Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons^™

Envy Influences Interpersonal Dynamics And Team Performance: Roles Of Gender Congruence And Collective Team Identification, Kenneth Tai, Sejin Keem, Ki Young Lee, Eugene Kim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Our research extends past envy research by considering how envy and gender congruence shape interpersonal dynamics at the dyadic level and their bottom-up effects for team performance. Integrating social comparison theory and social identity theory, we examine when and how dyadic level envy influences team performance. Using time-lagged data from 428 dyads of 161 employees in 51 teams, our results show that envious employees are likely to engage in interpersonal deviance directed toward envied team members and that envied employees are likely to seek advice from envious team members. Gender congruence further influences these relationships, with different patterns for males …

A Report From The 2023 National Communication Association Annual Convention, Mick Brewer

Title III Professional Development Reports

This blog post presents a brief review of activity featured at the 2023 National Communication Association's annual conference, held in National Harbor from November 16-19, with the theme "Freedom."

The Socialization Of Social Media: Examining The Impact Of Social Media Use On Interpersonal Skills During Face-To-Face Interaction, Tenille Thomas

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Research has well established that the use of social networking sites (SNS) has increased accessibility and connectivity to people with limitless boundaries. SNS have progressively become the preferred source of communication. However, often overlooked is the impact SNS use has on face-to-face interactions, specifically on interpersonal skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between SNS use and face-to-face interaction. Specifically, this study examines the participant’s ability to recognize and interpret nonverbal cues with increased SNS use. This was a correlational study utilizing a quantitative design of self-reported questionnaires. A total of 178 participants, ranging in age …

Medical Tourism & Communication, Alicia Mason

Faculty Submissions

Medical tourism (MT), sometimes referred to as health tourism or medical travel, involves both the treatment of illness and the facilitation of wellness, with travel. Medical tourism is a multifaceted and multiphase process involving many agents and actors that requires careful planning and execution. The coordinated process involves the biomedical, transportation, tourism, and leisure industries. From the communication perspective, the process can be viewed as a 5-stage model consisting of the: (a) orientation, (b) preparation, (c) experiential and treatment, (d) convalescence, and (e) reflection phases. Medical tourism is uniquely situated in a nexus of academic literature related to communication, business …

Walking The Walk: Ex-Prisoners, Lived Experience, And The Delivery Of Restorative Justice, Allely Albert

Articles

Although the role of prisoners and ex-prisoners has recently received significant attention in restorative justice research, the literature typically treats them as the ‘offending’ party within restorative justice processes. This article instead focuses on ex-prisoners as facilitators of restorative justice, highlighting their ability to lead such programmes. Using a case study from Northern Ireland, the article examines the way that experiences of incarceration have directly influenced practitioners’ skills and their ability to uphold restorative justice principles. It is contended that qualities developed and honed in the prison environment ultimately translate to unique characteristics that can improve the restorative process. As …

Discursive Struggles Reflected In The Communication Of Conservative Christian Parents And Their Adult Children With Differing Religious Beliefs And Values, Braedon G. Worman

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Nearly half of American adults no longer believe in their childhood faiths (Pew Research Center, 2015). The steady decline of Christianity could have considerable impacts on family life (Pew Research Center, 2022). From a postmodern critical perspective and guided by Relational Dialectics Theory 2.0, the researcher sought to discern how conservative Christian parents and their adult children with differing religious beliefs and values communicated when they discussed these differences, as well as to identify the discourses that informed and were reflected in their talk and illustrate how these discourses interplayed and animated the meaning of participants’ Christian family identities. The …

Outbreak Communication: Exploring The Relationships Between Health Information Seeking Behaviors, Vested Interests, And Covid-19 Knowledge In U.S. Midwest Populations, Alicia Mason, Josh Compton, Elizabeth Spencer, Kaitlin Barnett

Faculty Submissions

On February 15, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director, General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated at a Munich Security Conference, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” (Zarocostas, 2020, p. 676). The term ‘infodemic’ refers to the onslaught of both accurate and inaccurate health information surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept of an ‘infodemic’ was quickly integrated into mass media, popular culture (i.e., documentaries, podcasts), and eventually scholarly literature. In response to COVID-19, health communication scholars have centered on understanding specific messaging strategies such as the use of fear appeals (Stolow et al., 2020), nature of advertising …

Relational Effects Of Romantic Partner’S Perceived Parasocial Romantic Attachment With Pornography, Jessica Journeay, Megan A. Vendemia, Rebecca (Riva) Tukachinsky Forster

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

An online experiment investigated heterosexual women’s responses to their romantic partners’ pornography use. Specifically, we examined how a perceived parasocial (i.e., entirely fanciful, one-sided) versus social (i.e., reciprocal) interaction with a porn actress, as well as a perceived parasocial romantic attachment to a porn actress, may pose a relational threat to one’s actual romantic relationship. Results revealed that perceptions of infidelity and jealousy were dampened by women’s belief that their romantic partner had a weak (vs. stronger) parasocial romantic attachment to and parasocial (vs. social) interaction with a porn actress. These findings advance our understanding of the effects of pornography …

Fantasy Escapism: Using Role-Playing Games To Explore Mental Health And Gender Identity, Aidan Cipolla

English Summer Fellows

This project analyzes how escapism through the use of role-playing games can be used as a coping mechanism for those struggling with a variety of topics, including gender dysphoria and mental health issues. The project takes an ethnographic approach to data gathering, consisting of interviews with a small group of Dungeons and Dragons / video game players, and personal anecdotes regarding the author’s experience with escapism.

“Some Days Are Much Holier Than Others”: Relational Uncertainty And Partner Influence In Christian Dating Couples' Sexual Intimacy Negotiation, Arielle Leonard Hodges, Jennifer L. Bevan

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

When intrafaith couples' religion strictly prohibits premarital sexual intercourse, negotiating sexual intimacy can become a multilayered process of identity negotiation that compounds the difficulty of sexual communication. Through the lens of relational turbulence theory, this study explored how devout Christian couples negotiate sexual intimacy by reanalyzing qualitative interview data the first author collected in 2017 from 16 self-identified Christians (8 heterosexual couples). Seven themes revealed how relational uncertainty, partner interference, and partner facilitation manifested in the context of sexual intimacy negotiation. Themes of relational uncertainty experience and prevention included assumption of shared values, relationship talk, and sexual behaviors …

Sexual Self-Concept, Communication Privacy Management, & Relational Dialetcics Among Post-Partum Women, Mary Pitts

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Sexual communication research has long focused on adolescents, though a growing area in need of focus revolves around sexual confidence and view of self, or sexual self-concept. Similarly, research on motherhood often lacks a deep view into postpartum women’s feelings and experiences and how they communicate about them with other people. Relational Dialectics Theory and Communication Privacy Management were used to evaluate how postpartum women experiences changes in their sexual self-concept and how they subsequently communicate about those changes with other people. Through interviewing 10 women through semi-structured interviews surrounding their experiences with sexual self-concept and motherhood, themes connecting open …

Building Before: Community Resiliency As Emergency Management, Alexandria Rinne

Honors Theses

This project seeks to address gaps in emergency preparedness education related to tornado response. Through an examination of current research about best practices for tornado emergency management response and an examination of the needs of FEMA Regions 7 and 8, the author has identified key strategies and stakeholders to increase positive outcome through building community engagement and resiliency. Three presentations were created for delivery to key community stakeholders—local government officials; non-governmental organizations, social networks, and associations; and individual private citizens. The project offers an overview of background research and provides presentation slide decks, scripts, and discussion guides, all created with …

“Evolving Homes, Not Revolving Doors”: Examining Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Foster Parents’ Discursive Construction And Negotiation Of Identity Layers And Identity Gaps, Lucas Hackenburg

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The United States foster care system serves more than half a million children each year (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [DHH], 2023). The purpose of this study was to examine how LGB foster parents discursively construct and navigate their identities in the fostering context. The researcher undertook in-depth interviews with 18 LGB people who were currently fostering or had previously fostered at least one child from the foster care system. The researcher analyzed the interview data using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis (2019).

Consistent with the Communication Theory of Identity (Hecht, 1993; 2015; Hecht & Phillips, 2022), …

Norms Of Public Argumentation And The Ideals Of Correctness And Participation, Frank Zenker, Jan Albert Van Laar, Bianca Cepollaro, Anca Gâță, Martin Hinton, Colin Guthrie King, Brian N. Larson, Marcin Lewinski, Christoph Lumer, Steve Oswald, Maciej Pichlak, Blake D. Scott, Mariusz Urbanski, Jean H.M. Wagemans

Faculty Scholarship

Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. …

Closing The Gap Between College Students: An Intergroup Dialogue Program To Reach Understanding And Reduction Of Disparities, Lilly Zhou

Honors Theses

The goals of the intergroup dialogue program are exploration and collective action. The goal of exploration is to spread awareness by presenting the situation. Several students are not aware that disparities between students exist, so this dialogue provided awareness of the issue. With increased understanding of each other, collective action can be taken. Actions by a small number of students are still steps taken to reduce the gap between the financially supported and not financially supported students. Action can look like spreading awareness of the issue, advocating for policy changes, and more.

The structure of the intergroup dialogue program required …

Where The Action Is: Positioning Matters In Interaction, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

Position matters. As a conversation analyst examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – I constantly monitor for, and organize my collections of target phenomena around structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? Because conversation analysis (CA) is primarily focused upon action sequences, I use CA methods to examine the ways in which participants’ audible utterances and visible body-behaviors accomplish particular social actions due at least in part to their positioning within a sequence of interaction – …

Depersonalizing Troubles In Institutional Interaction: Routinizing In Parent-Teacher Conferences, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it can be advantageous for professionals to treat addressed-recipients as non-unique. Examining how teachers talk about children-as-students during parent-teacher conferences, this investigation illuminates several specific interactional methods that teachers use to depersonalize the focal student’s trouble, delineating as among these the novel practice of “routinizing”—citing firsthand experience with other similar cases. Analysis demonstrates how teachers use routinizing to enact their expertise, both responsively as a vehicle for attenuating and credentialing their advice-giving to parents/caregivers, and proactively to preempt parent/caregiver resistance to their student-assessments/evaluations. This research …

Reflections Of The Bentley Ombuds, Eliane S. Markoff

Office of the Ombuds

The Ombuds Office hears your grievances and can help you resolve a conflict. Conflicts can be within yourself or between you and others, making you feel anxious, not appreciated or worse.

During the past several years at Bentley, I have been given the opportunity to mediate, conduct workshops and provide you with advice to empower you to constructively resolve conflicts on your own. It has been especially rewarding to receive feedback on the progress many of you achieved after a challenging situation. Learning that someone has taken the time to resolve a conflict, apologize for being unfair, or change behavior …

Report From The 2022 National Communication Association Annual Convention, Mick Brewer

Title III Professional Development Reports

The following is a brief descriptive report of some of the work that took place at the 2022 National Communication Association's annual convention.

Fundamentals Of Communication, 2nd Ed., Teresa Fisher

Open Educational Resources

This textbook explores human communication with a particular focus on interpersonal communication. Following a foundational chapter, subsequent chapters include examining the role of culture, identity, perception, verbal communication, nonverbal communication, and listening on interpersonal communication. The textbook also includes chapters on interpersonal relationships and conflict. The final chapter provides guidance on oral presentations. The first edition was titled "Fundamentals of Interpersonal Communication".

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Com 3077 (Interpersonal Communication), Christina Donaldson

Open Educational Resources

This course is designed to examine communication issues surrounding interaction between individuals in family, peer, work, and business contexts. Topics include effective verbal and nonverbal communication, communication and perception of self and other, interpersonal conflict resolution, family communication, friendship development, computer-mediated communication, and interpersonal communication in work and business contexts.

Columnas: The Honors Program Newsletter At Bentley University, Debayan Sen, Hailey Jennato, Gabe Holmes, Daniel Furze

Honors Program

Page 1: SOCIAL MEDIA—A VEHICLE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE OR VIRTUE SIGNALING? ~ By Debayan Sen ’23

Page 2: WILL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ROBOTICS REPLACE THE HUMAN WORKER? ~ By Hailey Jennato ’24

Page 3: HOW TO HEALTHILY COMMUNICATE IN A RELATIONSHIP: NO, NOT JUST A ROMANTIC ONE ~ By Gabe Holmes ’26

Page 4: THE W SLANT ~ By Daniel Furze ’26

A Mixed Methodological Examination Of Older Adults’ Psychological Reactance Toward Caregiving Messages From Their Adult Children, Hannah Ball, Keith Weber, Alan K. Goodboy, Christine E. Kunkle, Christa L. Lilly, Scott A. Myers

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

This study extends psychological reactance theory (PRT) to family caregiving by exploring autonomy-threatening messages adult child caregivers use to gain compliance from older adult parents. Results of focus groups and interviews with older adult care recipients (Study One) and caregivers (Study Two) corroborated three types of autonomy-threatening messages, which were used to test PRT (Study Three). Older adults (N = 281) were randomly assigned a caregiving message and answered reactance-related survey questions. Results supported serial mediation: relative to an autonomy-supporting message, two types of autonomy-threatening messages (i.e., offering directives, expressing doubt) triggered greater freedom threat, which amplified reactance. In …

Researcher And Academic Library Roles And User Beliefs In The Pandemic: Designing The Open-Access And Library Usage Scale (Oalu), Elizabeth Dezouche, Angelique Blackburn

Killam Library Faculty Publications

We investigated whether individuals believe they have a right to information during a crisis, and whether attitudes about crisis-related information sharing differ by age and one’s role in providing or consuming information. We measured attitudes about aspects of data sharing related to COVID-19: researchers’ obligation to share data, publishers’ obligation to share information, and libraries’ responsibility to provide them. We predicted younger individuals, especially students as consumers of information, would report stronger preference for open access to pandemic-related information. A principal components analysis was performed, and two predicted factors emerged: information-sharing obligations and libraries’ responsibility to provide resources. Age was …

Pathway To Promote Diversity Within Public Transit Workforce, Mehri Mohebbi, Sumita Raghuram, Ahoura Zandiatashbar

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

There are many aspects of the transportation industry that can be focused on, but the lack of resiliency is one of the most urgent. Enhancing resiliency and creative problem-solving is essential to the industry’s growth and survival. But it cannot happen without building a more diverse workforce. Women still make up a small fraction of transportation workers, and African American and Hispanic employees are even less represented. These disparities are increasingly pronounced in many senior positions, particularly in STEM fields. Meanwhile, the public transportation industry is experiencing a severe and worsening workforce shortage and many agencies have reported substantial difficulty …

Balloons, Breadcrumbs, And Spoons: Emerging Adults’ Privacy Negotiation And Management Of The (Non)Disclosure Of Chronic Illness-Related Information With A Friend, Robert D. Hall

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Emerging adults (EAs) experience many changes throughout this life-stage, characterized by self-focus, identity explorations, instability, in-betweenness, and possibilities of optimism (Arnett, 2014). As EAs transition from home of origin into independence, they may place more reliance on social networks apart from their family of origin (e.g., friends, Rawlins, 2009). Yet, chronically ill EAs may experience complications due to the biographical disruption, or interference of expectations in one’s life (Bury, 1982), particularly given that chronic illness is typically viewed as an elderly-related issue rather than occurring with youth (Kundrat & Nussbaum, 2003). Through transitions in the EA life-stage, EAs with chronic …

A Framework For Understanding How People Can Draw Different Conclusions Based On The Same Information, Evan Schapiro

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

At least partially fueled by misinformation, political polarization is growing in the United States, leading to a breakdown of confidence in our traditional academic and political institutions. A popular belief is that a solution is to train people to think more rationally by eliminating the cognitive biases embedded in their subconscious thought patterns. This paper identifies the influences on my thinking and the framework used to look at these issues from a different perspective through methodological believing and the application of models of learning and conversation. The paper also points out that the methods of scientific inquiry often assume that …

Our Stories, Katelyn S. Lopez

Publications and Research

This semester, we participated in the “Our Stories” qualitative research project that involves learning more about students' first year, and first-semester experiences at City Tech during pandemic times. As we organized and read students’ posts, we journaled and practiced reflexivity, a qualitative research process that helps us examine how we are interpreting the data that we are engaging with. T Reflexivity is a process in qualitative research involving frequent examination of one’s position in the project. These positions include one’s assumptions, feelings, and so forth. An essential question for qualitative researchers, according to Leavy (2011), is “Has the researcher engaged …

Do You Believe What You Know?: A Quantitative Analysis Of Sexual Education, Sexual Consent, And Rape Myth Acceptance In College Student Attitudes And Actions, Julie Sisler

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Sexual education has long been a heavily debated topic, particularly in relation to appropriateness and effectiveness. The subject is further muddled by the difficulty of effectively addressing sexual consent and sexual assault in sexual education. The topics have garnered additional attention in today’s society, but remain ambiguous and complex. This quantitative thesis sought to examine the relationships between sexual education, sexual consent, and sexual assault, focusing specifically on college populations. Through surveying 445 college students using the Updated Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (IRMA), Sexual Consent Scale (SCS-R), and Affirmative Sexual Consent Situational Knowledge Scale, connections between attitudes and actions regarding …

Developing Ethical Training Curriculum For University Short-Term Missions, Elizabeth P. Sutphin

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

This thesis addresses common problems associated with short-term mission (STM) trips and the gaps in existing training materials for these trips. The research throughout this project is designed to inspire community-specific training materials for college students participating in domestic STM trips through their universities. The final chapter of this thesis includes the framework for a sample curriculum to promote sustainable STM work — providing cross-cultural communication techniques and relationship-building tools to avoid harming the communities students seek to serve.