Award Date

May 2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication

First Committee Member

Tara Emmers-Sommer

Second Committee Member

Tara McManus

Third Committee Member

David Gruber

Fourth Committee Member

Carlton Craig

Number of Pages

203

Abstract

Over 107 million individuals are thought to have alcohol use disorder (AUD) (Ritchie & Roser, 2018). Discontinuing drinking can be difficult, but social support is thought to promote sobriety efforts. The r/stopdrinking online public community supports such efforts. This study has two broad aims: (1) explore how resilience building might occur on r/stopdrinking among initial users disclosing an abstinence disruption and responses from other users; and, (2) explore possible relationships, within initial posts, between resilience and three other phenomena (i.e., trauma, stated views of Alcoholics Anonymous, statements reflecting the transtheoretical model’s ten processes of change; Prochaska & Prochaska, 2021). To explore these, 193 initial posts and 1238 first-level responses were examined—guided by an analytical lens composed of four elements, apropos of reflexive communication (Merten, 1977). Collapsed into sets corresponding to initial posts, responses were more resilience-heavy than initial posts, suggesting a positive outcome for r/stopdrinking users looking to disclose an abstinence disruption. Other findings include theoretical and methodological contributions such as: (1) suggesting a possible, fourth dimension of reflexive communication (Merten, 1977); (2) extending the use of the communication resilience process scale (CRPS; Wilson et al., 2021) by applying it to content analysis—which was, in part, binarily-guided and thus enabled a resilience volume comparison between initial and response posts; (3) identifying three distinct response post perspectives for conducting content analysis research, guided by the Communication Theory of Resilience (CTR; Buzzanell, 2010; 2019) and the CRPS; and, (4) identifying and suggesting gratitude as an additional CTR/CRPS resilience building process.

Keywords

alcohol use disorder (AUD); health behavior change; r/stopdrinking; relapse; resilience; trauma

Disciplines

Communication

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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