As the spring semester draws to a close, several UMSL M.A. students are wrapping up their Master’s Theses. Students can choose to complete a thesis as their final, capstone experience within the graduate program. Doing so is a rewarding, but challenging, undertaking. Students have to choose a research topic, investigate what has been done on it before, design a new research study that has the potential to expand upon what is known about the topic, carry out the research, write it up, and then defend their work in front of a committee of three faculty members.
We invited some of this year’s graduates to provide a little bit of information about what their projects were about. The first student is Toni Rowell, whose work was titled “Natural Hair: A Content Analysis of Black Hair Style and Texture on YouTube Videos.” Here’s what she had to say:
My name is Toni Rowell and I obtained my undergraduate degree in the field of Communications at UMSL in the winter of 2008. In 2010, I decided to come back to UMSL and get my master’s degree in Communication. This past semester I wrote a thesis on hair and Black women. Within a society, the dominant ideology about aesthetics is instilled in individuals at a very early age. Hegemonic standards concerning the subject of hair style and texture has been an ongoing debate in the Black community for decades. A content analysis of videos on the video-sharing website YouTube was conducted to examine perceptions on African American women’s hair style, the relationship between the perceptions on hair style and gender, and the function of African American women’s’ hair styles as a status symbol. The sample consisted of 150 YouTube videos generated by using the keywords, “hair and Black women.” The results that the research yielded suggest that individuals have started to reject hegemonically defined standards concerning the issue of hair and redefine it based on personal preference. Though writing a thesis and conducting research is extremely time consuming and challenging, I am glad I chose this graduation route. I learned to perfect my skills in critical thinking, research methods and most of all I got insight on a subject that interests me.
