My colleague (Jim McKelvey and Cynthia Tomasch) and I attended the in-person Marketing Management Association conference in St Louis, MO from March 10 to 11. We presented a paper (marketing education) on the perception of student internship. It was nice to attend a conference in person again after 2 years of being virtual. We received good feedback and some new ideas for this project. It was Cynthia’s first academic conference and she said she learned a lot.

This year, under my and Jim McKelvey’s supervision, College of Business students (Tabitha Meers and Elias Lignos) won the Best Undergraduate Research Paper Award at the Marketing Management Association. Their project was about examining disparaging humor in advertising. The students used biometric and self-reported measures in their research. The conference was virtual this year but the students did a good job presenting and discussing the results from their research at the conference.

The Akron Life Magazine asked us about our #QuarantineCooking class in Spring 2021. Typically, we come up with the menu about 2 weeks before class. But because the magazine wanted to publish our schedule until May in their March 2021 issue, for the first time, we had to plan our classes 3 months in advance. Thank you for your interest in our cooking class!

I gave a radio interview with WAKR (93.5 FM/ 1590 AM) about my research on romantic gift sharing on social media. In this study, we compared Asians and Western participants and examine their likelihood of sharing romantic gifts on social media. We found that interdependent self construals (Asians) are more likely to share romantic gifts on Facebook and Instagram, but not on Twitter.

We found that the motivations driving interdependents’ behavior also changed with the platform: they posted gifts on Facebook because they felt the gifts portrayed their self-identity among peers, while posting on Instagram was driven by a desire to flaunt their social status.

This paper was published in Computers in Human Behavior (see the article here). For more information about this research, please contact me at schinchana@uakron.edu.

The article was also mentioned in Phys.org (see the article HERE), Techcodex.com (see the article HERE), Moneytrainingclub.com (see the article HERE).

Our #QuarantineCooking class was featured as a cover story in Medina Weekly News last week. Thank you for your interest in our cooking classes story. We truly enjoy teaching these classes and are very blessed to get to know many amazing people through these classes.

To read the full story, click HERE.