2008 show a positive approach to immigration policy. Presidential rhetoric, however, does not match the tone of the platforms. There are negative frames (illegality, criminality, terrorism, and economic threats) in nearly 50% of immigration speeches. We argue that social context motivates presidents to talk about immigration negatively. This analysis provides insight into rhetoric as responsive to context rather …
How Big Is Big Coal? Public Perceptions of the Coal Industry’s Economic Impact in West Virginia
The coal industry has played a major role in the culture and history of the state of West Virginia, establishing an identity as the “backbone” of the economy in this region. However, as the mining process has become more mechanized, employment has declined and risks have increased, but support for the industry continues. This study explores research that could provide explanations for this phenomenon and examines whether there is an overestimatio…
Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society
Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, or a society in which big money, private security, and personal relations determine key social outcomes? Shlapentokh and Woods argue that the answer to these questions cannot be found among the conventional models. Offering a new analytical tool, the authors present a provocative explanation of the nature of contemporary society by comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval Euro…
Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society
Framing terror: An experimental framing effects study of the perceived threat of terrorism
An exploratory framing effects experiment was conducted to test whether three controversial news portrayals (or frames) of the terrorist threat increase subjects' perceptions of the danger. A total of 176 subjects were exposed to one of eight different article treatments. The subjects reported higher levels of perceived threat when the danger was associated with 'radical Islamic groups' (as compared to homegrown terrorists) and 'nuclear' technolo…
The 9/11 effect: Toward a social science of the terrorist threat
After 9/11, public attitudes on numerous social issues changed. While many studies have examined post-9/11 attitude trends on specific topics, such as civil liberties or war, few have investigated the scope and variety of these effects. Did the events of 9/11 have a brief effect on a limited number of attitudes, or did they produce numerous, long-term changes in the way Americans think, feel and act? Drawing on a broad range of pre–post-9/11 stud…
Medieval Security in the Modern State
The size of the private security industry has increased substantially in recent decades. While previous research has focused on the industry's growth trajectory, less emphasis has been placed on explaining the nature and diversity of private security services. This article investigates the possibility of studying private security with the feudal model. Feudalism is introduced as an ideal type and the paper explains why it is necessary for underst…
The 9/11 effect: Toward a social science of the terrorist threat
After 9/11, public attitudes on numerous social issues changed. While many studies have examined post-9/11 attitude trends on specific topics, such as civil liberties or war, few have investigated the scope and variety of these effects. Did the events of 9/11 have a brief effect on a limited number of attitudes, or did they produce numerous, long-term changes in the way Americans think, feel and act? Drawing on a broad range of pre–post-9/11 stud…
What We Talk about When We Talk about Terrorism: Elite Press Coverage of Terrorism Risk from 1997 to 2005
The risk of terrorism in the United States has gained a great deal of attention from researchers, policy makers, the public, and the press. This article focused on how one of these actors—the press—portrayed the risk during an eight-year period centered on the attacks of 9/11. The three goals of this study were to identify the dimensions of terrorism risk that are most likely to increase public perceptions of the danger, describe how these dimens…
Framing terror: An experimental framing effects study of the perceived threat of terrorism
An exploratory framing effects experiment was conducted to test whether three controversial news portrayals (or frames) of the terrorist threat increase subjects' perceptions of the danger. A total of 176 subjects were exposed to one of eight different article treatments. The subjects reported higher levels of perceived threat when the danger was associated with 'radical Islamic groups' (as compared to homegrown terrorists) and 'nuclear' technolo…
The Threat of Terrorism and the Changing Public Discourse on Immigration after September 11
This article uses articles from the opinion-leading press to investigate how the news media's repertoire of negative portrayals changed after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is based on a systematic random sample of 360 articles from two, opinion-leading newspapers—one known for its liberal slant (New York Times) and one known for its conservative slant (Wall Street Journal). The sample is drawn from a large population of articles publishe…
The Contextual Presidency: The Negative Shift in Presidential Immigration Rhetoric
Party platforms from 1993 through 2008 show a positive approach to immigration policy. Presidential rhetoric, however, does not match the tone of the platforms. There are negative frames (illegality, criminality, terrorism, and economic threats) in nearly 50% of immigration speeches. We argue that social context motivates presidents to talk about immigration negatively. This analysis provides insight into rhetoric as responsive to context rather …
The Effects of Perceived Threat, Political Orientation, and Framing on Public Reactions to Punitive Immigration Law Enforcement Practices
This study explores variation in people's reactions to a punitive immigration law enforcement practice. Using a vignette-styled framing-effects experiment, we examined whether reactions to the practice depend, in part, on who receives its consequences. More than 500 undergraduates from a large Mid-Atlantic university read a brief vignette about an immigrant motorist who is stopped by a police officer for a broken taillight violation and then deta…
Democracy and the press: A comparative analysis of pluralism in the international print media
The relationship between democracy and press pluralism is assessed in seven countries: China, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, India, Lithuania, and Russia. The term "pluralism" is defined as the extent to which diverse and competing views appear in the content of the mainstream press on a given news topic. Content analysis of 2,172 articles from the 10 largest newspapers in each country, published in the first months after the September 11, 2001 terror…
The Popularity Gap: Effects of Social Status on the Visibility of Lifestyle Sports Stars on Instagram
Social media provides athletes with opportunities to enhance their personal brands, engage with fans, and access professional opportunities. Several studies have examined how athletes use social media to attract and engage large audiences. Less is known about the social forces that enable and constrain their popularity. Drawing on expectation states theory, this study considers how athletes’ social status affects their follower counts and engagem…
Normal Violence: The Case of Fighting on a College Campus
This study examines the normalization of violence using the case of fighting on a college campus. Undergraduate participant observers witnessed 150 physical altercations (fights), and gave detailed descriptions of them. They also described their thoughts and feelings as they witnessed the fights. We identified seven distinct reactions to fighting. We then classified these reactions into one of three categories (normal, disturbed and other) and ca…
The Impression Management Tactics of an Immigration Think Tank
Interest groups or “think tanks” influence how people and policymakers understand public policies in part by using impression management to enhance their credibility as information sources. Using immigration policy as a case study, this research examines the impression management tactics of one interest group (the Center for Immigration Studies), compares its coverage of immigration issues to that of large-circulation U.S. newspapers, and determi…
A Systematic Literature Review of Predictors of Social Media Popularity
A growing area of research has examined the individual behaviors and social antecedents that enable and constrain the popularity of social media users. This systematic review gathers and summarizes 68 naturalistic studies that measure popularity based on users’ reach (e.g., followers, fans and subscribers) or engagement (e.g., likes, comments and shares) on multiple platforms. It draws on Barnlund’s (2008) transactional model of communication to …
The evolving self-presentation of the Islamic State, from Dabiq to Rumiyah
In 2016 the Islamic State (IS) dramatically altered the centerpiece of its Western outreach, shuttering Dabiq magazine and replacing it with Rumiyah. While Dabiq was marked by twin appeals to themes of chaos and civilization, the publication run of Rumiyah finds IS experiencing significant setbacks. Utilizing a quantitative content analysis of images in Rumiyah reveals IS adapting its framing to better reflect its present abilities and outlook. D…
Normative Bridges and Barriers in the Framing of Emerging Sports Movements
Why have some small, emerging sports communities grown faster than others? To begin answering this question, the analysis presented here considers the case of disc golf, a flying disc sport that has grown rapidly since the early twenty-first century. This research conceptualizes the disc golf community as a new social movement and examines how the news media has influenced its development. Drawing on a large, diverse sample of local and national …
The Op-ed Sociologists: The Matthew Effect in Op-ed Publication Patterns
Foreign Perceptions of the USA after the Terrorist Attacks of 2001
Searching for the Victim in the General Sociological Literature on Crime
In the last fifty years, the sociology of crime has been transformed by a changing ideological climate, the politicization of crime research and a greater isolation of criminology with respect to its theories, methods, organization and physical location outside of sociology departments. The objective of this paper is to explore how these changes may have influenced today's general sociological literature on crime. We begin by laying out our basic…
What We Talk about When We Talk about Terrorism: Elite Press Coverage of Terrorism Risk from 1997 to 2005
The risk of terrorism in the United States has gained a great deal of attention from researchers, policy makers, the public, and the press. This article focused on how one of these actors—the press—portrayed the risk during an eight-year period centered on the attacks of 9/11. The three goals of this study were to identify the dimensions of terrorism risk that are most likely to increase public perceptions of the danger, describe how these dimens…
Democracy and the press: A comparative analysis of pluralism in the international print media
The relationship between democracy and press pluralism is assessed in seven countries: China, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, India, Lithuania, and Russia. The term "pluralism" is defined as the extent to which diverse and competing views appear in the content of the mainstream press on a given news topic. Content analysis of 2,172 articles from the 10 largest newspapers in each country, published in the first months after the September 11, 2001 terror…
Medieval Security in the Modern State
The size of the private security industry has increased substantially in recent decades. While previous research has focused on the industry's growth trajectory, less emphasis has been placed on explaining the nature and diversity of private security services. This article investigates the possibility of studying private security with the feudal model. Feudalism is introduced as an ideal type and the paper explains why it is necessary for underst…
Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society
Framing terror: An experimental framing effects study of the perceived threat of terrorism
An exploratory framing effects experiment was conducted to test whether three controversial news portrayals (or frames) of the terrorist threat increase subjects' perceptions of the danger. A total of 176 subjects were exposed to one of eight different article treatments. The subjects reported higher levels of perceived threat when the danger was associated with 'radical Islamic groups' (as compared to homegrown terrorists) and 'nuclear' technolo…
The 9/11 effect: Toward a social science of the terrorist threat
After 9/11, public attitudes on numerous social issues changed. While many studies have examined post-9/11 attitude trends on specific topics, such as civil liberties or war, few have investigated the scope and variety of these effects. Did the events of 9/11 have a brief effect on a limited number of attitudes, or did they produce numerous, long-term changes in the way Americans think, feel and act? Drawing on a broad range of pre–post-9/11 stud…
How Big Is Big Coal? Public Perceptions of the Coal Industry’s Economic Impact in West Virginia
The coal industry has played a major role in the culture and history of the state of West Virginia, establishing an identity as the “backbone” of the economy in this region. However, as the mining process has become more mechanized, employment has declined and risks have increased, but support for the industry continues. This study explores research that could provide explanations for this phenomenon and examines whether there is an overestimatio…
Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society
Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, or a society in which big money, private security, and personal relations determine key social outcomes? Shlapentokh and Woods argue that the answer to these questions cannot be found among the conventional models. Offering a new analytical tool, the authors present a provocative explanation of the nature of contemporary society by comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval Euro…
The Contextual Presidency: The Negative Shift in Presidential Immigration Rhetoric
Party platforms from 1993 through 2008 show a positive approach to immigration policy. Presidential rhetoric, however, does not match the tone of the platforms. There are negative frames (illegality, criminality, terrorism, and economic threats) in nearly 50% of immigration speeches. We argue that social context motivates presidents to talk about immigration negatively. This analysis provides insight into rhetoric as responsive to context rather …
The Threat of Terrorism and the Changing Public Discourse on Immigration after September 11
This article uses articles from the opinion-leading press to investigate how the news media's repertoire of negative portrayals changed after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is based on a systematic random sample of 360 articles from two, opinion-leading newspapers—one known for its liberal slant (New York Times) and one known for its conservative slant (Wall Street Journal). The sample is drawn from a large population of articles publishe…
The Impression Management Tactics of an Immigration Think Tank
Interest groups or “think tanks” influence how people and policymakers understand public policies in part by using impression management to enhance their credibility as information sources. Using immigration policy as a case study, this research examines the impression management tactics of one interest group (the Center for Immigration Studies), compares its coverage of immigration issues to that of large-circulation U.S. newspapers, and determi…
The Op-ed Sociologists: The Matthew Effect in Op-ed Publication Patterns
Debating Immigration in the Age of Terrorism, Polarization, and Trump
This book offers a broad interdisciplinary approach to the changes in the U.S. immigration debate before and after 9/11. A nation’s reaction to foreigners has as much to do with sociology as it does with political science, economics and psychology. Without drawing on this knowledge, our understanding of the immigration debate remains mundane, partial, and imperfect. Therefore, our story accounts for multiple factors, including culture and politic…
The Effects of Perceived Threat, Political Orientation, and Framing on Public Reactions to Punitive Immigration Law Enforcement Practices
This study explores variation in people's reactions to a punitive immigration law enforcement practice. Using a vignette-styled framing-effects experiment, we examined whether reactions to the practice depend, in part, on who receives its consequences. More than 500 undergraduates from a large Mid-Atlantic university read a brief vignette about an immigrant motorist who is stopped by a police officer for a broken taillight violation and then deta…
“Fights Happen . . . It’s Just What Drunks Do”: Alcohol and the Situational Normalization of College Student Fighting
Fights are common at many U.S. residential universities and colleges and often seen as “normal” by students who witness them. This study explores the normalization of college fighting by using a situational learning approach that highlights definitions as learned and shared within a drinking context. Exploratory analysis of survey data finds that nine in 10 fights at college occur when at least one participant is intoxicated, and more than half o…
Normal Violence: The Case of Fighting on a College Campus
This study examines the normalization of violence using the case of fighting on a college campus. Undergraduate participant observers witnessed 150 physical altercations (fights), and gave detailed descriptions of them. They also described their thoughts and feelings as they witnessed the fights. We identified seven distinct reactions to fighting. We then classified these reactions into one of three categories (normal, disturbed and other) and ca…
Normative Bridges and Barriers in the Framing of Emerging Sports Movements
Why have some small, emerging sports communities grown faster than others? To begin answering this question, the analysis presented here considers the case of disc golf, a flying disc sport that has grown rapidly since the early twenty-first century. This research conceptualizes the disc golf community as a new social movement and examines how the news media has influenced its development. Drawing on a large, diverse sample of local and national …
The evolving self-presentation of the Islamic State, from Dabiq to Rumiyah
In 2016 the Islamic State (IS) dramatically altered the centerpiece of its Western outreach, shuttering Dabiq magazine and replacing it with Rumiyah. While Dabiq was marked by twin appeals to themes of chaos and civilization, the publication run of Rumiyah finds IS experiencing significant setbacks. Utilizing a quantitative content analysis of images in Rumiyah reveals IS adapting its framing to better reflect its present abilities and outlook. D…
Introduction to the Special Issue on Emerging Sports
Centering the Self, Doing the Sport, and Being the Brand: The Self-Branding of Lifestyle Athletes on Instagram
Several scholars have examined how sport stars and other celebrities establish personal brands on social media, but few studies have used a longitudinal research design to study the self-branding process itself and measure changes in self-branding behaviors over time. Based on a content analysis of 6,240 images posted on Instagram by 112 top-ranked professional disc golfers, this study shows how self-branding is a common practice even among the p…
What Color is a Golden Boy? The Glorification and Disparagement of Male Superstar Athletes in Sports Illustrated
This study examined media representations of male superstar athletes over more than three decades. Some journalists portrayed their subjects as smart, physically attractive young men at the top of their games. Other writers emphasized their flaws and told stories of tarnished heroes. Based on an analysis of 140 references to sports stars in Sports Illustrated magazine articles, the results showed that favorable and unfavorable framing of athletes…
A Systematic Literature Review of Predictors of Social Media Popularity
A growing area of research has examined the individual behaviors and social antecedents that enable and constrain the popularity of social media users. This systematic review gathers and summarizes 68 naturalistic studies that measure popularity based on users’ reach (e.g., followers, fans and subscribers) or engagement (e.g., likes, comments and shares) on multiple platforms. It draws on Barnlund’s (2008) transactional model of communication to …
The Popularity Gap: Effects of Social Status on the Visibility of Lifestyle Sports Stars on Instagram
Social media provides athletes with opportunities to enhance their personal brands, engage with fans, and access professional opportunities. Several studies have examined how athletes use social media to attract and engage large audiences. Less is known about the social forces that enable and constrain their popularity. Drawing on expectation states theory, this study considers how athletes’ social status affects their follower counts and engagem…
Political science (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Criminology (8 works) · History (8 works) · Social science (8 works)