Enhancing self-efficacy in minority youth: A group technique

This article presents a two-phase group process that can be utilized to develop self-efficacy in minority youth. The process involves helping minority students to develop realistic educational and precareer goals through group supported analysis of individual strengths, weaknesses, resources, and roadblocks to success. Modeling, role playing, and outside activities are the major components of the group process.     

Ex-Communication: Competition and Collusion in the U.S. Prison Telephone Industry

This paper explores the political economy of the prison telephone industry, with special emphasis on changes in the industry since the mid-1980s. Contrary to the expectations of competition advocates, the principal outcome of deregulation in the prison telephone sector has been a sharp increase in price, as new market entrants compete for monopoly service contracts on the basis of steadily escalating commissions paid to state and private prison authorities—costs which are then passed on to the (literally) captive market through exorbitant end-user rates. The sheer magnitude of such rate increases, together with explosive growth in the national prison population over the same period, has turned the prison telephone sector into a lucrative and largely invisible growth center for the U.S. telecommunication industries as a whole.     

The information requirements and information-seeking behaviours of health and social care professionals providing care to children with health care needs: a pilot study

OBJECTIVES: The objectives of this work were to identify the sources of information currently received, information-seeking behaviours, information requirements and preferences for future information provision amongst health and social care professionals providing care to children with health care needs. METHODS: Data were collected using a cross-sectional postal questionnaire survey. RESULTS: A wide range of information resources was reported as being available to professionals. However, a large proportion of respondents found it necessary to perform additional searches for information, suggesting that current resources were not satisfying their needs. The majority of professionals reported a preference for electronic formats, whilst a smaller proportion preferred hard copy materials. Participants promoted the use of informal networks as a means of support and exchange of information. CONCLUSION: Supplementing the information that is provided in electronic and hard copy formats, by enhancing informal networks, may be the most effective way of meeting the information needs of this group of professionals.     

Becoming More Reflective about the Role of Design in Communication

Robert Craig's constitutive meta-model of communication reminds us that while communication scholarship may feel like discovery of communication's natural properties, it is also often (if not always) on a path to invention of new possibilities and reconstitution. The constitutive meta-model suggests that every theory of communication is also a design language for communication, and that design itself may be a path to theory development. Design inquiry can be conducted in all subdisciplines of communication, incorporating and contributing to widely disparate communication theories. Design work itself takes many forms, producing artifacts as diverse as individual messages, persuasive campaigns, interaction protocols, large-scale participation frameworks for public decision-making, and more. This special issue explores design scholarship in the field of communication, with five original essays representing different subfields and different theoretical approaches. In this introduction, we argue that design work is more than application of theory; design itself is a theory-building enterprise. It is a distinct form of inquiry that builds new knowledge, complementary to, but different in kind from, empirical and critical scholarship.