Communication Commons^™

Proactive Communication: An Investigation Of Employee Reactions To Organizational Communication Problems, Katie Marie Reno

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explored how employees proactively responded to perceived communication problems and what employees considered when proactively responding. The study utilized semi-structured interviews to gather data, resulting in 15 interviews. The interviews were transcribed yielding 130 single-spaced pages of data. Template analysis was used to code the data for themes. This analysis was chosen because it allowed the researcher to utilize previously established literature to develop a codebook, which could then be modified on the data.

The findings demonstrate that employees will enact many types of proactive behavior to correct perceived communication problems in an organization. Findings also demonstrated that …

Experiences Of Newly Licensed Registered Nurses Who Stay In Their First Jobs, Lisa D. Kirkland

Doctoral Dissertations

Most newly licensed registered nurses go to work in acute care hospitals, which means they enter an increasingly complex healthcare environment where they experience staffing shortages, high nurse-patient ratios, and workplace violence. The purpose of this study is to attempt to understand the experiences of newly licensed registered nurses who have endured the early years of bedside hospital nursing and continue to work in their first nursing job. The existential phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty serves as the guiding framework for this qualitative research study. Following IRB approval, criterion and snowball sampling were used to recruit newly licensed registered nurses who …

Russian Anti-Americanism, Public Opinion And The Impact Of The State-Controlled Mass Media, Natalie Manaeva Rice

Doctoral Dissertations

From 2011 to 2015, a rise in anti-Americanism was strongly reflected in Russian public opinion during President Vladimir Putin’s third term. The study examined the phenomenon of anti-Americanism in Russia and the role of state-controlled mass media in promoting anti-American attitudes. Statistical analysis of polls conducted in Russia by the Pew Research Center in 2012 demonstrated that anti-Americanism in Russian society should not be treated as a monolithic phenomenon. A segment of the Russian populace held a strong and deep-seated anti-American ideological bias that affected its perception of everything related to the United States. Other sentiments, however, fit a more …

The Formation Of Youth-Led Participatory Networks In Urban Bangladesh: A Case Study Of The Bgreen Project, Fadia Hasan

Doctoral Dissertations

Through the lens of a participatory action research platform that I founded called The BGreen Project (BGreen), my research explores networked political economic connections that were developed as a result of this academic-community initiative. BGreen was a participatory action research platform that connected urban high school, college, university youth in an assortment of participatory/deliberative activities in the fields of education and environment. With their ongoing engagement in the participatory network called BGreen, Bangladeshi youth are negotiating their affiliation to diverse political economic structures (for example, their educational institutions) in creative ways and forging innovative methods of transformative participation as …

“Of All, I Most Hate Bulgarians”: Situating Oplakvane In Bulgarian Discourse As A Cultural Term For Communicative Practice, Nadezhda M. Sotirova

Doctoral Dissertations

The following dissertation raises these questions: how do people talk about their communication, and what role does this play as constructing a widely used cultural resource? The specific data concerns oplakvane, referring both to a key cultural term and a range of communication practices in Bulgaria. This term, and these practices are explored through the theoretical and methodological frame of cultural communication (Philipsen, 1981-87), ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1962), and cultural discourse analysis (Carbaugh, 1992, 2007a, 2010). The analyses demonstrate how oplakvane, which can loosely be translated as “complaining” and “mourning”, functions as a deeply shared cultural resource for communication …

The Ambiguous Construction Of Collective "Family" In The Age Of Post-Collectivism China: Through The Lens Of Cctv's Spring Festival Gala, Lin Shi

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation, through a semiotic reading of familial imagery in CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, explores the new propaganda and its effects on Chinese people's political subjectivity, against the background combining the dying Communist ideology, the rise of neoliberalism, the proliferating social technologies, and the tremendous human dislocation in contemporary China. Particularly, informed by cultural studies and ethnographic methods, this research project explores how the post-collectivism party-state insists on a mirror image of the collectivism through constructing the country as a singular super "family" form the olden time, as exemplified in the televised spectacle - CCTV's Spring Festival Gala. In the …

Parents’ Television Viewing And The Cultivation Of Materialism Among Families With Young Adult Offspring, Laras Sekarasih

Doctoral Dissertations

Employing cultivation theory as a guiding framework, and utilizing online survey responses from 303 young adults aged 18 to 25, this study examined how parents’ television viewing cultivates materialism among parents and young adult offspring, as well as offspring’s social comparison and life satisfaction. Path analyses revealed the evidence for intergenerational cultivation through parents’ materialism for the success and happiness dimensions of materialism. For the two dimensions, parents’ general television viewing positively predicts their own materialism, which in turn is positively associated with their children’s materialism. Somewhat differently, the analysis on the centrality dimension of materialism suggest that parents’ general …

Performing Critical Consciousness In Teaching: Entanglements Of Knowing, Feeling And Relating, Kathleen A. Mcdonough

Doctoral Dissertations

At a time when education reform is guided by neoliberalism, accountability and standardization have reshaped teaching as highly technocratic and threatened the democratic possibilities of public education. Even so, many teacher education programs have taken up the call to prepare teachers to teach for social justice, whether framed as multicultural education, critical literacy, or critical pedagogy. A construct that ties these pedagogical approaches together is critical consciousness, with the aim of some teacher education efforts to evoke critical consciousness among preservice teachers. This study focuses on exploring how nine educators from elementary grades to higher education experience and enact critical …

Dimensions Of Access To Traceability Information For Us Beef Cattle Producers: Merging Information Frameworks For Assessment And Visualization Of State Web-Based Resources In An Effort To Strengthen National Security Connections Between Government And Cattle Farming Operations, Reid Isaac Boehm

Doctoral Dissertations

US consumers eat a lot of beef. The nation’s beef cattle production industry is a multi-faceted, complex supply chain which makes it an area rich for discussion about information practices, yet vulnerable to problems such as disease and terrorist attack. This research looks at cattle identification and traceability information resources that are accessible to beef cattle producers through two web channels: the state cooperative Extension website and the state Department of Agriculture website. This is a state by state content analysis of all fifty states to look at the topics, types, formats, quality, and interactivity of the available resources. By …

An Exploration Of The Relationships Among Faculty Verbal Messages, College Student Identities, And Student Outcomes, Michelle Epstein Garland

Doctoral Dissertations

This project explores the interrelationships of college student identities, faculty verbal messages, and student outcomes (learner empowerment and learning indicators). To this aim, studies were completed to develop and test new measures, create and test models, and develop an adapted theoretical perspective for identity research. First, traditional approaches to identity in combination with Hecht’s (1993) Communication Theory of Identity were explored and adapted as a basis for the creation of Interactional Theory of Identity (ITI). Second, two measures, College Student Identity scale and Faculty Verbal Messages scale, were developed and tested through factor analysis and revised. Third, the interrelationships between …

An Exploratory Study Of The Presence And Direction Of Agenda-Setting Effects Between Leading U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks And U.S. Newspapers, Dzmitry Yuran

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the roles news media and think tanks play in U.S. foreign policy in an analysis of their possible effects on each other’s agendas. In an analysis of salience of, or attention to, multiple countries over time in coverage from leading U.S. newspapers, The New York Times and Washington Post, and in published online materials from leading U.S. foreign policy think tanks, Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the research looks at the presence, direction, and strength of agenda-setting effects in the construction of news agendas and attention foci of think tanks. Findings suggest that the …

Social Systems And Psychic Confluence: Flash Mobs, Communications, And Agency, Nicholas John Hauman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation involves two components: 1) an analysis of the history of flash mobs including detailed descriptions of specific flash mobs and 2) an exploration of what this analysis elucidates concerning the interaction between individuals and social structure. By focusing on the flash mob as a form of communication, the dissertation displays how the flash mob has communicated multiplicitously through various social systems (e.g. art, mass media, economy, politics) to achieve various and often divergent ends. Within this larger understanding of the interaction between flash mobs and social structure this dissertation also finds, through an application of Luhmannian systems theory, …

Group Brainstorming In Organizations: Implementing The Functional Theory Of Group Decision-Making As A Means For Increasing Performance, Kyle B. Heuett

Doctoral Dissertations

Brainstorming was first introduced as a group focused method for generating ideas on behalf of an organization. Past studies on brainstorming have been inconclusive about the effect of certain types of brainstorming techniques on the number of ideas and the quality of ideas generated by groups. In seeking to develop different techniques for brainstorming research has lacked a theoretical guide that has led to mixed results at best about different brainstorming techniques. Further, brainstorming research conducting using experimental methods have lacked realism compared to industrial groups; specifically this lack of realism is evident in the history of brainstorming groups and …

Freelancers On The Frontline: Influences On Conflict Coverage, Denae Lynn D'Arcy

Doctoral Dissertations

Some journalists who cover conflict in countries like Syria, Ukraine, and Egypt work as freelancers. As opposed to full-time staff members of media organizations, freelancers pay for their own travel, security, drivers, and insurance. While this model of conflict coverage is financially beneficial for media organizations, freelancers indicate that they work for themselves in order to have “freedom” to make their own decisions about conflict coverage. The researcher studied the phenomena of freelance journalism in conflict scenarios through an exploratory study utilizing long interviews, an interpretative, textual analysis of war correspondents’ autobiographies, an online, open-ended questionnaire, and follow-up in-depth interviews …

The Relationship Between Demands And Resources And Teacher Burnout: A Fifteen-Year Meta-Analysis, Tammy Marie Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

This meta-analysis explored the phenomenon of teacher burnout— the biggest contributor to teacher attrition (Owens, 2013; Unterbrink, 2014; Yu, 2015). The focus of this study was to use meta-analytical procedures to explore the relationship between burnout dimensions (i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of personal accomplishment) and specific demand and resource correlates. Demand correlates included work overload, role conflict, role ambiguity, and student misbehavior. Resource correlates included peer support, supervisory support, and decision-making. This meta-analytical research method encompassed fifteen years of published and unpublished studies from January 2000 through January 2015. A total of 116 studies met the following inclusion …

The Semiosis Of Civil Society: Theorizing The Media In Postcolonial Polities, Srinivas R. Lankala

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation is an attempt to construct a theoretical framework for the distinctive nature of the mass media in the postcolonial political context through an engagement with the theoretical legacy of Indian political theory and historiography, especially the Subaltern Studies school. I draw from Partha Chatterjee’s conceptualization of Indian politics as divided into the two spheres of civil and political society and interpret these political categories through the rubric of mass media and televisual discourse, both to locate the mass media in the discourse and practice of politics, and to also locate political practice as it takes place in a …

Democratic Potential For A Multiplicity Of Public Spaces: A Content Analysis Of Media-Hosted Discussion Boards, Bryan M. Baldwin

Doctoral Dissertations

Since their inception, online discussion boards have intrinsically appealed to proponents of deliberative democracy, and those appended to Web-based news sources have been recognized as possessing the potential – whether realized yet or not – to engender meaningful discussions by engaged citizens on a range of public issues. In contrast, ardent critics of such forums contend they are merely raucous and unstructured repositories of expressions reflecting the darker side of human nature (e.g. incivility, vulgarity, ad hominem attacks, racism, homophobia, etc.). This study assessed the deliberative quality of online postings made over a two- month period and affiliated with four …

Effects Of A Mental-Health Clinical Simulation Experience Using Standardized Patients And Two Debriefing Styles On Prelicensure Nursing Students' Knowledge, Anxiety, And Therapeutic Communication And Psychiatric Assessment Skills, Debrayh Gaylle

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study was to compare the effects of two debriefing styles (insimulation and postsimulation) on (a) students’ knowledge of psychiatric assessment and therapeutic communication, (b) students’ performance of a psychiatric assessment using therapeutic communication, (c) students’ perceived anxiety related to a clinical rotation in psychiatric mental-health, and (d) students’ perceptions of the efficacy of the insimulation debriefing. The participants (n = 67) were senior, prelicensure nursing students enrolled in a baccalaureate degree program. Students were assigned randomly to either the treatment or the compression group and participated in a series of simulated interviews using student …

A Case Study Of E-Leadership Constructs: An Assessment Of Leadership In A Healthcare Organization, Kevin James Lovelace

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to identify the components of e-leadership theory and how it can be used to teach healthcare leaders to develop virtual teams in a healthcare organization. This study will define a way in which leaders can use e-leadership components to increase the efficacy of virtual teams. In particular, this study will examine the perceptions executive leaders have of e-leadership constructs.

This study used a mixed method concurrent triangulation design to examine perceptions of e-leadership theory which may be used to improve the efficacy of virtual teams. The e-leadership theory as a construct was first measured …