Digital Commons Network^™

Monstrous Youth In Suburbia: Disruption And Recovery Of The American Dream, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Although the American Dream myth idealizes youth who grow up in suburbia as culture types of imminent success, the Columbine High School shootings demonstrated that all not suburban youth will grow up to succeed. The extensive news media coverage of the tragedy reflects broader anxieties about the declining status of the suburbs in American society. In the wake of the shootings, the news media created a myth of monstrous youth in suburbia that functioned to repair suburbanites’ waning faith in the myth of the American Dream.

“The Policy Exists But You Can’T Really Use It”: Communication And The Structuration Of Work-Family Policies, Erika L. Kirby, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Although work-family benefits are increasingly important organizational policies, limited research addresses the impact of communication on benefit utilization. However, communication is significant because the perceived appropriateness of work-family benefits emerges through interaction. For example, when coworkers complain about “picking up the slack” for those using family leave, their discourse may impact future decisions of other workers regarding whether they utilize the work-family benefits available to them. We apply Giddens’ (1984) Structuration Theory to examine organizational members’ discursive responses to conditions (and contradictions) present in utilizing work-family benefits in a governmental organization. We argue the daily discursive practices of individuals can …

Contradictions Of Interaction For Wives Of Elderly Husbands With Adult Dementia, Leslie A. Baxter, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Tamara D. Golish, Loreen N. Olson

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The researchers used a dialectical framework to examine interviews with wives whose elderly husbands experienced adult dementia from Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders (ADRD), centering on how wives coped communicatively with their husbands’ illness. These “married widows” experienced a primary contradiction between their husbands’ physical presence and cognitive/emotional absence. Interwoven with the presence-absence contradiction were three additional contradictions: certainty-uncertainty, openness-closedness, and past-present. Results describe the ways these wives communicatively negotiated the web of contradictions as they interacted in the present with husbands they once knew. Applications for practitioners and caregivers working with ADRD patients and their wives, including formal and …

Representing Bosnia: Human Rights Claims And Global Media Culture, James Castonguay

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Performing Marriage: Marriage Renewal Rituals As Cultural Performance, Leslie A. Baxter, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This interpretive study examined how the marriage renewal ritual reflects the social construction of marriage in the United States. Two culturally prominent ideologies of marriage were interwoven in our interviews of 25 married persons who had renewed their marriage vows: (a) a dominant ideology of community and (b) a more muted ideology of individualism. The ideology of community was evidenced by a construction of marriage featuring themes of public accountability, social embeddedness, and permanence. By contrast, the ideology of individualism constructed marriage around themes of love, choice, and individual growth.

“Married Widowhood”: Maintaining Couplehood When One Spouse Is Living In A Nursing Home, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

When a marital partner moves to a nursing home, how do community-dwelling spouses, labeled “married widows,” adapt and cope with changes in the relationship and their own marital roles? The first goal of this study was to explore the role additions and deletions for community-based wives whose husbands moved to a nursing home. The second goal was to examine how these women discursively represent their own self-identity and the relationship they have with their husband who is living in a nursing home. Data were drawn from in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 21 wives whose husbands resided in a nursing home. A …

Autotopography: Graffiti, Landscapes, & Selves, Deirdre Heddon

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For some time now I have been interested in autobiographical performance -- some form of the theatrical, in which performers explicitly use personal material in their work. Within this general field of autobiography and performance, one area of research concerns performances that are dependent on being located in personalised space -- what could be called, then, site-specific autobiographical performance. A recent example of this would be the performance Bubbling Tom (2000), by the UK based performer Mike Pearson, which saw Pearson return to the village of his childhood, to reflect upon and re-enact certain memories, events and persons …

The Children Overboard Event: Constructing The Family And Nation Through Representations Of The Other, Kate Slattery

Theses : Honours

This thesis presents a selection of representations of the Children Overboard event of October 7, 2001, sourced from the Australian government and print news media. Employing an interpretative and critical discourse approach, I explore how the event could be seen to define the physical and cultural boundaries of the Australian nation. In particular I explore how a threat to nation is articulated. From my analysis of the representations, I identify a rhetoric of the 'Other' set within the discursive spaces of family and nation. These discourses circulated within the Children Overboard event are pursued in this thesis in terms of …

See Me, Touch Me, Feel Me':(Im)Proving The Bodily Sense Of Masculinity, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Ultimately, this paper stems from two cultural strands which intersect in one cultural form, self-improvement advertising aimed at men. The first of these is the figure of the new man, which appeared in the mid-1980s. The novelty lies in the positioning of masculine bodies precisely for the purpose of being seen. The available criticism was not equipped to account for these positionings. The second cultural strand, the proliferation of technologies which alter the body itself, as opposed to its coverings, makes the gap in the criticism more apparent. The two cultural trends intersect most noticeably in the advertisements …

Bending The Rules Of “Professional” Display: Emotional Improvisation In Caregiver Performances, Jayne M. Morgan, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Organizational norms of emotional expression are open to negotiation through improvised performances, as employees may bend or break emotion rules to gain more leeway in expressiveness and participate in the development of their own role identities in the workplace. In this ethnographic study, a dramaturgical perspective is used to analyze the processes and outcomes of emotional improvisation as observed among nurses, technicians, and physicians in a cardiac care center. It was found that the emphasis on maintaining a “professional” appearance in caregiving largely constrains actors to perform along their scripted roles. Results are discussed in terms of practical implications for …

2001 Presidential Address: Do More With More, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

As I have listened to, and recently reread the addresses of our WSCA Presidents, I have been moved and challenged by their words and their wisdom. And their speeches are challenging. They have exhorted us to embrace quality discourse, to welcome change, to maintain the centrality of communication in the university of the 21st century, and to avoid becoming out-of-touch whiners. I wondered, what can I add to their words in my own address?

Over this past year, I have thought about my life as a communication professor. How are my times similar and different from those who have come …

Exploring The Emergent Identities Of Future Physicians: Toward An Understanding Of The Ideological Socialization Of Osteopathic Medical Students, Lynn M. Harter, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This project brings contextual factors to the forefront of socialization research by investigating how medical ideology relates to the formation of the identities of students of osteopathic medicine. In particular, we investigate their attitudes toward, the role of communication in, and the expression of emotion in health care delivery. Through in-depth interviews with students about their vocational development experiences, we began exploring their emergent identities as future practitioners of osteopathic medicine. Three themes emerged from a constant comparative analysis of data, including (a) selecting osteopathic medicine, (b) encountering osteopathy, and (c) students’ emergent identities. These themes, and their respective subthemes, …

The Boundary-Spanning Role Of A Cooperative Support Organization: Managing The Paradox Of Stability And Change In Non-Traditional Organizations, Lynn M. Harter, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This project provides an interpretation of how one cooperative support organization, the Nebraska Cooperative Council, discursively functions to help its constituent cooperatives consolidate resources in order to better intersect with organizations in a larger bureaucratic system. In analyzing qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, surveys, and organizational documents, we found the paradox of stability and change a revealing prism through which to make sense of participants’ experiences. We work toward locating and describing how the Council, through its boundary-spanning activities, helps cooperatives manage the paradox of stability and change while protecting their core participatory ideologies. By providing networks of learning, …

“Becoming A Family”: Developmental Processes Represented In Blended Family Discourse, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Loreen N. Olson, Tamara D. Golish, Charles Soukup, Paul Turman

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

We adopted a process-focus in order to gain a deeper understanding of how (step) blended family members experiencing different developmental pathways discursively represented their processes of becoming a family. Using a qualitative/interpretive method, we analyzed 980 pages of interview transcripts with stepparents and stepchildren. We studied the first four years of family development, using the five developmental pathways developed by Baxter, Braithwaite, and Nicholson (1999). Three salient issues identified in the family experiences were boundary management, solidarity, and adaptation. While the negotiation of these issues varied across the five trajectories, there were commonalities across family experiences that helped determine whether …

Volume 30, Number 1, Post Amerikan

The Post Amerikan (1972-2004)

No abstract provided.

Examining Interruption In Conversation Among Middle-Eastern Couples, Khetam Dahi

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Between Gay And Straight: Understanding Friendship Across Sexual Orientation [Book], Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This chapter sets a personal, academic, and cultural context for the author's PhD dissertation research (1994-98), an ethnographic and interview study of a network of gay male friends in Tampa, Florida.

Volume 29, Number 5, Post Amerikan

The Post Amerikan (1972-2004)

No abstract provided.

Younger And Older Adults’ Schematic Representations Of Intergenerational Communication, Jake Harwood, Jordan Mckee, Mei-Chen Lee

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The current paper examines younger and older adults’ cognitive representations of intergenerational conversations. In interviews, younger and older adults were asked to imagine various types of conversations with older and younger targets. They were prompted to provide a wide variety of information about the targets and the conversations. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed to uncover types of conversations commonly reported. Through a combination of coding and hierarchical cluster analysis, a hierarchical arrangement of types of conversations emerged in younger and older adults’ descriptions. Each of the types is described in detail. In a second study, exemplars of each type …

Women Managers And Gendered Values, Diane Kay Sloan, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In this study we interviewed 30 women managers to better understand ways in which they experience gendered values and behavior in organizational leadership and their responses to those experiences. The results, based on a constant comparison, thematic analysis, indicate the emergence of surprisingly strong and similar perceptions among the 30 women that there are distinct feminine and masculine power orientations in leadership communication with corresponding sets of gendered values: (a) open/closed and (b) supportive/intimidating. Their most common responses were: (a) rejection of masculine power, (b) self-doubt and blame, (c) competence, (d) confrontation, (e) isolation, and (f) resignation. These women judge …

Nuestro Espacio Cyber: The Internet As Expressive Space For Latina/Os In The United States, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

The Latina/o community is in the midst of a major demographic shift upwards- Along with this population growth, there has been an explosion of Latina,/os across the spectrum of popular culture. However, lack of access to mass-media outlets and social constructions in mainstream society pose obstacles to Latina/o freedom of expression. Meanwhile, the Internet is evolving into a powerful platform for communication and freedom of speech- By developing a stronger Latina/o presence online, it may be possible to channel the power of the Internet as a vehicle for empowerment, expression and freedom of speech.

Overcoming The Dichotomy: Cultivating Standpoints In Organizations Through Research, Debbie S. Dougherty, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Feminist standpoint theories are seldom used by researchers. One possible reason is the ongoing debate between postmodern theorists and feminine standpoint theorists. The debate has been constructed in bipolar terms such that the issues are perceived as mutually exclusive. However, bipolar assumptions are damaging to women, both in general and in organizations. We contend that feminist standpoint theories should theorize similarities, material reality, and communal agency while being sensitive to differences, multiple realities, and individual agency. A study of academic women is used to illustrate how standpoints can develop around similarities while respecting differences. Using a creative narrative, participants’ organizational …

Turning Points In The Development Of Blended Families, Leslie A. Baxter, Dawn O. Braithwaite, John H. Nicholson

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

A modified retrospective interview technique (RIT) was employed with members of 53 blended families to determine the types of turning points they reported experiencing and the developmental trajectories of their respective blended family’s first 4 years. Findings revealed 15 primary types of turning points, of which “Changes in Household Configuration,” “Conflict,” “Holidays/Special Events,” “Quality Time,” and “Family Crisis” were the most frequent. A cluster analysis revealed five basic trajectories of development for the first 48 months of family development: Accelerated, Prolonged, Stagnating, Declining, and High-Amplitude Turbulent. The trajectories differed in the overall positive-to-negative valence ratio, the frequency of conflict related …

Another Look At The Portrayal Of Minorities And Women In Prime-Time Television, Tellisa Amos

Dissertations and Theses

This study updates a 10-year longitudinal study investigating TV's portrayal of minorities and women on prime time television. Prior studies focused on the types of roles held by performers. This study extends prior research, examining not only the types of roles held by performers, but also networks' preference for women and minorities and the genre that most often feature women and minorities.

Data were collected for a consecutive five-week period from February 19, 1997 to March 14,1997. From this sample 40 dramas and 115 situation comedies were recorded and coded. Programming was taken from shows that aired in the Pacific …

Protecting Communication Departments: Reflections On The Nebraska Experience, Ronald Lee, William J. Seiler

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Eight years ago, in the first week of the 1991 fall semester, the Acting Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs announced a series of vertical budget cuts that included the elimination of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s department of Speech Communication (now Communication Studies). Over the next seven months the department fought against the proposed action. In March 1992, the Budget Reduction Review Committee voted against the Vice Chancellor’s recommendation. Later in the month, the Academic Planning Committee also voted to rescind the budget cutting measure.

These actions ended the battle and assured the continuation of the department. In an earlier …

Communication Of Social Support In Computer-Mediated Groups For People With Disabilities, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Vincent R. Waldron, Jerry Finn

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study documented the types and extent of social support messages exchanged by persons with disabilities who participated in a computer-based support group. A modified version of Cutrona and Suhr’s (1992) social support category system was used to code 1,472 support messages. The largest percentage of these messages offered emotional and informational support, whereas network support and tangible assistance were least frequently offered. It appeared that many of the support messages directly redressed limitations and challenges associated with disability-related mobility, socialization, and self-care. Results are discussed in terms of the generalizability of existing category systems for coding support to this …

The Perceived Effects Of Cross-Cultural Interaction On Flight Crew Training Between Anglo-Australian Flight Instructors And Asian Students, Daniel Goh

Theses : Honours

The study investigated the perceived effects of cross-cultural interaction on ab-initio flight crew training between Anglo Australian flight instructors and Asian students. Students and instructors perceptions were sought as to whether they believed that cross-cultural interaction would impede learning. The sample included forty-eight students and nine instructors from two flying schools. Thirty-eight students were required to complete a 15 item survey and ten students and nine instructors participated in a semi-structured interview. The research identified four specific areas - language, studying and teaching methods, attitudes towards asking questions, and command decision making. Cross-cultural interaction was found to be an integral …

The Role Of Rituals In The Management Of The Dialectical Tension Of “Old” And “New” In Blended Families, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Leslie A. Baxter, Anneliese M. Harper

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In this study we examined how members of step- or blended families interact and develop their families by examining their successful and unsuccessful ritual enactments. Blended families provide a fertile context in which to study ritual adaptiveness and the possible relationship between successful enactment of rituals and their adaptability. Data were in-depth interviews with 53 members of blended families concerning their successful and unsuccessful ritual enactments. A qualitative/interpretive analysis indicated that blended families face an ongoing dialectical opposition between the “old family” and the “new family.” Blended family rituals are important communicative practices that enable blended family members to embrace …

Everyday Relating Or “The Grout Around The Tile”: Studying The Ordinary Aspects Of Personal Relationships, Dawn Braithwaite, Kathryn Dindia, Valerian Derlega, Mark Fine, Mark Leary, Rowland Miller, Julie Yingling

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In answering the call to explore everyday aspects of personal relationships, we planned a thematic symposium for the 1997 INPR [International Network on Personal Relationships] conference in Oxford, Ohio, titled, “‘Everyday Relating’: Studying the Ordinary Aspects of Personal Relationships.” We brought leading scholars together to facilitate discussion groups to explore how this diverse group would respond to the call to focus research attention on everyday relating. We asked the participants to consider: “How should we approach and study everyday relating in personal relationships?” We gathered panelists representing diverse disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and research methods. Panelists shared their perspectives and led …

Institutional Language Of Control: Race, Class, And Gender Issues, Harry Morgan

Trotter Review

Controlling discourse is a common practice among colleges and universities, public and private schools, political parties, libraries, departments of government, and funding institutions, just to name a few. The control of discourse is essential for maintaining their power, status, and influence. The goals and missions of these institutions are shaped through conversations between individuals at various levels of power, status, and influence. The ongoing behavior of these institutions — as dictated primarily by those in positions of power, status, and influence — is reflected in discourse among and between themselves, and their counterparts in other institutions.