Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons^™

National Collegiate Athletic Association Head Coaches' Satisfaction With Athletic Training Services 2015, Whitney Larson

Master's Theses

Athletic trainers and coaches have a significant amount of interaction regarding the care of an athlete. This communication and cooperation is necessary to providing effective care. The purpose of this study was to determine the level of satisfaction that head coaches have with those providing athletic training services across all three NCAA Divisions. Overall satisfaction and four satisfaction categories (professionalism, communication, knowledge/ability, and accessibility) were examined. A total of 40 head coaches from NCAA Division I, II, and III schools participated in the study. The instrument used was originally developed by Beer (2004) and was modified to fit the current …

Work Across The Generations: Communication Narratives Of Stay-At-Home Fathers In Early And Middle Adulthood, Alice L. Jones

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

The notion of work whether it is done inside or outside the home represents a complex and shifting pattern of social relationships, gender role identities, and ideologies. For an increasing numbers of men, who represent the population of fathers labeled as "stay-at-Home Dad" [SAHD] or "stay-at-home father" [SAHF], these changes have created special challenges, controversies, and raised questions about cultural expectations concerning the transition from that of a stigmatized role to that of a "new, involved father" (Eranta & Moisander, 2011; Rochlen, 2008). Increased participation by men in roles that challenge traditional and long standing gender role norms and expectations …

Organizational Communication: Perceptions Of Staff Members’ Level Of Communication Satisfaction And Job Satisfaction, Priti R. Sharma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research study was to explore the topic of organizational communication in higher education and examine staff members’ perceptions about their level of communication and job satisfaction in their workplaces. This study was also designed to test the relationship between communication satisfaction and job satisfaction by analyzing the significance of different dimensions of Communication Satisfaction with the view that satisfaction is multifaceted.

A total of 463 non-faculty staff members from different units of a single higher education institution participated in this study. This study included non-teaching staff, including student workers and both full-time and part-time staff members. …

A Case Study Of Professional Coach-Client Communication., Scott Shank

Honors Theses

Organizations increasingly embrace coaching as a core process to improve employee learning, increase overall performance, and develop leaders. Extant research on coaching is increasing, yet communication-based theories are underrepresented in the literature despite the fact that coaching is fundamentally discursive in nature. Further, although the coaching literature suggests that coaching conversations contribute to client identity growth and potential transformation, studies that specifically explore such activities are underrepresented in existing scholarship. Further, there lacks sufficient research examining how coaching contributes to the ongoing identity development of the coaches themselves. To fill this gap, this qualitative study explored the role coaching plays …

Students Talk About Gender And Race Within The Classroom, Amanda Lucock

Media and Communication Studies Honors Papers

This study attempts to gain a better understanding of students’ experiences and perceptions of conversations about gender and race in the classroom. Specifically, this study focuses on issues and concerns that arise in the course of talking about gender and race. There were over 20 hours of classes observed, eight one-on-one in-depth interviews, and over three hours of recorded classroom conversations. Through my analysis, I found that students used several devices, including storytelling and attacking, to speak about these taboo issues within the classroom.

Conversational Scaffolding With Couples With An Aphasic Partner, Mary Jo Bissmeyer

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder experienced by approximately one million Americans today, many recovering from stroke or traumatic brain injury. Traditional therapy has focused solely on regaining specific linguistic skills, including auditory comprehension, speech, reading, and/or writing. Conversation partner training is a newer trend in aphasia intervention that has emerged thanks to an increasingly social model of disability and the pressure to deliver meaningful and cost effective health services. It fits nicely with the Life Participation Approach to Aphasia, which encourages clinicians to help individuals with aphasia and their families set and meet their own goals for therapy, which …

The Thorn In Our Flesh: A Comparison Of Academic Group Projects Across Cultures, Eliysha Saputra

College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs Presentations

The mention of group projects often elicits groans from students, followed by chatter as they attempt to grab the best team members they can find among the flock of distressed classmates. In an attempt to discover whether or not the dislike toward group projects is exclusive to students in American universities, the current study explored the following question: How do students across cultures perceive group projects in the classroom? Previous research was explored to determine possible factors that influence group performance and how one’s perception of the group affects the outcome of the project. Data were collected data from university …

Framing Group Projects: Leadership And Style In Small Group Dynamics, Jillian Bonafede

Honors Projects in Applied Psychology

The purpose of my Capstone was to look at small group dynamics and the factors that have a profound impact upon them. I used Bryant University’s IDEA Program as the template for my project for, and arena from which I collected my research. The IDEA Program is a three-day ideation and innovation program that all first-year students are required to participate in. I observed, filmed and questioned twenty-five of the first-year students participating in the program. After my research and analysis, I found that there were four factors that greatly influenced the dynamics of a small group, as well as …

Making Oral Communication A Successful Part Of The Common Core, Jon A. Hess

Communication Faculty Publications

Adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represents the first time that oral communication has been included in the curriculum requirements for K–12 education in many states. If done well, this change will provide important benefits to students. However, effective implementation will require collaboration among policymakers, educators, and experts in oral communication.

As educators work to strengthen primary and secondary education in the United States, many agree that schools need educational standards that are grounded in today’s needs and shared across states. The CCSS have emerged as a potential solution, and the majority of states have adopted these standards. …

Storytelling As Self-Empowerment: A Case Study Of Avega Beneficiaries In Post-Genocide Rwanda, Lauren Garretson

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This project is an assessment of the effectiveness of storytelling as a mechanism of self-empowerment in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. It concentrates on the effects of the storytelling that is done by female survivors of the 1994 genocide within one Rwandan organization, AVEGA Agahozo.[1] The research project aim is to understand how these women in contemporary Rwanda try to counter their oppression through the stories they tell others about themselves and reclaim agency over their own lives. I examine the possibilities for, and limitations of, storytelling as a means of self-empowerment for these women to counter the unjust …

Discursive Struggles Of Tradition And Nontradition In The Retrospective Accounts Of Married Couples Who Cohabited Before Engagement, Julia Moore, Jennifer Kienzle, Elizabeth Flood Grady

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Couples who cohabit and then become engaged often participate in nontraditional living arrangements and traditional marriage proposals. Because understandings of tradition and nontradition are constituted in discourse, we employed relational dialectics theory to examine the interplay of competing discourses in the talk of married participants who cohabited before engagement. Through retrospective interviews, we investigated the discursive struggles in participants’ talk across three contexts: pre-engagement cohabitation, the marriage proposal ritual, and the (re)telling of the proposal story to friends and family. Analysis of participant interviews illustrated three discursive struggles: (a) pragmatism and risk in cohabitation, (b) romance and partnership in the …

Youth Narratives Of The Conflict In Northern Uganda, Ellen Eichelberger

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Narratives are an essential method of communication that create windows into human experiences. Narratives are also responsible for generating the societies in which they are told, or are shaped indelibly by the societies generated by more powerful narratives. In a post-conflict environment where society has been destroyed by decades of violence, the power of narratives to influence society is heightened. Such a postconflict environment is that of northern Uganda, as it emerges from the violence of the war between the LRA and the UPDF. Due to the heightened powers of narratives, it is necessary to give attention to what those …

It Takes A Community: On-Time Graduation For At-Risk Youth, Sheila L. Gray, Danielle A. Craig

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

Cultivating Youth is an at-risk student community agency and organization collaboration that provides opportunities to 1) attend leadership training and college level classes, 2) retrieve and receive duel credits to achieve graduation, and 3) directly apply learned life-skills and workforce preparation to applied experiences while building self- esteem.

It is a full circle approach to improve quality of life.

Being A "Good Parent" In Parent-Teacher Conferences, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

This research advances our understanding of what constitutes a "good parent" in the course of actual social interaction. Examining video-recorded naturally occurring parent-teacher conferences, this article shows that, while teachers deliver student-praising utterances, parents may display that they are gaining knowledge; but when teachers’ actions adumbrate student-criticizing utterances, parents systematically display prior knowledge. This article elucidates the details of how teachers and parents tacitly collaborate to enable parents to express student-troubles first, demonstrating that parents display competence -- appropriate involvement with children’s schooling -- by asserting their prior knowledge of, and/or claiming/describing their efforts to remedy, student-troubles. People (have to) …

Giving And Receiving Compliments: What Are Your Intentions?, Tyler Karlberg, Nancy Moua, Emily Mcdonough, Sam Alakija

Concordia Journal of Communication Research

Compliments are a part of everyday communication in American culture. While many use compliments in order to gain compliance or to show interest in further developing a relationship, underlying intentions may be different than what is perceived by the receiver. The researchers of this study investigated the difference in the motivations of compliments both given and received based on different categories. Using a survey of students at a faith­based university in the Midwest, researchers were able to gather insight into the intentions of giving compliments as well as the perception of received compliments.

Communication Quality Differences Between Legos And Minecraft, Michael Cullen, Joel Klein, Keith Crockett

Concordia Journal of Communication Research

Communication between pre-adolescent boys can be viewed as strange and unlike teen girls and “grown ups”. According to Debra Tannen (1990), “All genders strive to be understood, however young men try to communicate to remain independent.” This often leads to competition amongst the male gender. In order to test this theory, this study looks to observe if there are any differences between hands on activity communication and technology gameplay communication. The study observed 3 pre-adolescent boys trying to work together to make a house in Legos and then the boys were instructed to make a house on Minecraft. The levels …

Virtual Conference And Meeting Systems: Resources For Online Connections, John Gottfried, Laura Delancey, Carol L. Watwood, Amanda Hardin

DLTS Faculty Publications

Librarians have always tried to stretch the limits of applicable technologies to create effective connections among researchers and resources. We thrive on the tools and tactics that help us do this, and we are always on the prowl for newer, better alternatives. This is one of the best ways we have of keeping high service standards in the face of shrinking budgets and skeletal staffing. Fortunately, there have never been so many technologies to choose from, and there have never been so many challenges calling out for technological intervention.

Hosting online instruction sessions is, for example, an excellent opportunity for …

Love Games: A Game-Theory Approach To Compatibility, Kerstin Bever, Julie Rowlett

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this note, we present a compatibility test with a rigorous mathematical foundation in game theory. The test must be taken separately by both partners, making it difficult for either partner alone to control the outcome. To introduce basic notions of game theory we investigate a scene from the film "A Beautiful Mind" based on John Nash's life and Nobel-prize-winning theorem. We recall this result and reveal the mathematics behind our test. Readers may customize and modify the test for more accurate results or to evaluate interpersonal relationships in other settings, not only romantic. Finally, we apply Dyson's and Press's …

A Comparison Of Sexual Health And Sexual Pressure Among Young African American And Caucasian Women, Ann Gakumo

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Introduction. Condom self-efficacy, positive attitudes toward condom use, condom negotiation skills, HIV knowledge, and self-esteem have been associated with decreased HIV risk behavior among young women, but few studies have examined racial disparities that may exist in these social health indicators. Moreover, sexual pressure (inclusive of both coercive and non-coercive pressures to engage in unwanted or unprotected sex) has been understudied in women of different racial groups.

Study Purpose. The purpose of this study was to compare racial similarities and disparities in indicators of sexual health and sexual pressure in an urban sample of young African American and Caucasian women …

A Meta-Analysis Of Crew Resource Management/Incident Command Systems Implementation Studies In The Fire And Emergency Services, John C. Griffith, Donna L. Roberts, Ronald T. Wakeham

Aviation / Aeronautics / Aerospace International Research Conference

The presentation will summarize a meta-analysis of studies on Crew Resource Management/Incident Command System implementation in the fire and emergency services. The need for using participative leadership tools such as CRM evolved from an NTSB recommendation that followed United Airlines Flight 173 crash in 1978. NASA, civilian and military aviation communities implemented Crew Resource Management (CRM) training to improve decisionmaking during flight operations. Maintenance Resource Management (MRM) was a variant of CRM and first appeared in a Federal Aviation Administration circular in 2000. CRM was adopted by the medical community in the 1990s, specifically in the surgical and nursing areas, …