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This thesis explored how multisport service organizations (MSOs) have responded to the institutional pressure to incorporate health into organizational practice. A qualitative exploratory methodology underpinned by an institutional theoretical framework facilitated a snapshot understanding of the institutional environment within the Canadian sport landscape. Data was collected from online document and policy sources, and later analyzed using Hartwig and Dearing's (1979) two-step exploratory data analysis process. First, institutional theory was applied to capture the institutional change, institutional pressure, and organizational response within the Canadian sport sector. In a second round of analysis, data was re-expressed using archetype theory. Organizations were classified according to a Canadian Sport Policy (CSP)(2012) objective typology and the MSO response was revisited. The institutional environment was found largely marked by regulative pressures, and organizations most often responded with defiance. The findings suggest that system-level structural and financial mechanisms may be restricting MSO's capacity to comply to health-oriented institutional pressures.

Much of the US public acquires political information socially. However, the consequences of acquiring information from others instead of the media are under-explored. I conduct a "telephone-game" experiment to examine how information changes as it flows from official reports to news outlets to other people, finding that social information is empirically different from news articles. In a second experiment on a nationally representative sample, I randomly assign participants to read a news article or a social message about that article generated in Study 1. Participants exposed to social information learned significantly less than participants who were exposed to the news article. However, individuals exposed to information from someone who is like-minded and knowledgeable learned the same objective facts as those who received information from the media. Although participants learned the same factual information from these ideal informants as they did from the media, they had different subjective evaluations.

Individuals do not always express their private political opinions in front of others who disagree with them. Neither the political science literature nor the psychology literature has been able to firmly establish why this behavior occurs. Previous research has explored how social network composition can influence political attitudes and how political attitudes can be resistant to persuasion. However, the concept of conformity does not involve attitude change or persuasion; it more accurately involves self-censoring to match a socially desirable norm. In an effort to improve our understanding of this behavior, I conduct a lab experiment in which participants discuss political issues with actors who deliberately disagree with them. I measured the differences between the responses participants gave on a private survey compared to their publicly stated attitudes in the discussion group. Results indicate that regardless of the order in which participants gave their responses, individuals do indeed conform to the group's opinion or censor their views. Conformity and censorship were most frequent among introverted, emotionally stable, and racial minority participants. Significant differences were also found between the types of issues; specifically, non-social and ideologically ambiguous issues yielded higher levels of conformity. Political conformity and censorship could lead to a distorted view of public opinion and may challenge the execution of freedom of expression. The following errata was provided on March 5, 2016: The main results of this analysis reported on page 17 were calculated incorrectly due to an error in the pretest survey. One question on the pretest survey, "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being 'very likely' and 1 being 'very unlikely,' how likely would you be to vote for a candidate who supports the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare?" However, the Omnibus Survey coordinator accidentally mislabeled the scale such that 1 represented "very likely" and 10 represented "very unlikely." As such, this question should have been reverse coded so that it matched the direction of this question in the lab and on the post-test. After correcting this error and reverse-coding the responses to this question, the following main results hold: Participants in the treatment condition conformed significantly more frequently than participants in the control condition for standard (p<.01) and strict (p=.105) conformity. 88.9% of participants conformed on at least one question by standard conformity measures (94.1% in the treatment group and 82.8% in the control group), and 58.7% of participants conformed at least once by pure conformity measures (65.2% in the treatment group and 52.2% in the control group). There are no statistically significant differences in censorship between the treatment groups. More details about the results are available upon request (tfeenstr@ucsd.edu). An updated version of this paper is published as "Political Chameleons: An Exploration of Conformity in Political Discussion" in Political Behavior DOI:10.1007/s11109-016-9335-y.

Why are political conversations uncomfortable for so many people? The current literature focuses on the structure of people's discussion networks and the frequency with which they talk about politics, but not the dynamics of the conversations themselves. In What Goes Without Saying, Taylor N. Carlson and Jaime E. Settle investigate how Americans navigate these discussions in their daily lives, with particular attention to the decision-making process around when and how to broach politics. The authors use a multi-methods approach to unpack what they call the 4D Framework of political conversation: identifying the ways that people detect others' views, decide whether to talk, discuss their opinions honestly-or not, and determine whether they will repeat the experience in the future. In developing a framework for studying and explaining political discussion as a social process, What Goes Without Saying will set the agenda for research in political science, psychology, communication, and sociology for decades to come.

Is exposure to false information necessary for misbelief? In this article, we consider the possibility that certain individuals hold misinformed beliefs without encountering misinformation, thus questioning for whom exposure to "fake news" is most deleterious. Using a pre-registered experiment on a diverse sample of 1079 US respondents, we find that the young, those with low information literacy, and those with high trust in government tend to hold mistaken beliefs, even without exposure to misinformation. Because these groups are already misinformed, eventual exposure to fake news does little to influence their misperceptions. Instead, misinformation exposure affects the elderly, those with high information literacy, and those with low trust in mainstream media the most. These results suggest that research focused on correcting misperceptions should avoid studying how certain characteristics correlate with misbelief only in misinformation's presence.

AbstractRecent research suggests widespread misperception about the political views of others. Measuring perceptions often relies on instruments that do not separate uncertainty from inaccuracy. We present new experimental measures of second-order political beliefs. To carefully measure political (mis)perceptions, we have subjects report beliefs as probabilities. To encourage accuracy, we provide micro-incentives for each response. To measure learning, we provide information sequentially about the perception of interest. We illustrate our method by applying it to perceptions of vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Subjects made inferences about randomly selected American National Election Study (ANES) respondents. Before and after receiving information about the other, subjects reported a probabilistic belief about the other's vote. We find that perceptions are less biased than in previous work on second-order beliefs. Accuracy increased most with the delivery of party identification and report of a most important problem. We also find evidence of modest egocentric and different-trait bias.