‘Adults don’t understand’: exploring how teens use dialectical frameworks to navigate webs of tensions in online life

As communication increasingly takes place online and via mobile technologies, young people are the fastest growing adopters of new online platforms. Consequently, communication scholars have begun to consider young people’s experiences online, comparing online and offline interactions, establishing how developmental stages affect youth’s engagement with online content, and documenting risks for youth’s experience online. We argue that much can be gained from a ‘tension-centered’ approach that highlights the competing demands of young people’s online engagement and problematizes current conceptions of risk. Through focus group interviews with teens, we examine current trends of online activity and re-conceptualize opportunities for conducting research with youth. Teens’ ‘local logics’ for negotiation webs of communicative tensions online reveal articulation of formal rules, which are later eclipsed by lived experiences. We offer strategies for parents, caregivers, and educators to more productively engage with youth about their online experiences, as well as implications for communication researchers.     

The bibliometric quotient (BQ), or how to measure a researcher’s performance capacity: A Bayesian Poisson Rasch model

Regarding evaluation of individual researchers, the bibliometric indicators approach has been increasingly discussed recently, but there are some problems involved with it: construct definition, measurement errors, level of scale, dimensionality, normalization. Based on a psychometric model, the Rasch model, we developed a measuring scale for the theoretical construct ‘researcher’s performance capacity,’ defined as the competency of a researcher to write influential papers. The aim was a scale that is one-dimensional and continuous, is applicable to bibliometric count variables, and takes measurement errors into account. In this paper we present the psychometric model (Bayesian Poisson Rasch model, BPR) and its assumptions and examine the behavior of the model under various sampling conditions. For a sample of N?=?254 researchers in a quantitative methodology section of an undisclosed German academic society for social sciences, using the BPR model we developed a scale that we named ‘Bibliometric Quotient’ (BQ, M?=?100, SD?=?15) (following the term ‘intelligence quotient’). The scale fulfills most of the test-theoretical requirements (e.g., high reliability α_t?=?.96, no differential item functioning except for academic age and German states) and in addition allows researchers to be ranked. Women’s BQ scores were 8.3 points lower on the scale than men’s BQ scores.