Pediatric nurses’ communication of role expectations to parents of hospitalized children

This study examines the role performance of pediatric nurses and parents in relation to hospitalized children. The ambiguity associated with role behaviors for both groups is considered in terms of rules that might be formally adopted to define nurses’ and parents’ roles. Pediatric nurses were interviewed to identify behaviors appropriately performed by parents for their hospitalized children, and formal rules were drafted. These rules were communicated by nurses in writing, orally, or both and were compared to no formal communication for impact on nurses’ job satisfaction, parents’ satisfaction with nursing care, and both nurses’ and parents’ role ambiguity. The formal rules were found to enhance both nurses’ job satisfaction and parents’ satisfaction with the technical‐professional competence component of nursing care. Moreover, both nurses and parents perceived a reduction in role ambiguity as measured by the information that nurses give and the communication of expectations.     

Use of Digitization to Modernize China’s Publishing Industry

To develop digital publishing, is an important part for China’s progress into an informed country, and the new designated direction for the development of publishing industry in China. This article introduces the macro-planning for developing digital publishing in China, the present status and problems of this industry, as well as personal viewpoints on how to develop a digital publishing industry in the near future.     

Staying True to Disney: College Students’ Resistance to Criticism of The Little Mermaid

This article discusses the implementation of a media literacy program in a college classroom in the form of an extended critique and analysis of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Students’ decoding of Disney’s messages and their resistance to critique of the film are analyzed using four areas of research: audience research, media literacy, critical pedagogy, and psychology’s cognitive dissonance theory.     

Creating greeting cards to understand and to evaluate Knapp’s Staircase Model of relationships

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Relational Communication

Objective: This article teaches students to explain and evaluate Knapp’s Relational Staircase Model through the creation of personalized greeting cards for each relational stage. The in-class activity encourages students to be creative and succinct in capturing the essence of an assigned relational stage in their respective greeting cards. The activity also provides students with an opportunity to apply the model to their lives and to test the validity and usefulness of the model in the hook-up culture prevalent among many college students today.     

African-Americans’ perceptions of organ donation: ‘simply boils down to mistrust!’

Five focus groups were conducted to better understand African-American adults’ (N?=?62) perceptions of organ donation. Applying the health belief model, results revealed that participants generally were aware of the need for organ donors and felt susceptible to needing a transplant in the future. Additionally, the number of perceived barriers greatly outweighed the number of perceived benefits to organ donation. Several novel barriers to organ donation, not currently identified in the literature, arose during focus group discussions, alluding to a larger source of mistrust among African-Americans. In respect to self-efficacy, participants’ responses further delineated the distinction between task and decisional efficacy. The results are discussed with an emphasis on how the current findings compare and contrast with previous work, as well as a focus on the practical implications for targeted organ donation campaigns aimed at African-American communities.     

Using a Targeted Rubric to Deepen Direct Assessment of College Students’ Abilities to Evaluate the Credibility of Sources

At the Sonoma State University Library, a rubric was designed specifically for deepening the assessment of freshmen students’ ability to evaluate the credibility of sources. The course-level rubric was developed after program-level assessments proved too broad to uncover specific challenges in this particular skill. As a direct assessment tool, the rubric allows teaching faculty and librarians to more clearly identify and address the smaller steps required for a student to successfully learn to evaluate a source. The rubric and the results of using it as an assessment tool with a freshmen-level, general education oral communication/critical thinking course are discussed.     

A sensitivity analysis of researchers’ productivity rankings to the time of citation observation

In this work we investigate the sensitivity of individual researchers’ productivity rankings to the time of citation observation. The analysis is based on observation of research products for the 2001–2003 triennium for all research staff of Italian universities in the hard sciences, with the year of citation observation varying from 2004 to 2008. The 2008 rankings list is assumed the most accurate, as citations have had the longest time to accumulate and thus represent the best possible proxy of impact. By comparing the rankings lists from each year against the 2008 benchmark we provide policy-makers and research organization managers a measure of trade-off between timeliness of evaluation execution and accuracy of performance rankings. The results show that with variation in the evaluation citation window there are variable rates of inaccuracy across the disciplines of researchers. The inaccuracy results negligible for Physics, Biology and Medicine.     

Perceptions of social‐sexual communication at work: The effects of message,situation, and observer characteristics on judgments of sexual harassment

Social‐sexual communication at work may contribute to either the initiation of an organizational romance or sexual harassment. We examined forces that influence perceptions of sexual messages as harassing rather than flirtatious. We presented 94 working adults with questionnaires soliciting workplace attitudes and experiences. Then, participants reviewed newsletters describing male and female coworkers in a fictitious organization. Finally, participants evaluated the degree of sexual harassment evident in six hypothetical interactions wherein one of the employees introduced in the newsletter makes a suggestive remark to his or her coworker. Newsletters and questionnaires manipulated the explicitness of messages, the initiator's status as supervisor versus subordinate, the attractiveness of the message initiator and target, and the initiator's sex. Message explicitness accounted for 88% of the variance in perceptions of harassment. A five‐way interaction among message and situational cues suggested that perceptions of sexual harassment are also influenced by contextual information. Females rated highly explicit messages as more harassing than did males, and individuals who were more accepting of socializing or dating between coworkers rated scenarios as less harassing. Exposure to socializing at work had a curvilinear association with perceptions of harassment such that low to moderate exposure corresponded with perceptions of greater harassment and moderate to high exposure was associated with lower ratings of sexual harassment. The discussion highlights applications for sexual harassment training programs within organizations.     

A sensitivity analysis of research institutions’ productivity rankings to the time of citation observation

One of the critical issues in bibliometric research assessments is the time required to achieve maturity in citations. Citation counts can be considered a reliable proxy of the real impact of a work only if they are observed after sufficient time has passed from publication date. In the present work the authors investigate the effect of varying the time of citation observation on accuracy of productivity rankings for research institutions. Research productivity measures are calculated for all Italian universities active in the hard sciences in the 2001–2003 period, by individual field and discipline, with the time of the citation observation varying from 2004 to 2008. The objective is to support policy-makers in choosing a citation window that optimizes the tradeoff between accuracy of rankings and timeliness of the exercise.     

Teaching Them to Teach: Programmatic Evaluation of Graduate Assistants’ Teaching Performance

Academic libraries are one of the most important sources of “on the job” training for future library instructors. Librarians who supervise and assess these future library instructors (often in graduate assistant positions) often choose to provide observations and feedback each semester to these instructors in training. Scholarly literature, however, provides little information on whether this system helps graduate assistants to develop as teachers. The authors of this article assessed graduate assistants’ performance as teachers over three semesters using a system of observation and self-assessment. They analyzed both patterns and areas of growth and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this system.     

The broadcasters’ duty to editorialize

No matter how many years a person has worked in the broadcasting industry, he can only become acquainted with the organizational structure of a very limited number of stations—and his knowledge of these stations goes rapidly out of date. Although there are basic similarities in most stations—the division into programming, engineering, administrative, and sales for example— it would be unusual to find two stations with exactly the same functions, problems, and personnel. The need to know some of the variations of station organization is particularly acute among those students and others who are planning to find employment for the first time in a particular type or size of station. To assist these individuals, their teachers, and all those interested in broadcast management, the following report on some “typical” and atypical stations was prepared.

Both Lawrence W. Lichty and Joseph M. Ripley earned their Ph.D. degrees at The Ohio State University, and have contributed to the Journal of Broadcasting a number of times in the past. At the time this research was conducted they were Assistant and Associate Professor respectively in the Department of Speech at the University of Wisconsin. As of the fall of 1967, Dr. Lichty will be Associate Professor at Wisconsin and Dr. Ripley will be Chairman of the Department of Radio‐Television‐Film at the University of Kentucky.     

Comparing Advertising Agencies’ Resources to Academic Libraries’ Collections

Abstract

Collection development analysis in academic libraries typically involves collection-centered and user-centered methods. These approaches focus on building collections that help students with their academic needs but may overlook resources that students need experience with when employed. To address this gap, the authors analyzed early-career advertising agency positions to identify a list of information resources that advertising agencies expect employees to use. This list was then compared against the library websites of 158 universities with advertising programs to see how sufficiently libraries are fulfilling these resource needs. The authors found that overall, university libraries only subscribe to a small number of resources used by advertising agencies.     

What Motivates Parents to Mediate Children’s Use of Smartphones? An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior

Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study examines parents’ attitudes, social norms, self-efficacy, and intentions regarding parental mediation of children’s smartphone use. A survey conducted with parents of young smartphone users aged 10–17 shows that parents tend to perceive discussion-based active mediation to be more desirable, as compared to rule-making restrictive mediation. Findings also indicate that the extent to which parents believe that they have control over their parental mediation practices plays an important role in forming positive intentions to practice parental mediation, regardless of the mediation domain.     

Different Paths,Different Voices: The Historical Contexts of Women’s and Minorities’ Access to Broadcasting

This essay extends Susan Carter’s (2004) models of women’s access to broadcasting to include racial and ethnic minorities. It investigates the different historical contexts of female and minority access to commercial broadcasting, and argues that women and minorities have rooted their media access in different models. The intersection of race and gender, combined with an evolving cultural, political, and regulatory environment, has had a powerful influence on which of the three access models were used by women and people of color.     

German Book Publishers’ Barriers to Disruptive Innovations: The Case of E-Book Adoption

To succeed in a period of change, German book publishers need to adopt innovations, e.g., implement e-books into their product portfolio. Yet, in the book industry, the adoption of new technologies is not commonplace: Despite being the second biggest book market worldwide, only 1.2 % of all published books in Germany are available as e-books. This problem leads us to investigate the factors that determine whether publishing companies decide in favor or against entering the e-book market. Based on a standardized survey of more than 240 German publishing houses, barriers to innovation adoption are examined from a micro, meso and macro perspective. Our main findings show that individual characteristics of management and the company’s corporate culture strongly predict adoption. Also, organizational communication seems to be critical. Taking this into account, the key resource to enable innovation seems to be information underlining the necessity of communities of practice.     

Identifying paths to audience success of media products: the media decision-makers’ perspective

Research on media success factors is a fragmented field. Definitions, measures, and methods vary, and findings are often inconsistent. In an attempt to fill this perceived research gap, we distilled generic success factors of media products from the literature. Guided by theory and empirical findings, these factors were aggregated to complex concepts, building blocks of success that we further investigated in an exploratory qualitative study. We found that the building blocks are applicable to all types of media, independent of seriality and content types of media products. Subsequently the research question of this article is: Which building blocks of success are most important for media products? To answer this question, we conducted an online survey of 255 media professionals in print, audio-visual, and online media in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. To analyze our data, we deployed qualitative comparative analysis, a method based on set theory that is suitable to investigate complex causality. We conclude that four building blocks are necessary for success: “good” distribution, environmental orientation, form/design, and human resources are preconditions for achieving success in terms of audience market share. In addition, three patterns emerge in the sufficient paths (combinations of building blocks) to success. Which route to success a media product shows can be related to the width of its topical scope and the corresponding projected audience size.     

Cross-field evaluation of publications of research institutes using their contributions to the fields’ MVPs determined by h-index

We propose a cross-field evaluation method for the publications of research institutes. With this approach, we first determine a set of the most visible publications (MVPs) for each field from the publications of all assessed institutes according to the field's h-index. Then, we measure an institute's production in each field by its percentage share (i.e., contribution) to the field's MVPs. Finally, we obtain an institute's cross-field production measure as the average of its contributions to all fields. The proposed approach is proven empirically to be reasonable, intuitive to understand, and uniformly applicable to various sets of institutes and fields of different publication and citation patterns. The field and cross-field production measures obtained by the proposed approach not only allow linear ranking of institutes, but also reveal the degree of their production difference.