Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Cowl - V.81 - N.14 - Jan 26, 2017

The Cowl

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 81, Number 14 - January 26, 2017. 24 pages.

Infusing Critical Thinking Into Communication Courses, James P. Dimock, Kristen P. Treinen, Daniel Cronn-Mills, Robert S. Jersak

Daniel Cronn-Mills, Ph.D.

The importance of critical thinking is generally recognized by educators and during the past 20 years numerous initiatives have been taken to improve critical thinking. Although research demonstrates courses in communication study can have a positive impact on critical thinking skills, we argue that instruction in critical thinking can be more explicitly covered in basic communication courses. This article details our efforts to infuse critical thinking into an entrylevel communication course and outlines a guide to help communication teachers integrate critical thinking into their courses.

The Cowl - V.81 - N.13 - Jan 19, 2017

The Cowl

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 81, Number 13 - January 19, 2017. 28 pages.

Communication Through Social Technologies: A Study Of Israeli Women, Jeretta Horn Nord 405-747-0320, Dafni Biran Achituv, Joanna Paliszkiewicz

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Social technologies have changed the way we communicate allowing users to interact, share knowledge, reach out to friends and family, keep up with the news, and even promote and support a business. A study of Israeli women was conducted to determine how social technologies platforms — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ — are used and the benefits realized. Women worldwide face challenges including economic, educational, health, and political. Israel women, like women in every other country in the world, are challenged with gender inequity. Do women who use social technologies believe that these platforms provide empowerment leading to greater …

A Phenomenological Investigation Of Sport And Fandom Through Hans-Georg Gadamer And Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alexander Regina

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to uncover the phenomenological and communicative roots of sport fandom from the fan perspective, taking into account the many ways in which fans come to contact sport and integrate corresponding experiences into their own lives and sense of being in the world. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are used to understand the conventions of play that manifest in sport, leading not only to the co-creation of the game experience due to the intertwining of spectators and players but also to the interplay of temporal realms that leads to what Gadamer calls the fusion of horizons. Through …

"Can You Hail Me Now?": Brand, Identity, And Althusserian Ideological Interpellation, Jenna Lo Castro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A surge in the role of branding within marketing practices has influenced an

industry transformation. A review of recent literature suggests that brand and the branding process have become integral in sustaining and amplifying organizations. This has been particularly influenced by Integrated Marketing Communication’s (IMC) espousal of being a consumer-driven process. As such, this project seeks to explore the current state of branding practices through the vision of French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser. Althusser’s philosophy inspects the human capacity to exercise autonomous decision-making and highlights the influence of social structures upon individuals. Through the Althusserian constructs of ideology and interpellation, …

Showing And Telling: A Technique For Teaching Delivery Skills, Justin J. Rudnick

Communication Studies Department Publications

This single-class activity provides a framework for instructors to “coach” students to use various delivery skills for presentational speaking. By rotating student groups through three stations, the activity cultivates the students’ understanding of direct eye contact, hand gestures, and vocal volume and articulation. Students prepare a story to share in groups and actively practice each skill while the instructor demonstrates acceptable standards. After completing a debrief discussion, students are better equipped to practice delivery skills with a frame of reference for how those skills should be cultivated in class.

How Are Non-Numerical Prognostic Statements Interpreted And Are They Subject To Positive Bias?, Anne Moyer, Samantha Siess, Sumeet Bhinder

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Objectives: Frank, clear, communication with family members of terminally-ill or incapacitated patients has important implications for well being, satisfaction with care, and sound decision making. However, numerical prognostic statements, particularly more negative ones, have been found to be interpreted in a positively-biased manner. Less precise non-numerical statements, preferred by physicians, and particularly statements using threatening terms (“dying” vs. “surviving”) may be even more subject to such biases. Methods: Participants (N = 200) read non-numerical prognostic statements framed in terms of dying or surviving and indicated their interpretation of likelihood of survival. Results: Even the most extreme statements were not interpreted …

Assessing The Applicability Of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions For Global 500 Corporations' Facebook Profiles And Content, Kevin D. Lo, Richard D. Waters, N. Christensen

Organization, Leadership, and Communication

This research examines how Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions are reflected on the official corporate Facebook pages from 259 organizations on Fortune magazine’s Global 500 list. This research is grounded in original indices to measure the six dimensions across Facebook’s “About Us” section, the textual updates provided by the companies, as well as the media that they share (photographs and videos). This is the first attempt to create a conceptualization of Hofstede’s dimensions for organizational social media use. The results paint a mixed picture indicating that the global nature of these corporations is echoed in a somewhat similar overall presence on …

Effect Of Negotiator Active Listening Skills On Crisis (Hostage) Negotiations, Karen Guszkowski

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of active listening skills on perpetrator response style in crisis negotiations. The extant literature boasts the utility of negotiations in crisis situations for law enforcement that came about in response to cataclysmic events such as the Attica Prison Riots (1971), Munich Massacre (1972), and the Williamsburg incident (1973). Various crisis negotiation models assert the importance of active listening skills in crisis negotiations; given the recent and voluminous media attention on police, this research aimed to provide further support for a cultural shift in police departments around the country to provide …

Snapping Live: Exploring The Effects Of Ephemerality Nature Of Messaging In Social Media Settings, Dania Aljouhi

ETD Archive

Ephemeral messaging apps such as Snapchat has become a very popular app with young adults. The Snapchat application defined as an instant messaging app that allows its users to take pictures, videos, add a captions, doodles and send the content to a friend or add it to the user’s story. Importantly, “the snaps” will self-destruct after a specified period of time. Further investigation regarding the effects of using ephemeral nature of messaging in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is explored in the theoretical framework of Hyperpersonal. This study was designed to examine the role of ephemeral nature of messaging in social media …

An Investigation Into How Degree Of Distraction With Mobile Device Users Influences Attention To Detail, Jeffery Craig Allen

ETD Archive

Previous research has indicated that the overuse of mobile devices by youths, especially at work or in class, can be disruptive to others, and be detrimental to the individual engaged in this activity in regards to task performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between distraction due to use of mobile devices, while engaged in a task, and subsequent recall of details being presented during exposure to a stimulus.

Due to the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of mobile devices in today's youth culture, and in our society as a whole, understanding and explaining what personality types …

A Study Of The Influence Of Branded Messages On Non-Branded Food Items When Presented To 10 To 14-Year-Old Children, Cassandra J. Chinn

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Children are more likely to create bonds with foods based on the environmental, socioeconomic and familial influences in their lives during early development stages. They gravitate to foods that are familiar to them and that are positioned with familiarity, creating an opportunity for branded food items to create more of a space in their psyche as part of their identity. Current research looks to reposition those energy-dense foods (commodity vegetables) that can often times be left unbranded, to see if immediate interest in the food items changes. Results found no significance to confirm nor deny a positive correlation in interest …

Comm 454: Communication And Health Disparities—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Angela L. Palmer-Wackerly

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

The current portfolio examines the second iteration of a new course in the Department of Communication Studies, Comm 454: Communication and Health Disparities. The primary goal of the course is for students to understand what health disparities are and how communication (on micro, meso, and macro levels) helps to create, reinforce, and improve these health disparities. Student learning was measured through the evaluation of the above course objective through four assignments: a short reflection paper, 2 teaching lessons, a research paper, and a health disparities communication campaign/intervention. The short reflection paper was examined through thematic analysis, while the latter three …

Primary Goals, Information-Giving And Men's Understanding: A Qualitative Study Of Australian And Uk Doctors' Varied Communication About Psa Screening, Kristen Pickles, Stacy M. Carter, Lucie Rychetnik, Kirsten Mccaffery, Vikki A. Entwistle

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Objectives (1) To characterise variation in general practitioners' (GPs') accounts of communicating with men about prostate cancer screening using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, (2) to characterise GPs' reasons for communicating as they do and (3) to explain why and under what conditions GP communication approaches vary. Study design and setting A grounded theory study. We interviewed 69 GPs consulting in primary care practices in Australia (n=40) and the UK (n=29). Results GPs explained their communication practices in relation to their primary goals. In Australia, three different communication goals were reported: to encourage asymptomatic men to either have a PSA …

Communicatively Constructing The Bright And Dark Sides Of Hope: Family Caregivers’ Experiences During End Of Life Cancer Care, Jody Koenig Kellas, Katherine M. Castle, Alexis Johnson, Marlene Z. Cohen

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

(1) Background: The communication of hope is complicated, particularly for family caregivers in the context of cancer who struggle to maintain hope for themselves and their loved ones in the face of terminality. In order to understand these complexities, the current study examines the bright and dark sides of how hope is communicated across the cancer journey from the vantage point of bereaved family caregivers; (2) Methods: We analyzed interviews with bereaved family caregivers using qualitative thematic and case oriented strategies to identify patterns in the positive and negative lived experiences when communicating about hope at the end of life; …

Assessing The Efficacy Of Communication Interventions For Shifting Public Perceptions Of Park Benefits, Betty Weiler, Brent Moyle, Isabelle D. Wolf, Kelly De Bie, Monica Torland

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

One way national parks can sustain their societal relevance and ensure ongoing political and community support is through conscious and deliberate repositioning. This study investigates the potential for psychologically repositioning national parks using persuasive communication designed to shift public perceptions of the benefits of visitor experiences in parks. The experimental communication interventions were selected to target benefits where gaps were identified between the perceptions of park managers and the parks' constituent publics. Using a pre-post design on 1,055 respondents split evenly across two Australian states, the experiment revealed that the website and the video used as interventions were highly effective …

Job Searches In Liaison Departments: Opportunities For Outreach And Inreach, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Liaison librarians are uniquely positioned to provide a library introduction to job candidates in their liaison departments. This outreach identifies important resources that might attract candidates, showcases the library to them and to liaison departments, and helps to solidify a library or library system's suite of offerings to a discipline.

The Language Of Dystopia, Sidney Woodson Peery

Senior Projects Spring 2017

The dystopian genre in literature is not a happy genre. We are not drawn to works of dystopian fiction because we expect to be satisfied: there are no “fuzzy feelings” in books like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Rather, we are fascinated by the thought processes and the questions that these nightmarish societies inspire. This thesis explores one such question, namely: what is the relationship between language, the individual, and society at large? Through an analysis of the three pivotal dystopian books above, I show how this relationship plays a key role in …

Formative Assessment To Develop Oral Communication Competency Using Youtube: Self- And Peer Assessment In Engineering, Sasha Nikolic, David Stirling, Montserrat Ros

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Obtaining oral communication competency is an important skill for engineering students to prepare them for interacting and working in any professional setting. For engineers, it is also important to be able to present technical information to non-technical audiences. To ensure oral competency, a non-graded formative assessment approach using video with self- and peer assessment was introduced into a final-year engineering thesis course. A low workload approach was used due to growing student numbers and higher pressures on academic staff. A quasi-experimental design was used to investigate the differences between traditional delivery, self-assessment and combined self-assessment with peer feedback. The study …

Comic Book Project As A Tool For Teaching Multimodal Argument And Fostering Critical Thinking Skills: Implications For The L2 Writing Classroom, Hee-Seung Kang

Publications and Scholarship

One of my major responsibilities as Director of ESL Writing Program at Case Western Reserve University was to place incoming international students in the appropriate writing class based on their placement essay each fall. Overseeing the placement of 150-170 second language (L2) students in a few days was overwhelming and daunting at times, but it gave me a better sense of L2 students’ challenges in academic writing. The placement essay prompt aimed to gauge students’ academic reading and writing skills by asking them to make an argument based on a reading excerpt. Incoming freshmen were asked to summarize, respond to …

Feeding Our Identities:Buzzfeed Quizzes As A Tool For Personal Identification In The Social Digital Age, Sarah M. Quinn

Communication & Media Studies Theses

Specializing in “listicle” media and personality identification quizzes, BuzzFeed is enormously popular among college students. Audiences apply the identities they are ascribed through Buzzfeed quizzes to inform their communication within a discourse community, and as individual expression. This paper examines college students’ discourse that surrounds their use of BuzzFeed identity quizzes. The goal of this study is to understand how the consumption of these quizzes constructs personal identities and informs the communication of these identities.

The Effects Of Online Social Networking On Social Connectedness And Friendship Quality Among Adolescents, Christine Klinkhoff

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

The emergence of social networking sites (SNSs) has led to marked shifts in the ways that individuals communicate, share, and acquire information. Present-day adolescents are the first generation to grow up with these technologies and are among the most frequent users (Shapiro & Margolin, 2014). Although the technological landscape continues to evolve, the impact it has on aspects of adolescent development remains poorly understood. This study examined the possible relationship between SNS use and perceptions of social connectedness and friendship quality in a sample of Canadian and American adolescents. A self-report questionnaire developed by the author was utilized to examine …

Reflected Academic Self-Efficacy: How Teacher Behavior Influences Self-Efficacy In The Classroom, John Martin Wildauer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in their ability to complete tasks. The model social cognitive theory provides for studying self-efficacy shows that communicative sources of efficacy expectation yield self-efficacy in individuals by means of cognitive processing. The current study examines these communicative components of self-efficacy in the classroom more closely by marrying social cognitive theory and symbolic interactionism. Analysis of data from a sample of 69 college students found that student perceptions of their teacher’s beliefs about their ability in the classroom (reflected academic self-efficacy) have a direct relationship to their perceptions of their own abilities (academic self-efficacy). More …

Communication Strategies Used During Organizational Change In A Health Care Organization, Amber Rose Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

More than 4.9 million businesses exist in the United States, and leaders within these businesses have to acclimate to change. Clear and effective communication is vital to the success of an organization. According to scholars and health care leaders focusing on strategies to communicate change during organizational change is a critical aspect of sustainability and profitability. The conceptual framework of this study was communication theory. The purpose of this single case study was to explore successful strategies that some health care leaders used to communicate during organizational change in a health care organization in El Paso, Texas. The data collection …

Information Communication Technology Management As A Gdp Growth Contributor Within Arab League Nations, Jamal Alexander Thompson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The general problem addressed in this study was Arab League nations' over-reliance on fossil fuels as a gross domestic product (GDP) growth driver. Arab League nations that depend primarily on fossil fuel production lack alternative resources for growth in times of fossil fuel usage or price decline. Overdependence on fossil fuels has led to minimal development in other economic sectors, primarily in skilled domestic labor, and to a high dependency on foreign skilled labor for skilled domestic jobs. The purpose of this study was to examine to what extent information communication technology (ICT) management can be a viable GDP growth …

Waves Of Feminism And The Media, Tayllor Blair Johnson

Lewis Honors College Capstone Collection

The feminist movement has gone through many different stages, three to be exact. Each stage, or as they are called in the academic world, “waves”, had its own history and unique defining qualities. Media played a role in the movement in the past, and continue to do so today. My research focused on how the two, feminism and media, intertwine with one another and the affect the movement had, and continues to have, on mainstream media. With the recent news of sexual assault allegations in the media industry, the two seem to go hand-in-hand, now more than ever before.

The …

Exploring Leaders' Strategies For Employee Engagement In The South African Mining Industry, Le-Marlie Marais

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research suggests that disengaged employees have contributed to the 28.5% reduction in the mining industry's contribution to South African gross domestic product. Some South African mining leaders lack strategies for engaging employees. Using the employee engagement framework, the purpose of this single case study was to explore successful strategies that South African mining leaders use to engage employees. The target population was mining leaders, purposefully selected because of their success with engaging employees at a typical South African mining company. Data collection was through face-to-face interviews with 4 leaders; a focus group interview with 9 employees; and a review of …

Gender Differences In Discussion Strategies Of Asynchronous Online Undergraduate Psychology Major Students, Shawna Marie Burtis

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Numerous studies have focused on gender differences in communication in various learning settings and have found that men and women typically communicate in different ways; however, no studies have directly investigated undergraduate psychology major students. Based on symbolic convergence theory, a survey design was in this quantitative study to examine gender differences in online discussion strategies among undergraduate psychology student majors at online universities. Focusing on 4 asynchronous online discussion strategies, the research questions addressed gender differences in discussion strategies while controlling for students' previous experience with online learning and level of study in their current program. A convenience sample …

Consensus In Anesthesia Handoff Reporting, Robin Lee Anselm

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite some improvement, no consensus exists to perfect quality in anesthesia handoff practice and policy. This quality improvement project was designed to assist a local anesthesia and perioperative workforce questioning the quality of its current handoff. Theories and models used to inform the project included the Inter-Professional Team Collaborative, Lewin's change theory, the continuous quality improvement theory, and the knowledge to action model. The communication assessment tool (CAT) functioned as a needs assessment yielding a gap in handoff practice of 25 participants. The CAT also served as the post project evaluation survey. The situation, background, assessment, and recommendation (SBAR) tool …