Communication Commons^™

Complete Issue, Volume 39, Issue 2

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This is the complete issue for Volume 39, Issue 2 of the Journal of the Association for Communication Administration.

Small Business Social Media Marketing Strategies In The Retail Industry, Mari E. Mew

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many small business owners lack social media marketing (SMM) strategies to generate sales growth. Small business owners are concerned with increasing sales growth to ensure sustainability. Grounded in Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore SMM strategies some small business owners in the women’s retail apparel industry use to generate growth in sales. The participants comprised 3 small business owners in the women’s retail apparel industry in South Carolina with successful experience using SMM strategies to generate sales growth. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, archival organizational documentation, and physical artifacts. …

Employee Motivation And Knowledge Transfer In Nonprofit Organizations, Heidi Keam Nors

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractIneffective knowledge transfer strategies can negatively affect knowledge creation and employee motivation. Nonprofit business leaders who struggle with knowledge transfer among department staff are at a high risk of not improving employee motivation. Grounded in Kahn’s organizational theory on leadership and structure, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the knowledge transfer strategies used by nonprofit business leaders to transfer knowledge among departmental staff and to improve employee motivation. The participants comprised business leaders and staff, consisting of 2 executives, 2 managers, and 2 departmental staff members from a nonprofit charter school management company in North …

Strategies For News Professionals To Mitigate Negative Social Media Posts, Airielle J. Vincent

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Businesses use social media to promote services and products as well as connect with current and potential customers. The purpose of this qualitative, multiple case study was to explore and understand the strategies that effectively remedy negative social media comments, the skills used to employ remedial actions, the reasons why organizations fail to develop effective strategies, and the motivations to develop them among the participants and their organizations. The conceptual framework of this study combined elements from the skills approach to leadership and e-leadership theory. The target population included news directors, assignment managers, and executive producers who have used social …

Volume 37 - Editor's Note, Richard E. Paine, Emily M. Cramer

National Forensic Journal

No abstract provided.

The Inter-State Oratorical Contest In The 1800s: The Beginning Of Organized Collegiate Competitive Speaking, Lisa Roth

National Forensic Journal

The purpose of this article is to explore the beginnings of the Inter-State Oratorical Contest (IOC) and the Inter-State Oratorical Association (IOA) and to examine the characteristics of the Inter-State Oratorical speeches from 1874 to 1899. Through an analysis of the top two speeches from each of these years in regard to topic, evidence, organization, style, and delivery, I identify trends and strategies which appeared in competitive collegiate persuasive speaking in the late 1800s.

Discovery: The Student Journal Of Dale Bumpers College Of Agricultural, Food And Life Sciences - Volume 21 2020, Several Authors

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

No abstract provided.

A Content Analysis Of Institutions Of Higher Education's Sexual Assault Policies: Assessing Response To Sexual Assault In Georgia, Brianna Williams

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Sexual assault is a public health concern that must be systematically addressed. The existence of a comprehensive sexual assault policy and compliance with federal regulations can guide institutions of higher education in responding to and preventing sexual assault on campus. Federal laws hold institutions accountable for providing a safe environment for students. The purpose of this qualitative content analysis was to assess compliance with federal policy and assess the response to sexual assault by IHE in Georgia. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics was utilized to identify Georgia's institutions receiving federal aid during 2018-2019. Using a proportionate stratified …

Self-Supervised Learning To Detect Key Frames In Videos, Xiang Yan, Syed Zulqarnain Gilani, Mingtao Feng, Liang Zhang, Hanlin Qin, Ajmal Mian

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Detecting key frames in videos is a common problem in many applications such as video classification, action recognition and video summarization. These tasks can be performed more efficiently using only a handful of key frames rather than the full video. Existing key frame detection approaches are mostly designed for supervised learning and require manual labelling of key frames in a large corpus of training data to train the models. Labelling requires human annotators from different backgrounds to annotate key frames in videos which is not only expensive and time consuming but …

A New Development In Front Group Strategy: The Social Aspects Public Relations Organization (Sapro), Rachel Pietracatella, Danielle Brady

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Increased pressure on risk industries to reduce their negative impact on society has resulted in an increasing volume of “risk” and “responsibility” communications from interest groups known as Social Aspects Public Relations Organizations (SAPROs). SAPROs have been criticized for being the “front groups” of risk industries (e.g., the tobacco, gambling, sugar, and alcohol industries). Operating within the neoliberal policy framework, SAPROs seek to forestall regulation and prioritize industry profits over public health. Building on risk industry research from the public health sphere, this article examines the SAPRO phenomenon and situates it in the political public relations (PR) literature. Specifically, it …

It’S All Fun And Games Until Somebody Dies: Grief, Mortality Salience, And Coping In Meaningful Permadeath, Mckay Steven West

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Because part of the enjoyment of video game experiences is rooted in their ability to afford players to fail but still reattempt gameplay with relatively little consequence, the appeal of playing games with permadeath seems paradoxical. This dissertation proposed that players’ motivations for playing these games with permadeath stem from an enhanced sense of appreciation garnered by players through the meaningfulness of permanent character death, rather than just through simple, hedonic enjoyment. Enhanced appreciation was expected to arise from permadeath through the grief players experienced toward the loss of their characters and through their contemplation of their own mortality. Grief …

Perceptions Of Asian American Representation In Entertainment Media, Lydia Susan Owens

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The rise of Asian American representation in entertainment media has brought new questions to the current perceptions of Asian Americans in American culture. Where whitewashing of roles or stereotypes of the Model Minority were once portrayed frequently in the past, there are now more diverse stories being shown. When representational images are being shown in entertainment media, there is need for a media literacy lens to critically analyze these images. With this rise in Asian American representation, what are current perceptions of Asian Americans in American culture and American entertainment media? What are current levels of media literacy? This study …

The Fight Is Still On: An Ethical Analysis Of The American Civil Liberties Union’S Partisan Rhetoric In The Trump Era, Emily Charlotte Gerber

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The 2016 U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump generated a newfound surge in political advocacy that greatly benefitted certain nonprofits and grassroots organizations. One of these organizations was the American Civil Liberties Union, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to protecting and defending civil liberties and rights in the U.S. The ACLU received an unprecedented number of donations following Election Day and has since pursued an aggressive campaign against President Donald Trump.

In order to explore this phenomenon, this thesis analyzed the ACLU’s rhetoric between Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump (both Republicans) and between Presidents Barack Obama (Democrat) and Donald …

Exploring The Challenges Of Social Integration Within An Upper-Level Public Relations Classroom, Tabitha Hayley Dyer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Despite three decades of literature that has explored the gender imbalance of public relations at a professional level, there is a dearth of information addressing if or how these experiences are informed at a collegiate level. Accordingly, this study examines if the gender imbalance impacts students in the upper-level public relations classroom, and the similarities and differences exist between other single-gender dominant programs including nursing and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) using three dimensions (i.e., role strain, teamwork, and overall social environment) as a comparison. Using qualitative in-depth interview data collected from 13 junior- and senior-standing public relations students …

Addiction Or Disorder? Using The Bias Map Model To Explain The Stigmatizing Effects Of News Media Labels For Opioid Use Disorder, Kylie J. Wilson

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The stigma surrounding opioid use disorder is often reinforced by the language that the general public and institutions use to talk about people with the disorder. Consistent with labeling theory, contending that labels are vehicles for social categorization and stereotypes, triggering bias, (e.g., Ashford, Brown, Ashford, & Curtis, 2019; Corrigan, Kuwabara, & O’Shaughnessy, 2009; Goodyear, Haass-Koffler, & Chavanne, 2018; Link & Phelan, 1999) but the ingroup based cognitive and emotional process through which these affect public stigma has not been explored in detail. This dissertation employs the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) and the Behaviors from Intergroup Affect Stereotypes (BIAS) Map …

Owner Perceptions Of Cat-Human Communication, Kendal Cler

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

This study focuses on cat to human communication with an emphasis on the way humans perceive cats' communicative signals. Compared to other animals, the domestication of cats has been a slow process and humans have begun to recognize the communicative signals from cats and vice versa. Based on the results of this survey research, humans have started to notice different forms of communication from cats, and are able to decipher their cat’s needs, most of the time. Owners of cats in this study appear to be projecting human values of communication onto their cats. Cats have begun to adjust their …

The Big Era Of Podcasting: A Timely Examination Of Advertisements In Popular Podcasts, Kristine Johnson, Marilena O. Vilceanu, Erika P. Solis, Kailey C. Bertelson

AMTP Proceedings 2020

No abstract provided.

The Dark Tetrad, Social Dominance Orientation, And Online Political Discussion, Cory D. Taylor

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Previous literature into online trolling behavior has focused upon the role of the Dark Tetrad and political measures separately. This study extended the existing body of research by examining the relationship between the Dark Tetrad personality traits, social dominance orientation (SDO) and online political trolling in the United States of America. The data was collected using an online questionnaire from American users of Facebook and Reddit in the summer of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, and in the runup to a hotly contested national election. Positive correlations were found between all of the Dark Tetrad traits, …

Wiser Assessment: A Communication Program Assessment Framework, Michael G. Strawser, Lindsay Neuberger

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Learning outcome assessment is a fairly recent trend in higher education that began in the 1980s (Lubinescu et al., 2001). Today, many faculty perceive assessment reporting to be tedious, time-consuming, and irrelevant busywork (Wang & Hurley, 2012). Unfortunately, this systematic process created to use empirical evidence to measure, document, and improve student learning has in many cases lost sight of this central goal. As a result, faculty may be justified in their opinions about it. This essay proposes a framework for addressing this thorny issue via WISER. WISER is an acronym for five content pillars of the communication discipline faculty …

An Empirical Analysis Of Individual Events In Collegiate Forensics, Jordan Wong

UCARE: Research Products

Anecdotally, it is a widely accepted notion in the United States’ collegiate competitive speech and debate community that a competitor’s strong record of competitive performance in the activity at the high school level is a powerful predictor of similar success in the activity at the collegiate level. However, no evidence has been brought to bear supporting this claim. This paper uses the universe of American Forensic Association National Individual Events Tournament results from 2013 to 2018 and links collegiate competitors to their respective high school performance data. I demonstrate evidence that high school experience does, in fact, appear to play …

Donald J. Trump And The Rhetoric Of Ressentiment, Casey Ryan Kelly

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay contributes to and reframes the preliminary scholarly assessments of President Donald J. Trump’s appeals to rage, malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization, resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent, subjugated and unable to act on or adequately express frustration. Though anger and resentment capture part of Trump’s affective register, I suggest that ressentiment accounts for the unique intersection where powerful sentiments and self-serving morality are …

Communication Accommodation And Identity Gaps As Predictors Of Relational Solidarity In Interfaith Family Relationships, Toni Morgan, Jordan Soliz, Mackensie Minniear, Gretchen Bergquist

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Guided by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) and Communication Theory of Identity (CTI), the purpose of this study was to investigate how families communicatively negotiate religious differences and how that negotiation is related to parent-child relational solidarity. Specifically, we examined the direct effects of (non)accommodative communication on relational solidarity and indirect effects via identity gaps. Using a cross-sectional survey from emerging adult college students (N = 234), we found nonaccommodative communication is indirectly related to lower relational solidarity through increased identity gaps. Accommodative communication is indirectly related to higher relational solidarity through decreased identity gaps. When parents use accommodative strategies, they …

Disclosure Of Trans & Gender Variant Identities By Students To Students, C. A. Brimmer

Graduate Research Papers

In this study the ways in which trans and gender variant students come out to their cisgender peers is discussed utilizing a framework of communication privacy management (CPM), which is broken down into privacy ownership, privacy control, and privacy turbulence. Foundationally, this work was intended to magnify the experiences of trans and gender variant students in addition to expanding the application of CPM to the experiences of those who transition across binaries and who eschew them altogether. Previous literature examines CPM in a binarily gendered way, and does not take into account how the appearance of bodies can disclose private …

Educating Public Information Officers In Kentucky, Lori Kent

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This study researched the education and training of public information officers (PIO) within Kentucky. Even though training exists, the effectiveness of prior training and education of currently employed public information officers is unknown. As the formalization and importance of the role has evolved in recent years, it is more important to determine and possibly create proper training and post-secondary courses to prepare public information officers for their role. Interviews were conducted, utilizing standard questions with practicing public information officers throughout the state. Research found inconsistent experience and a lack of training by public information officers prior to obtaining their …

To Thine Communication Partner Be True: The Effect Of Presentation Consistency On Perceived Authenticity And Liking After Making A First Impression Online, Nicholas Tang, Janell Chu, Kahmun Leong, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This experiment examines the effects of presentation consistency on perceived authenticity and liking in computer-mediated communication, differentiating between profile views and short online text-based conversations. The experimental design is a 2 (presentation-consistent vs. -inconsistent) × 2 (profile view vs. short conversation) between-subjects experiment using university students (N = 173) in Singapore. Results show higher perceived authenticity (η2p = .29) and liking after short conversations than after profile views without conversations. When there is only a profile view, perceived authenticity is lower when the profile photo is inconsistent with the profile text than when it is consistent (η2p = .05). We …

Media Literacy, Scientific Literacy, And Science Videos On The Internet, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Although video is not a new format for communicating about science, video-sharing platforms have democratized the process. Individuals who wish to share information or ideas about science can use these platforms to connect with potentially large and diverse audiences. This has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are related to increased access to scientific information and greater public engagement with science. The drawbacks are related to communication within echo chambers and the spread of misinformation. This mini-review presents these benefits and drawbacks with respect to the science video landscape and media and scientific literacies. It concludes with a brief synthesis of …

Editor’S Note, Janie Harden Fritz

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This is the Editor’s Note to Volume 39, Issue 1 of the Journal of the Association for Communication Administration.

Just Showing Up Can Make A Difference: A History Of The Association For Communication Administration, Christopher Lynch

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

The Association for Communication Administration (ACA), founded in Chicago in 1972, claimed a membership of one hundred and two departments. It was an independent organization but shared resources with what is now the National Communication Association. Initial membership included theatre and broadcast programs under the umbrella of communication. These programs would create their own independent associations. ACA’s mission was to promote the role of communication administrators, chairpersons to university presidents, in academia. It has weathered the ebbs and flows of any organization as it moves towards its fiftieth anniversary. A newsletter to the membership led to the creation of JACA …

Mentoring Faculty And Bolstering Students’ Emotional And Cognitive Interest: The Impact Of Perceived Homophily In The College Classroom, Robert J. Sidelinger, Leeanne M. Bell Mcmanus

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

For this study, expectancy violations theory was used to explore the associations among instructors’ inappropriate conversations, perceived homophily (similarity), and college students’ emotional and cognitive interest. Results found that students’ perceptions of instructor perceived homophily moderated the relationships between students’ reports of instructors’ enactment of inappropriate conversations and students’ emotional and cognitive interest. These results offer further understanding of the ways in which inappropriate conversations and perceived homophily affect perceptual outcomes in the college classroom, which can inform college faculty, administrators, and mentors. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Editor’S Note, Janie Harden Fritz

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This is the Editor’s Note to Volume 39, Issue 2 of the Journal of the Association for Communication Administration.