Point of Practice: Keeping “Health” in Health Communication Research and Practice

A review of my research in health communication leads to the presentation of eight insights that may be applied to the practice of health communication. The significance of collaboration and work in health communication practice settings, ranging from public health departments, to clinics, to participation in the Institute of Medicine guides the discussion of three broad principles that inform my health communication research. In both cases, a core emphasis is given to keeping “health” in health communication research and practice.     

ticTOCs: A New Service for “Keeping Current”

ticTOCs, a new journal table of contents service, provides users a free resource for managing RSS feeds for new content from selected journals. This service could be used as a complement and in some cases as an alternative to other table of contents providers. Using RSS feeds provided by publishers, ticTOCs provides an easy-to-use interface for finding, viewing, and saving current tables of contents. The service also provides OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file exports so that users can incorporate the feeds they find in ticTOCs into a feed reader of their choice.     

“Masculine” vs. “feminine” strategies in political ADS: Implications for female candidates

This study explored several research questions concerning strategies typically said to be beneficial for female political candidates. Six 60‐second videotaped political commercials were produced featuring a female “candidate”, each containing either a “masculine” or a “feminine” strategy. The strategies were aggressive, nonaggressive, career, family, ambitious, and nonambitious. Each political commercial was inserted into a set of four locally produced, nonpolitical ads. Six groups of students were randomly assigned to each of the six treatment groups. After viewing the commercials, subjects were asked to fill out a questionnaire to measure response to the candidate and to the ads through semantic differentials and Likert‐scale questions. Results from the study indicate that the “aggressive” strategy worked better in comparison with the “nonaggressive” strategy and the “career” strategy worked better in comparison with the “family” strategy. Few significant differences were found between the “ambitious” and the “nonambitious” strategies. Several implications for female candidates are discussed.     

“Once a Foster Child … ”: Identity Construction in Former Foster Children's Narratives

The present study is a thematic narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008 Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. [Google Scholar]) of 17 former foster children's online stories. The author explores the question, “What identities are constructed in narrative tellings about one's foster child experience?” Three pervasive, non-exclusive identities emerged from the former foster children's narratives: victim, survivor, and victor. These identity constructions are discussed in relation to redemptive tellings, wellbeing, and the foster care system.     

“If you hit me again,I'll hit you back:” Conflict management strategies of individuals experiencing aggression during conflicts

In interpersonal relationships characterized by aggression, the negotiation of conflict is especially significant. The present study examined the conflict management strategies used by 31 individuals who had experienced verbal and/or physical aggression during conflicts with their partners. Sillars’ (1986) conflict tactics coding system was used as a framework to analyze 960 pages of transcribed data. The results of this deductive content analysis indicated that the participants reported using primarily Distributive conflict strategies. Analytic induction was also used to interpret nonverbal forms of conflict management, revealing three common tactics: crying, nonverbal avoidance, and aggression. Implications for using these conflict strategies in interpersonal relationships characterized by aggression are discussed.     

“I know it when i see it”: Assessing good teaching

Teaching effectiveness is a particularly difficult aspect of library instruction to evaluate because judging what makes an instructor effective in the classroom can be a highly subjective, interpretive act. In search of more “objective” criteria, this study began by adapting a process described by Carole Larson and Laura Dickson (in their 1994 RQ article, “Developing Behavioral Reference Desk Performance Standards”) to elicit a comparable set of performance behaviors for instruction. Traits and behaviors derived from two preliminary investigations served as the basis for a written survey then distributed to a wider audience of instruction librarians. This article reports on the results of that survey—what instruction librarians consider to be the desired traits and behaviors of an effective teacher.     

“Talking things through”; and “putting it in writing”;: Two codes of communication in an academic institution

This study is an interpretive ethnography based on participant observation over a two‐year period of time as members of one academic institution responded to a Board of Trustees’ mandate to revise the system of governance. Two communication codes were identified in faculty and administration subcultures of this institution. The code of “collegiality,”; used by members of the faculty subculture, valued “talking things through,”; because this channel of communication best affirmed the individual self and facilitated personal and egalitarian relations among organizational members. The code of “professional management,”; used by members of the administration subculture, privileged “putting it in writing,”; because written codification best insured the rights and responsibilities of organizational members.     

The Strategic Rhetoric of an “At-Risk” Educational Identity: Interviewing Jane

This essay explores how communication research on “at-risk” students relies on under-theorized understandings of identity as seemingly stable traits and characteristics. In this sense, “at-riskness,” as a cultural identity, is dangerous precisely because it encourages researchers to link identity difference with failure, rather than to explore the presence and perpetuation of particular ideologies. We illuminate such ideological tensions through our analysis of a complex educational identity—an in-depth interview with an “at-risk” student—where we locate strategic rhetorics (i.e., discursive constructions that reify normalized assumptions about educational success and failure) that demonstrate how ideology constitutes the phenomenon of educational risk.     

“Is this for real?”: Web literacy for the web-savvy

Objective: Students will enhance their information literacy skills (ability to determine the validity, currency, and appropriateness) relative to web resources.

Courses: Professional Writing, Academic Writing, Introduction to Communication     

“Who Are You Trying To Be?”: Identity Gaps Within Intraracial Encounters

This study employs the Communication Theory of Identity (CTI) to explain and describe the interpenetration of personal, enacted, and relational frames of identity within the context of interracial communication encounters. Specific examples, derived from focus group discussions, of personal-relational and personal-enacted-relational identity gaps experienced by Blacks and Hispanics are presented. The article concludes with a discussion of the conditions under which satisfying communication is achievable in difficult situations requiring the negotiation of ethnicity.     

Managing the “backend” of LIS research projects: A project management perspective

There is very little guidance in library and information science (LIS) literature about how researchers should manage the scope, time, costs, quality, human resources, communications, and risks associated with LIS research projects. To fill this gap, researchers tested the utility of project management principles (PMP) for planning and managing a project designed to enhance the information, digital, and financial literacy of the people earning less than $2 per day in India. The customization of PMP through 29 mechanisms and 60 action items was used to conduct focus groups and in-person surveys with over 150 participants, in their native language, at 10 public libraries. PMP were most helpful for managing risks (13 solutions), communications (11 solutions), and human resources (10 solutions) of the project and treating participants ethically. PMP developed in the West were helpful before, during, and after data collection in the LIS research project in a developing country.     

“Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are”: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists

Interviews with women working as sports journalists showed that they must negotiate several tensions, including balancing their conflicting identities as woman and as professional journalist. Nevertheless, in the end, they also saw the two as compatible. They fell along a spectrum of resistance to traditional values in sports and journalism, providing evidence of cracks in hegemonic notions of what it means to be a woman covering sports.     

“A Helluva Read”: Profanity in Adolescent Literature

Although the use of profanity has been examined in a number of types of media, to our knowledge profanity has not been examined in adolescent literature. Thus, the frequency and portrayal of profanity was coded in 40 bestselling adolescent novels. Results revealed that some novels did not contain a single instance of profanity, whereas others contained hundreds of often very strong profanity. When profanity was used, characters were likely to be young, rich, attractive, and of pronounced social status. Novels directed at older adolescents contained much more profanity. However, age guidance or content warnings are not found on the books themselves. Discussion is provided regarding the implications of the findings and the appropriateness of including content warnings in adolescent literature.     

Expert critics: operationalizing the judgement/decisionmaking literature as a theory of “bugs” and repair strategies

Humans are well-known for being adept at using their intuition and expertise in many situations. However, in some settings even human experts are susceptible to errors in judgement, and a failure to recognize the limits of knowledge. This happens often especially in semi-structured situtations, where multi-disciplinary expertise is required, or when uncertainty is a factor. At these times our natural ability to recognize and correct errors fails us, since we have faith in our reasoning. One way to deal with such problems is to have a computerized “critic” to assist in the process. This article introduces the concept of automated critics that collaborate with human experts to help improve their problem solving performance. A critic is a narrowly focused program that uses a knowledge base to help it recognize (1) what types of human error have occurred, and (2) what kinds of criticism strategies could help the user prevent or eliminate those errors. In discussing the “errors” half of this knowledge base, there is a difference between the expert's knowledge and his or her judgement. The focus in this article is more on judgement than on knowledge but both are addressed.To build automated critics it is important to understand the use and behavior of human critics. For this reason critic theory, principles and rules for design are described in this article. These are presented by showing various types of criticism encountered across a variety of generic tasks, such as medical diagnosis, coaching forecasting and authoring among many others. Thus a model of expert cognition and rules for identifying cognitive biases are presented. This rule base exploits four decades of literature on the psychology of judgement and decisionmaking as a generative theory of “bugs” in expert intuition and as a deep knowledge from which rules about buggy behavior are drawn. For the commonly recurring expert errors, specific preventive and corrective strategies are also reviewed and considerations for criticism presentation and deployment are explained. Particular attention is given to rules about when and how criticism should be offered. By consulting and attempting to operationalize the judgement and decisionmaking literature within the critiquing approach, this establishes criticism-based problem solving as a novel way to bridge the gap between the traditional domain knowledge-rich approaches of AI and the domain-independent, theory-rich approaches of decision analysis. Attention is also devoted to the obstacles to, and opportunities for, further bridging this gap.