Various forms of media have contributed to and shaped negative perception of immigrants and refugees in the United States. These perceptions may contribute to dangerous stereotyping, which may impact policy and the daily life of immigrants in the United States. Various factors must be considered when analyzing media, such as the type of media, language used, consumption, and the reaction of viewers. This thesis focuses on AZcentral, an Arizona news source, and how it portrays immigrants versus the commentary from an immigrant here in Arizona. First it is important to look at time periodization of the portrayal of immigrants and how it has changed through technology mediums. The information obtained by looking at these periods provide specific terms and content to look for when collecting sources for the podcast. In the podcast, AZcentral and the interviewee stories are compared to show how different or similar they may be. Through this, the audience should be making their own conclusions to show accurate AZcentral is portraying the immigrant experience.

Our thesis project is a 5-person group thesis that was created over the span of two years. In the summer of 2020, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, our group first met and discussed our shared interests in mask-wearing and individual factors that we each thought had significant impacts on mask-wearing among Barrett students. We each decided on factors that we wanted to investigate and subsequently split into three main groups based on our interests: culture and geography, medical humanities, and medical and psychological conditions. Despite these different interests, we continued to treat our thesis as a five-person project rather than three different projects. We then constructed a survey, followed by several focus group sessions and interview questions to ask Honors students. In January 2021, we received approval from the IRB for our project, and we quickly finalized our survey, focus group and interview questions. In February 2021, we sent out our survey via the Barrett Digest, which we kept open for approximately one month. We also sent out advertisements for our survey via social media platforms such as Twitter and Discord. Following completion of the survey, we contacted all of the respondents who stated that they were interested in participating in focus groups and interviews. Focus groups and interviews were conducted in March and April 2021, and results were analyzed and correlated to our individual subtopics. Each of the focus group and interview participants received $50 each, and three randomly-selected students who completed the survey received $25 each. From April 2021 until April 2022, we analyzed our results, came to conclusions based on our initial topics of interest, and constructed our paper.