Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons^™

Building Financial Peace: A Conflict Resolution Framework For Money Arguments, Sarah D. Asebedo

Journal of Financial Therapy

This paper presents a well-known and highly utilized conflict resolution framework from the mediation profession and demonstrates how to apply this framework to money arguments. While conflict resolution skills have been identified as important to communication within the financial planning context, an integrated conflict resolution framework has yet to be recognized and understood within the financial planning literature. This paper aims to fill this gap. Ultimately, both mental health professionals and financial planners can benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to resolving money arguments by combining training in personal financial strategies and conflict resolution principles.

The Role Of Liberian Community Organizations In The Integration Of Liberian Immigrants: A Case Study Of Immigrants In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Solomon M. Muin

Capstone Collection

Immigrants that settled in a dominant new culture face challenges during the process of acculturation. Though minority culture is always at the disadvantaged end of acculturation in most cases, most research done on acculturation in the West mostly focused on the impact of immigrants on their societies, or on ways of strengthening integration in the host countries. As this continues, the dominant culture role and importance of the majority culture is what influence most narratives and not much is seeing from the minority culture. Most research on acculturation in the United States, for example, placed more emphasis on the Hispanic …

Fortaleza's Immigrant Song: Portrait-Narratives And An Identity Needs Analysis Of Recent Immigrants' Lived Experiences, Carl Weitz-Santiago

Capstone Collection

This inquiry sheds light on the personal stories and lived experiences of a group of recent immigrants currently living in Fortaleza, the sprawling capital of the Northeastern state of Ceará, Brazil. Utilizing a theoretical framework guided by “Epistemologies of the South,” ethnographic principles, and constructivist grounded theory, this capstones presents five first person portrait-narratives highlighting intimate details of project participants’ lives prior to immigrating, and uncovers four persistent and recurrent themes expressed by project participants: (1) language and communication, (2) professional opportunity, (3) personal growth, and (4) “saudade” and belongingness.

Through the lens of Johan Galtung’s Basic Needs Approach, …

The Captivity Of Opportunity: The Conversation Surrounding Church-Going Hispanic Immigrants, Nicolet Hopper Bell

Master's Theses

Immigration is a long-standing topic of discussion in the United States. Hispanic immigrants, or families of Hispanic immigrants, living in America face unique challenges. Through focus group interviews, participants from a predominantly Hispanic Protestant church narrated their experience of living in the United States. Guided grounded theory data analysis revealed three categories and 14 subcategories, or themes of conversation, surrounding this hot topic. Participants shed light on the distinctive challenges they faced, how these challenges affected them, and how they attempted to overcome these difficulties. By exploring these results through the lens of social stigma theory (Goffman, 2009) and intergroup …

Offline Social Relationships And Online Cancer Communication: Effects Of Social And Family Support On Online Social Network Building, Namkoong Kang, Dhavan V. Shah, David H. Gustafson

Community & Leadership Development Faculty Publications

This study investigates how social support and family relationship perceptions influence breast cancer patients’ online communication networks in a computer-mediated social support (CMSS) group. To examine social interactions in the CMSS group, we identified two types of online social networks: open and targeted communication networks. The open communication network reflects group communication behaviors (i.e., one-to-many or “broadcast” communication) in which the intended audience is not specified; in contrast, the targeted communication network reflects interpersonal discourses (i.e., one-to-one or directed communication) in which the audience for the message is specified. The communication networks were constructed by tracking CMSS group usage data …

Understanding How Intentionally Unplugging From Cell Phones Shapes Interpersonal Relationships And The Undergraduate College Experience, Jadelin P. Felipe

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of what motivated college students—the Unplugged Students—to intentionally use their cell phones less and how they understood the impact that unplugging had on their interpersonal relationships and college experience. Nine undergraduate college students from four private schools were interviewed in one-on-one semi- structured interviews. These students, considered non-users, provided a particularly useful perspective as these students made a conscious choice to counteract social norms and experienced both being plugged in and unplugged. Cell phones and the act of unplugging proved to make up a complex and more nuanced topic than …

A Discourse Analytic Approach To Accusations Of Infidelity In Romantic Couples' Natural Conversations, Neill Korobov

The Qualitative Report

This study uses a discourse analytic approach to examine how twenty young adult heterosexual romantic couples (ages 19-26) formulate accusations and insinuations of infidelity in their unstructured natural conversations. The analyses demonstrate how accusations of infidelity among romantic partners work to pursue and avert relational trouble. They indirectly index local interactional breaches that may, if left unattended, lead to non-affiliative interactional outcomes. Unlike mainstream psychological work that would treat talk about infidelity as a sign of emotional insecurity or jealousy, the present study posits that accusations of infidelity may function as a brief but effective way for one partner to …

Playing Out: The Importance Of The City As A Playground For Skateboard And Parkour, Mike Jeffries, Sebastian Messer, Jon Swords

Occasional Paper Series

The authors document young skaters and freerunners’ improvisational use of public space and the development of their interpersonal relationships and learning.

Enhanced Participation: Creating Opportunities For Youth Leadership Development, Clara Waloff

Occasional Paper Series

Demonstrates how young people in an arts-based after-school program develop leadership.

Changing Through Laughter With “Laughter For A Change”, Laurel J. Felt, Ed Greenberg

Occasional Paper Series

This paper describes systematic observation, research, and analysis of Laughter for a Change (L4C)’s 2011–2012 after-school improv workshop, revealing the program’s multiple impacts. Our data suggest that improvising creates a “safe space,” a supportive context in which participants feel empowered to take risks and play freely.

Mapping The Social Across Lived Experiences: Relational Geographies And After-School Time, Louai Rahal, Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur

Occasional Paper Series

This article is divided into two sections. The first offers a theoretical frame that enables key concepts to be defined and discussed. The second reviews current approaches to methodology that enable researchers to study the movement of youth over time and across space in an effort to examine the learning that is occasioned by different relationships. Here, we offer ways to begin thinking about mapping social relationships across lived experiences. The article ends with a brief conclusion, in which we note the significance of documenting the developing experiences of children and youth, mediated by social relationships, and the necessity of …

Love On - The Life Of A Suicide Survivor: A Performance Autoethnographic Study, Patricia R. Wheeler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Suicide touches the lives of millions of people each year in this country alone, yet conversations about suicide loss and survival after a loss remain taboo and often do not happen. The story I performed for this performance autoethnographic study centers on my life as a survivor of suicide. It provides a starting point for dialog regarding trauma, grief, and suicide loss. The narrative was constructed directly following the sudden death of my father, which had a direct effect on my ability to produce artistic work. The development, staging and performance of the story were altered to account for the …

Towards Embracing A Critical Love Ethic In Community Development: A Case Study From Nicaragua, Patrick Barnosky

Sustainability and Social Justice

This research is based on a community sanitation project from Cuajchillo Dos, Nicaragua, in which I served as a field volunteer for Walu International and simultaneously conducted interviews and focus groups with project participants.The goal of this research is to determine to what extent dialogues that took place in this project were based on an ethic of critical love, which is has two primary components: relationality and critical social consciousness. The main findings from this research were that the essential components of dialogue based on a critical love ethic are: listening deeply and sharing openly, building trust and relationships, entering …

Navigating Cape Town: A Poetic Cartography, Sam Lin-Sommer

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Cape Town has long been the site of conflicts over urban space. This study explored the potentials of a place-based poetry workshop as a tool for critically engaging with the urban environment. With the assistance of a well-established local poet, the researcher facilitated a poetry workshop that brought three young and emerging poets to contested public spaces including District Six, Company Gardens, and Church Square. After the workshop, poets submitted their writing to the researcher, who compiled and narrated a poem that showcased the voices of these poets while drawing attention to salient ideas evoked by the poets’ work. The …

How The Internet Is Used By The Millennial Generation And Its Impact On Family Interaction, Kendra Myers

Masters Theses

The purpose of the current study was to examine how Internet technology is used by the Millennial Generation and how it impacts family interaction. A questionnaire developed by the author was posted online and the final sample consisted of 92 participants, 13 men and 79 women. The average age of the participants was 27.97 (SD = 4.46). Findings showed that that the Millennial Generation used the Internet multiple times a day and for many reasons which were sorted into six distinct themes: 1) research/information seeking, 2) work, 3) social media/communication (besides email), 4) academics, 5) email, and 6) personal/entertainment. …

A Study Of The Success Of Group Formation In Virtual Teams Using Computer-Mediated Communications, Eliel Melón-Ramos

CCE Theses and Dissertations

In the digital domain, virtual teams within organizations and corporations are becoming common. Restructuring an organization or corporation is vital because competition and globalization are increasing. In this era of globalization, distributed working groups need to develop a competitive advantage in these ever-changing environments. Historically, teams had experienced problems stemming from geographical and temporal limitations. With the increase of technology in telecommunications, organizations are increasingly forming virtual teams, which have become critical to the survival of nearly any corporate entity.

Virtual teams have some of the same problems that regular teams have. One of the key challenges is the method …