Media Contributions to a Chesapeake Bay Watershed Collective Identity? A Tale of Three Cities.

Although collective action is needed to address many environmental challenges, it cannot proceed in the absence of collective identity, that is, evidence of group belongingness expressed in or via communicative behavior. This study looked for evidence of a collective identity in newspaper articles that referenced the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The data were drawn from local papers published in municipalities located at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, midway down the Susquehanna, and where the river meets the Bay. Computerized content analysis assessed the frequency with which the Chesapeake Bay and watershed were mentioned alongside a set of keywords thought to represent different facets of identity (e.g., agriculture, fishing, swimming). The results showed substantial variation in frequency across time and place but low absolute levels of coverage of the Bay and the watershed. Multidimensional scaling revealed different structures to collective identity as a function of place. These differences in content may be attributable to varying demographic and environmental characteristics along with proximity to the Bay. But, to the extent that media contribute to collective identity among residents of the watershed at all, they do so in a complex and heterogeneous manner.

Building community resilience on social media to help recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Facing the Covid outbreaks, public health researchers share a consensus that community resilience should be maintained and strengthened because it helps mitigate the physical and emotional tolls on individuals and communities. One way to achieve the goal is to build and strengthen community resilience through social media. However, social media's role in building community resilience has been poorly understood from a behavioral perspective. Guiding by uses and gratification theory and the coping literature, we build a model to examine how social media behaviors may influence community members' perceived community resilience, providing a "bottom-up" voice to deepen our understanding of community resilience and its implications for public health. The results shows that community members' social media engagement was significantly associated with their perceived community resilience. While helping others on social media led people to perceive their communities as less resilient, the use of social media for social support helped foster social capital, leading to more perceived resilience at the collective level. Overall, social media use played important roles in shaping people's perception of community resilience, helping community members and organizations evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and make improvement to better address future challenges in the times of global disasters.