Assignment Overview

Your final product will be a 16 to 20-page written paper (21-25 pages for Ph.D. students) that draws on a minimum of 15 published articles in academic journals (20 articles for Ph.D.

students), academic book chapters, or professionally presented academic papers (at communication conventions like NCA, ICA, AEJMC, etc.) that presents a proposed persuasive communication campaign. Please use the following outline to write your paper:

• Identify the end goal of your social influence. Explain who you are trying to persuade and exactly what are you trying to persuade them about. Are your targeting an attitude, a belief, a value, a behavior, or a combination of these?
• Explain how you plan to achieve this goal. You should clearly employ one or more of the social influence principles that you have learned. Whatever principle or principles that you use, provide an appropriate literature review of others who have used and studied the same principle(s).
• Determine what media you are going to use. Since the focus of our class is on social influence through media, then some form of media must be central to your plan. That doesn’t mean that interpersonal communication channels can’t be a part of your plan; but that media should be central. Include in this section a budget that estimates the funding needed to execute the media plan.
• In the last section of your paper, explain how you plan to assess how effective your persuasive communication is given the goal or goals that you set. How will you know if you are effective? Based on your readings of many other persuasion studies, make a research plan to study the effects of what you will do and describe it in this last section of the paper. Include in this section a budget that estimates the funding needed to execute the research plan.

Example: Suppose your goal is to design a persuasive political campaign commercial for a specific candidate. Ultimately you goal would be to help this candidate get elected to office. However, your more specific immediate goal of the campaign commercial could be to raise name recognition of the candidate and to create a favorable impression of the candidate through the use of self-deprecating humor.

Example: Suppose you intend to convince your study body to appeal to your university not to raise tuition rates next year, and one of the strategies you will use is the “door in the face technique” based on reciprocal concessions and the principle of reciprocity. First, you would design your strategy to ask for no tuition raises for 3 years, with the underlying goal to keep tuition the same for at least another year.

Note: Media include all digital communication such as the Internet, social networking sites, YouTube, Twitter, mobile phones, iPads, etc.

Example: Suppose you had designed a persuasive campaign to convince your church members to commit themselves to going on one short-term mission trip every five years. By designing a longitudinal study over a five-year period, you could assess the percentage of adults and teenagers who made such a commitment, how many mission trips they went on during the five-year period, and the percent that kept their commitment.

Assignment Requirements

Your theory review paper should have the following elements:

• Cover page with title, this class, your name, and date
• Short abstract (50-75 words)
• Introduction of the specific theory and relevant background information.
• Body of your paper: The body of your paper should have the four sections outlined above: the goal of your persuasion campaigns, the means of persuasion (principles, strategies, and methods), the media plan and funding needed to implement it, and the research and evaluation plan and funding needed to implement it.
• Conclusion – summarize and close your paper with a discussion of how you see your specific contribution could be used for future studies.
• References – a minimum of 15 academic references for MA students; a minimum of 20 academic references for Ph.D. students, with 10 or more from the year 2000 or later.
• Tables and Figures – If you have any tables or figures, place them after the references.
• Appendix – If you have one or more appendices, place them after any tables and figures.

Length and Style

• 16-20 pages for MA students; 21-25 pages for Ph.D. students, including an introduction, body of the paper, and conclusion (not counting cover page, abstract, references, and any tables, figures and appendices)
• Double-spaced, Times-Roman 12-pt Font, standard one-inch margins
• APA Style Manual, 6^th edition (follow it for citing in the text, providing references at the end of your paper, creating headings and sub-headings, creating headers and page numbers, etc.)