Paving Consensus: Enacting, Challenging, and Revising the Consensus Process in a Cohousing Community

This study focused on a cohousing community's use of consensus to make a decision about surfacing a parking area. It revealed that the community's use of consensus decision making allowed the residents to balance three goals: making an appropriate decision, meeting members' needs, and maintaining the community's well-being. Reaching agreement, however, was complicated by members' value differences and discontinuity in their participation. The analysis of this case reveals three qualities characteristic of the enactment of consensus: the role of structured communication within and between group meetings, a tension between maintaining process openness and reaching decision closure, and the expectation that group members will work within the consensus process. The analysis also highlights the importance of timing in the interpretation of conflict in a consensus-oriented group and the role of process change when a group reaches the limits of members' commitment to consensus.     

Employee mistreatment and muted voices in the culturally diverse workplace

This study examines mistreatment through the perspectives of employees with different cultural backgrounds and positions in order to understand the ways in which some voices are muted and others are privileged. Mistreatment is interactional, distributive, procedural, or systemic abuse of employees taking place at both interpersonal and institutional levels on the basis of cultural diversity. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with employees of a large research and development organization revealed three types of muted narratives used to respond to mistreatment (muted-but-engaged, angrily disengaged, and resigned) as well as one type of privileged response. The narratives provided evidence of two processes by which voices became muted: repeated silencing over time and silencing through ambiguity of policies.     

Online journals' impact on the citation patterns of medical faculty.

PURPOSE: The purpose was to determine the impact of online journals on the citation patterns of medical faculty. This study looked at whether researchers were more likely to limit the resources they consulted and cited to those journals available online rather than those only in print. SETTING: Faculty publications from the college of medicine at a large urban university were examined for this study. The faculty publications from a regional medical college of the same university were also examined in the study. The number of online journals available for faculty, staff, and students at this institution has increased from an initial core of 15 online journals in 1998 to over 11,000 online journals in 2004. METHODOLOGY: Searches by author affiliation were performed in the Web of Science to find all articles written by faculty members in the college of medicine at the selected institution. Searches were conducted for the following years: 1993, 1996, 1999, and 2002. Cited references from each faculty-authored article were recorded, and the corresponding cited journals were coded into four categories based on their availability at the institution in this study: print only, print and online, online only, and not owned. Results were analyzed using SPSS. RESULTS: The number of journals cited per year continued to increase from 1993 to 2002. The results did not indicate that researchers were more likely to cite online journals or were less likely to cite journals only in print. At the regional location where the number of print-only journals was minimal, use of the print-only journals did decrease in 2002, although not significantly. CONCLUSION/DISCUSSION: It is possible that electronic access to information (i.e., online databases) has had a positive impact on the number of articles faculty will cite. Results of this study suggest, at this point, that faculty are still accessing the print-only collection, at least for research purposes, and are therefore not sacrificing quality for convenience.     

Sampling Methods and Sample Populations in Quantitative Mass Communication Research Studies: A 15-Year Census of Six Journals

This study evaluated the sampling methods and sample populations used in all U.S.-based survey and experimental mass communication studies published between 2000 and 2014 in six major journals (N = 1,173). Most studies used nonprobability samples, and more than half used student samples. Experiments used more nonprobability and student samples than surveys. Funded studies used more probability and nonstudent samples than nonfunded studies. Implications of results pertaining to population validity and interpretations of findings for mass communication research are discussed.     

Persistent Misperceptions: Americans’ Misplaced Confidence in Privacy Policies, 2003–2015

This paper examines the persistence of Americans’ misunderstanding of the function of privacy policies. We also identify groups that have misplaced confidence in the privacy policy label and address whether the groups’ patterns of misperception have changed over time. The findings add a new dimension to the argument that the usefulness of privacy policies needs to be reassessed. As a remedy, we call for media literacy programs to address structural features of media systems that lead to broadly held misperceptions such as the one examined here.     

Overhyped Fad or Missed Opportunity? A History of Academic Libraries and the Social Web

The emergence of social media has radically transformed the way we create and consume information. These changes have in turn given rise to new models of librarianship centered on principles of participation, interaction, and collaboration. Over the last decade, academic libraries have eagerly adopted social media as a means of enhancing services and connecting with a new generation of users. But how exactly has this technology changed libraries? In what ways has the social web transformed library services or our relationships with users? This article attempts to assess the impact of social media on academic libraries in the United States through a review of the literature published since 2005. In particular, it looks at how academic libraries have used social media to improve or develop new services. By comparing published case studies with the theoretical literature, this article seeks to separate theory from practice and determine the extent to which the social web has transformed library practice. The author concludes that, despite several noteworthy examples, the majority of social library applications ultimately fail to live up to the transformative potential promised within the literature and that this failure may have more to do with philosophical rather than technical limitations.     

Analysis of single comments left for bioRxiv preprints till September 2019

IntroductionWhile early commenting on studies is seen as one of the advantages of preprints, the type of such comments, and the people who post them, have not been systematically explored.Materials and methodsWe analysed comments posted between 21 May 2015 and 9 September 2019 for 1983 bioRxiv preprints that received only one comment on the bioRxiv website. The comment types were classified by three coders independently, with all differences resolved by consensus.ResultsOur analysis showed that 69% of comments were posted by non-authors (N = 1366), and 31% by the preprints’ authors themselves (N = 617). Twelve percent of non-author comments (N = 168) were full review reports traditionally found during journal review, while the rest most commonly contained praises (N = 577, 42%), suggestions (N = 399, 29%), or criticisms (N = 226, 17%). Authors’ comments most commonly contained publication status updates (N = 354, 57%), additional study information (N = 158, 26%), or solicited feedback for the preprints (N = 65, 11%).ConclusionsOur results indicate that comments posted for bioRxiv preprints may have potential benefits for both the public and the scholarly community. Further research is needed to measure the direct impact of these comments on comments made by journal peer reviewers, subsequent preprint versions or journal publications.     

Success Without ‘A’ Pass: an Educational Experiment Revisited

In 1963, the University of Sussex inaugurated an innovative Early Leavers Scheme in response to two government reports which confirmed that it was still the norm for talented working‐class children to leave school aged 15 or 16 and indicated that the hopes of the 1944 Education Act were as yet unfulfilled. This article explores what the scheme has meant to some of the people who got to university because of it. Research on relevant documentation of the scheme and its outcomes held in the University of Sussex archives and information gathered from four people admitted to the scheme and its impact on them inform this article. The scheme is contextualised with relevant policy documents, government reports and academic publications to provide a framework for the accounts of those who took part in it and it is tentatively suggested that these have implications for higher education policy today.