Browsing by Subject "Prostitution"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Understanding Sex-Buyers Through Media Content Analysis
    (2016-04-27) Odhiambo, Tori
    The issue of human sex-trafficking permeates not only on an international scale, but a domestic scale as well. Sex-buyers play a critical role is feeding the economy of the demand of sex trafficking victims. Minnesota is not exempt from this reality. This research project examines the formulation of the group protocol established to assess how sex buyers (Johns) are depicted in published media through coded content analysis. First, a search for news articles with the keywords "Minnesota, “prostitution”, and “sex trafficking” was conducted; then, a content analysis was carried out using a detailed codebook protocol, which serves as a guideline for identifying sex buyers and sex buyer information in this article pool. This research study focuses on the challenges the research team faced in terms of defining who is a sex buyer and how much information is needed to be identified to specify an individual as a sex buyer in the articles. Since language is varied and different terms can be used to communicate the same meaning, it was important for the research team to agree on which terms would constitute “sex buyer language” in the studied articles. The creation of the research protocol is a guideline for how to code for quantitative data in an effort to communicate qualitative findings from published news articles.
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    Understanding The Impact Of Online Platforms On Human Society And Relationships: A Macro And Micro Perspective
    (2018-06) Mojumder, Probal
    Online intermediaries along with IT-enabled features have ushered a new era for human society. It has affected all aspects of life from cultivating societal good to unintentionally causing societal challenges. Particularly, online platforms allow users to engage in online market places, where certain platforms allow men and women to connect with each other to pursue inter-personal exchanges. For example, online dating platforms allow singles looking for mates, find partners who agree to go for dates, where consensual intimate sexual experiences, like hook ups, can be a consequential outcome. In another situation, in online classified advertisement platforms, sex workers can illegally post ads to solicitate clients. The characteristics of online platforms along with their IT-enabled features have influenced this process. In this dissertation, I examine two questions looking at the interaction of IT artifacts on societal outcomes in a causal manner. First, I study the impact of entry of an online classified advertisement platform, Craigslist, on prostitution trends, which is an unintentional consequence of website operation. Second, the dissertation looks at the impact of an useful IT-enabled feature, the vote-identity revelation feature, on user engagement and matching outcomes in an online dating websites.