Communication Commons^™

The Relationship Between Forgiveness, Imagined Interactions, Empathy And Relational Satisfaction Among Long-Distance Romantic Couples, Christopher Michael Mapp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Forgiveness is viewed as a major factor in maintaining healthy romantic relationships. But couples involved in long-distance relationships experience a different set of challenges than geographically-close couples when it comes to maintaining and enjoying satisfying and stable relationships. Many long-distance couples rely on increased empathy and intrapersonal communication – in the form of imagined interactions – to release tension, rehearse conversations, and review and analyze conflicts. While forgiveness has been studied extensively in a variety of interpersonal settings, it has not been explicitly studied in relation to the usage of imagined interactions or in maintaining long-distance relationships. Moreover, even though …

Examining The Effect Of Innovation On The Market Structure Of The U.S. Media Industry, Thomas Edward Vizcarrondo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines if and how technological innovation influences market structure of the media industry. The empirical focus is twofold: 1) to measure and quantify the level of ownership concentration and competition (i.e., market structure) of the U.S. media industry, and 2) to examine the market structure of the media industry as a function of the adoption of three different media technologies, including television, cable television, and the Internet. OLS regression analysis is employed to address the following research question: How do technological innovations affect the market structure of the media industry? Results of the study provide support for the …

Polygamy Is Creepy, Wrong, And Sick! (However, I Find It Fascinating) : Parasocial Comparison, Parasocial Processing, Parasocial Contact Hypothesis, And Polygamy, Thomas Phillip Madison

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examined tolerance of polygamists as a result of exposure to television programming. Specifically, it looked at how audiences form attitudes toward the practice of polygamy and its participants in light of viewing its portrayals in popular television entertainment. Using historical research, semi-structured interviews, surveys of viewers and students, and an experiment, I explored the issue of tolerance among different types of Americans. The findings in these studies demonstrate that Americans never cared for polygamy and continue to find little appeal for its practice. Yet, we are captivated by television shows that focus on polygamy. Part of our habit …

Burn, Boil & Eat : An Intersection Analysis Of Stereotypes In The Most Influential Films Of All Time, Roslyn M. Satchel

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research builds upon the work of Entman & Rojecki (2001) in examining the ways the most influential movies use racial stereotypes in media frames. The results of this study contribute to the rather limited mass media research and body of knowledge regarding the media content that attracts the largest and most enduring audiences in the new media landscape. As ten of the films that have generated the most revenue, the movies in this sample constitute a genre of movies that are also a prime feature of on-going publishing, cable, internet, digital gaming, DVD, and movie sequel franchises. If, as …

Masada Performances : The Contested Indentities Of Touristic Spaces, Ariel Gratch

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Masada, a Herodian fortress and the site of an ancient struggle between Jews and Romans that culminated in a mass suicide by 960 Jews, is a symbolically important site for the country of Israel and for the Jewish people. Previous research on Masada has focused on how the story about the site, told through popular culture, in history books, and at the site, has been used to create and maintain a national Israeli and, more broadly, Jewish identity. Masada is the second most visited site in Israel, attracting over 800,000 people each year, and the number of visitors to the …

Interpreting Racial Politics: Black And Mainstream Press Web Site Tea Party Coverage, Benjamin Rex Lapoe Ii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand the cultural meanings of the black and mainstream press’ online interpretations of the tea party. Little research exists on the modern black press; what does exist shows that unless the story is about race, the black press mirrors the mainstream press. To my knowledge, no research exists comparing the two presses on a racial issue in an online environment. This dissertation will fill that hole. The tea party narrative was, and continues to be, an intricate story for journalists to tell. Resonant myth offers interpretative templates for journalists to use for crafting cultural meaning while …

Causes And Consequences Of Conflict : Exploring The Influence Of Honor-Based Norms And Values On The Experience Of Intimate Partner Violence In The United States, Michelle Elaine Pence

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The three studies in this dissertation were posed with the common goal of revealing possible explanations for variations in the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence across regional cultures of the United States. Study 1 posed and tested two hypotheses related to the distribution of male-perpetrated intimate partner homicide across regions of the United States. The South and West, two regions characterized in full (the South) or in part (the West) by honor cultures, emerged as the regions with the highest rates of argument- and conflict- related, male-on-female intimate partner homicides in single victim/single offender incidents. Explanations provided at the …

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo, Xun Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This thesis provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. In addition to consider the multimedia impact on popularity, we also compare the user influence …

Attachment And Delayed Gratification In The Technological Age, Susan G. Pomerantz

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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English-Only Legislation: The Iowa Story, Kari Lien

Honors Program Theses

This project will discuss the recent history of English-Only legislation in Iowa. Common opinions about English-Only legislation will be shared, including quotations from individuals on both sides of the English-Only debate. Finally, this project will examine the way Iowa's story of English-Only legislation raises questions about the future of this legislation in Iowa as well as the nation.

Chairs Mentoring Faculty Colleagues, Jeff Kerssen-Griep

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

Many academics struggle to manage the changes that come with suddenly being responsible for chairing a group of peers. As in skilled classroom instruction, leading an academic unit invokes specific structural, strategic, tactical, and interpersonal abilities. New chairs often quickly have to add ways of thinking and acting that are beyond the precise expertise that got them to that point in the first place. With our focus on understanding process, communication scholars may be better equipped than some others to understand this role shift’s dynamics, but often we struggle as mightily as our chemist or engineering or nursing peers to …

Editor's Note, Randy Richardson

National Forensic Journal

No abstract provided.

Antidosis For A Forensics Life: An Isocratic Defense Of Modern Practices Of Competitive Forensics, Aaron Duncan

National Forensic Journal

The forensics community is under attack from inside and outside the coaching profession. It is important that we as coaches defend our practices and justify the value of the activity. Despite his prominence in his own time and his influence over the development of rhetoric, the work of Isocrates has not been utilized to craft a defense of forensics. Similar to the situation we face today, Isocrates also had to defend his practices as a teacher of rhetoric. Using his works Antidosis and Against the Sophist, I attempt to craft a defense for the practices of the modern forensics community.

Short And Tweet, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

The goal is to help students learn to write clearly and concisely. It reinforces William Zinsser’s advice in “On Writing Well.” He said, “Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.” The exercise helps students learn to find the focus of stories. It helps editing students write concise, clear headlines that pull readers into stories. It also helps reporting students learn to summarize stories accurately and briefly — a skill they need as they craft their own ledes.

The Amazing Twitter List Race, Michelle Carr Hassler

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

The goal of this assignment is to show students how curating lists on Twitter can help them discover news sources, monitor what is happening in their community and develop story ideas. They complete the assignment as part of a friendly competition in which each student tries to develop a Twitter list with the most news sources. Students often do not follow local news closely and struggle to come up with strong story ideas. This assignment helps them focus by creating one place where they can keep current on events and be inspired.

Prowatch: Critically Thinking About Reporters’ Work, Carla Kimbrough

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

ProWatch, an activity in critical thinking, is an assignment that I use in beginning reporting and editing classes, but it can be adapted easily for use in editing and advanced reporting classes. It is designed to make students read the newspaper, identify sources of story ideas, develop interviewing skills, identify Associated Press style, think about presenting stories across platforms and strengthen story organization skills. This assignment is used throughout the semester so that students can gain these skills by critically examining the published work of professional journalists.

Annual Report: 2013, Centracare Health

Annual Report

• Year end fiscal statistics
• Various stories of how CentraCare benefited the community
• Financial information regarding CentraCare Health Foundation
• List of donors

Communicative Responses To The Painful Self-Disclosures Of Familial And Non-Familial Older Adults, Craig Fowler, Jordan Soliz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Data from 365 college students were used to assess young adults’ communicative responses to older persons’ painful self-disclosures (PSDs). Coupland, Coupland, and Giles (1991) proposed that recipients of PSD may respond to such disclosures via a variety of “next moves.” These responses may broadly be considered to reflect forms of prosocial engagement, passive disengagement, and active disengagement. We investigated whether young adults’ tendency to use certain responses to PSD were influenced by their affective reactions to PSD, their communicative background and characteristics, and the socio-relational context of the encounter in which PSD occurred. Results are discussed with respect to their …

Connecting With Volunteers: Memorable Messages And Volunteer Identification, Sarah Steimel

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Many of the 1.8 million registered nonprofit organizations in the United States rely on the services of volunteers to be able to connect with and meaningfully serve their communities. However, volunteers are less likely to receive formal socialization and training than paid employees. Thus, this study employs the concept of memorable messages as a way for exploring the ways in which messages received by volunteers from a variety of organizational sources may affect their volunteer identification with the nonprofit organization they serve. Three results emerged from the data, including: (a) sources of memorable messages in volunteer organizations; (b) types of …

The Experience And Expression Of Stepchildren’S Emotions At Critical Events In Stepfamily Life, Sandra Metts, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Paul Schrodt, Tiffany R. Wang, Amanda J. Holman, Audra K. Nuru, Jenna Stephenson Abetz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study explored the experience and expression of emotions of adult stepchildren during four critical events in stepfamily life. During semistructured, in-depth interviews, 57 adult stepchildren shared stories about four critical events: the parental divorce, remarriage of one of the parents, an event in the stepfamily that generated feeling more like a family, and an event in the stepfamily that generated feeling less like a family. A total of 402 pages of single- spaced transcripts were coded for emotion, target, and expression of emotion resulting in positive and negative emotion categories and subcategories for all four critical events. Five research …

The Use Of Public Computing Facilities By Library Patrons: Demography, Motivations, And Barriers, Kurt Demaagd, Han Ei Chew, Guanxiong Huang, M. Laeeq Khan, Akshaya Sreenivasan, Robert Larose

Research Collection Office of Impact

Public libraries play an important part in the development of a community. Today, they are seen as more than store houses of books; they are also responsible for the dissemination of online, and offline information. Public access computers are becoming increasingly popular as more and more people understand the need for internet access. Using a series of surveys conducted in 12 libraries across the state of Michigan, the current study is a step towards understanding why the computing facilities are widely used, and what are the motivations behind their use. In addition, barriers and other factors that hinder usage are …

Measuring Differentials In Communication Research: Issues With Multicollinearity In Three Methods, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Models of communication processes sometimes require the computation of the difference between two variables. For example, information insufficiency is the difference between what people know and what they think they need to know about an issue, and it can motivate information seeking and processing. Common methods that compute this differential may bias model estimates as a function of the correlation between the differentiated variables and other variables in the model. This article describes Citation the general form of Cohen and Cohen's (1983) analysis of partial variance for computing differentials and analyzes simulated data to contrast that method with two alternative …

Four-Cornered Fight A Blessing In Disguise For Wp, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

SMU Assistant Professor of Law and NMP Eugene Tan said that much is at stake for the four political parties contesting the Punggol East by-election. Regardless of how the parties seek to characterise the by-election, it will be fought on both local and national issues. Although it is a four-cornered contest, the race will effectively be a two-horse race between the Workers' Party (WP) and the incumbent People's Action Party (PAP). The by-election is also a way station for PAP and WP as they move towards the next General Election, which promises to be the real watershed election. Assistant Prof …

Four Candidates, Two-Horse Race?, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

SMU Assistant Professor of Law and NMP Eugene Tan said that much is at stake for the four political parties contesting the Punggol East by-election. Regardless of how the parties seek to characterise the by-election, it will be fought on both local and national issues. Although it is a four-cornered contest, the race will effectively be a two-horse race between the Workers' Party (WP) and the incumbent People's Action Party (PAP). The by-election is also a way station for PAP and WP as they move towards the next General Election, which promises to be the real watershed election. Assistant Prof …

Top 10 Law School Home Pages Of 2012, Roger V. Skalbeck, Matthew L. Zimmerman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For a fourth consecutive year, every website home page of every ABA-accredited law school is evaluated and ranked based on objective criteria. The goal is to identify well-executed sites adopting best practices. For the 2012 report, twenty-six elements are evaluated across these three categories: Design Patterns and Metadata, Accessibility and Validation, & Marketing and Communications. For 2012, there are four new elements, two prior elements have been combined, and one element was dropped.

For 2012, forty-six schools now use the HTML5 doctype, which is up from thirteen in 2011 and just one in 2010. Eighteen schools achieve perfect scores in …

The Development Of Community Cable Television In Taizhou And The Rise Of The Chinese Middle Class, Shangling Lin

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis looks at the development of community cable television in the eastern coastal town of Taizhou in China from its beginnings in the 1990s to 2007. The establishment of community cable television can be seen as a new form of media production in China, by which changes in economic and political power and social identity can be traced. My hometown of Taizhou serves as a good example of this societal development. Taizhou is famous for private economy. Its average income is ranked in the top six among more than three hundred cities in China, making the middle class the …

Editor's Note, Don W. Stacks

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This is the Editor’s Note to Volume 32, Issue 1 of the Journal of the Association for Communication Administration.

Who Are We Educating? Why Undergraduate Students Choose To Major In Communication, Christopher J. Carpenter, Bree Mcewan

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This study examined student traits and major characteristics that might lead students to choose communication as a major by collecting survey responses from 476 undergraduate students. Attitudes about the major and potential jobs, expected norms from parents, and areas of perceived behavioral control based on student anxieties were analyzed as predictors of choosing the communication major. Short term benefits of taking communication classes as well as the long-term benefits predicted students’ intention of graduating with a communication major. The perception that the major required little math was associated with choosing the major for those higher in math anxiety.

Dialogic Ethics: Leadership And The Face Of The Other, Karen Lollar

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

Foundational to a relational ethic is the belief that healthy human existence requires respect for others, respect that does not work to reduce their otherness to the sameness that is familiar. It is not enough that the face of another person arouses awareness. What pragmatic action does it require? This article explores the application of a Levinasian ethic on day-to-day practice in the academy. Weaving together short vignettes from daily work practice with principles of ethics from Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1997), the author concludes with a vision of the possibility of creating a dwelling place based on dialogic ethics as …

Preachers, Politicians And People Of Character: A Rationale For The Centrality Of A Public-Speaking Course In The Core Curriculum, Blake J. Neff

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

Administrators in colleges and universities across America continue to debate the relative advantages of education designed to develop vocational skills and education committed to the liberal arts. This essay demonstrates that public speaking as the basic communication course bridges the divide. That course provides a necessary vocational skill for a host of professions, and in addition strongly supports liberal arts by bringing instructional units in self-discipline, critical thinking, listening, and academic preparedness to the core curriculum.