Selling Women on PDAs from “Simply Palm” to “Audrey”: How Moore's Law Met Parkinson's Law in the Kitchen

This essay investigates key moments in the history of personal digital assistant (PDA) marketing to women. Analyzing promotional texts for three PDAs that received considerable press coverage from 1999 to 2001, this essay explores the cultural significance of the convergence of anxieties about women's place in the gendered division of labor with the computer industry's changing marketing imperatives. Drawing on an array of promotional texts, including news articles, press releases, promotional Web sites, and ads appearing in newspapers and magazines, this paper tells the story of how the computer industry aimed to sell smaller, faster computing devices to women while promising to mediate and thus reproduce women's overwork as paid and familial laborers. After experimenting with the PDA as a sexy fashionable gadget for working women, marketers approached women as mothers with “Audrey,” an Internet appliance designed for the kitchen.     

A cross‐cultural test of the association between temperament and communication apprehension

The research reported in his study was a cross‐cultural test of the communibiological model of communication apprehension as temperamental expression. The study was designed to replicate the findings reported by Beatty, McCroskey, and Heisel (1998) in the U.S. and Japan. In this study participants from Japan and the U.S. completed measures of communication apprehension, neurotitism, and extroversion. The results indicated that, for both Japanese and U.S. college students, scores on the measure of communication apprehension were significantly correlated with measures of neuroticism and extroversion. Multiple regression analyses indicated that both neuroticism and extroversion predicted unique variance in communication in both cultures and that the multiple correlations for the two cultures did not differ significantly. It was concluded that the replication was successful and that temperament scores are substantially predictive of communication apprehension across the cultures tested.     

Lying and deception detection in television families

This study explores the use of lying and lie‐detection among television families in situation comedies. The findings indicate that (a) lying was prevalent on these television shows; (b) lies to spare others were told most frequently; (c) the majority of lies went undetected; (d) the husband/father character told the most lies; (e) children were the most honest characters in situation comedies and (f) peripheral characters were the recipients of many lies. Two conclusions were drawn from these findings. First, this study gives insight into the content of family communication as presented on television. Secondly', the study suggests television families mirror real families with respect to family structure and the ability to detect deception.     

Development of an alexithymia instrument to measure the diminished communication of affect

Although scholars recognize the importance of the communication of affect to the study of communication, no valid operationalization of the motivation and / or ability to communicate affect exists. This study describes alexithymia—an individual variable reflecting the reticence to communicate affect—and reports the reliability and validity of an instrument to measure alexithymia.     

A Content Analysis of Social Groups in Prime-Time Spanish-Language Television

The popularity of Spanish-language television in the United States has been increasing rapidly, yet little is known about the images viewers are likely to encounter when exposed to this content. As such, the present study investigates the representation of men and women in the 2004 prime-time, Spanish-language television season. Social identity theory provides a framework for understanding the potential influence of exposure to these depictions. Most notably, wealthy women were characterized as the slimmest, most provocatively dressed, and most submissive characters on Spanish-language television, whereas wealthy men were the heaviest, most conservatively dressed, and most dominant figures in prime time.     

A Social Cognitive Theory Approach to the Effects of Mediated Intergroup Contact on Intergroup Attitudes

This research applies a social cognitive theory perspective to the study of mediated intergroup contact. It was hypothesized that exposure to positive intergroup contact on television would be associated with more positive intergroup attitudes. Some support for this hypothesis was found for exposure to gay-straight and Black-White interactions. It was also hypothesized that identification with a character belonging to the viewer's ingroup and perceived typicality of a character from an outgroup would be associated with more positive intergroup attitudes. Some support for these hypotheses emerged with regard to associations between exposure to televised gay-straight interactions and homophobic attitudes.     

A rules‐based study of television's role in the construction of social reality

A qualitative analysis of one couple's conversational uses of mediated content is presented. Observations spanned a two‐year period. Data were categorized according to usage type and then examined from Lull's (1981) rules persective.     

A typology of drug resistance strategies

This study examined social influences on adolescents' responses to drug offers. Seventy narrative accounts of both successful and unsuccessful attempts to say no were collected. From these data, the authors developed a typology of both drug offers and drug resistance strategies. In addition, typologies were developed for: who made the offer, what substance was offered, where the offer occurred, and why the subject responded as she or he did. As well, the study revealed the influence of the type of drug, alcohol or controlled substance, on the process of offering and resisting.

The analysis revealed that adolescents were more likely to resist offers of controlled substances and did so more often when the offer was made by an acquaintance at school. When they did refuse, they were most likely to simply say no. Also, teenagers were more likely to accept offers of alcohol, particularly from friends in social situations when the friends used persuasive appeals.     

Shunning the Bird’s Eye View: General Science in the Schools of Ontario and Quebec

This paper considers the adoption of general science courses in two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, during the 1930s. In Ontario, a few science teachers had followed the early general science movements in the United States and Britain with interest. During the 1930s, several developments made the cross-disciplinary, applied thrust of general science particularly appealing to Ontario educationists. These developments included a new demand for vocational education, renewed reservations about pedagogical rationales based on transfer of training, and a growing professional divide between high school science teachers and university scientists. Around the same time, scientists in the Quebec’s French-language universities were engaged in a concerted campaign to expand the place of science in the province’s francophone secondary schools. The province’s prestigious classical colleges, which were the scientists’ principal target for reform, privileged an inductive view of science that had little in common with the applied, cross-disciplinary emphasis of the general science courses gaining support in English-speaking school systems. In 1934, however, a popular American general science textbook was adopted in a workers’ cooperative devoted to adult education. Comparing the fate of general science within these two education systems draws attention to the fact that general science made inroads in francophone Quebec but had little influence in public and private schools. In light of the growing support general science enjoyed elsewhere, we are led to explore why general science met with little overt interest by Quebec scientists pushing for school science reform during the 1930s.