The relationship between student communication motives and perceived instructor communicator style

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student communication motives (i.e., relational, functional, participatory, excuse‐making, sycophantic) and perceived instructor communicator style (i.e., friendly, impression leaving, relaxed, contentious, attentive, precise, animated, dramatic, open, dominant). Participants were 228 undergraduate students enrolled in a variety of communication courses at a small Midwestern university. Results indicate that (a) the perceived instructor communicator style attributes of impression leaving, friendly, and contentious predict student use of the relational motive, (b) the attribute of friendly predicts student use of the functional motive, (c) the attributes of animated, contentious, and friendly predict student use of the participatory motive, (d) the attributes of attentive and contentious predict student use of the excuse‐making motive, and (e) the attributes of contentious and friendly predict student use of the sycophantic motive.     

The relative impact of violation type and lie severity on judgments of message deceitfulness

This paper is part of a larger program of research assessing variables that underlie quantitative deceptiveness ratings. Several recent theoretical approaches, including Information Manipulation Theory (IMT), propose that deceptive messages are best understood as varying along two or more dimensions. At the same time, researchers have increasingly moved from dichotomous deception judgments to continuous deception ratings. This paper questions the validity of scaling degrees of deceptiveness along a single dimension, and argues that gradations in perceived deceptiveness reflect both the type of information manipulated and the severity of the consequences of the deception. This reasoning was tested with alxl experiment (N = 236) in which both the type of information manipulated and the severity of the consequences were systematically varied. As predicted, the results suggest that false messages (i.e., quality violations) are rated as more deceptive than lies of omission (i.e., quantity violations) when lie severity is low, but this difference diminishes as lie severity increases. In other words, false messages were rated as deceptive regardless of severity, but messages omitting information were rated as deceptive as false messages only when the consequences were serious. The implications for measuring deception are discussed.     

Newer is not necessarily better a reexamination of affective learning measurement

The instrument commonly employed in instructional communication to measure affective learning was subjected to tests of its construct validity as a measure of higher‐order affective learning. The results indicate the instrument is a satisfactory instrument for this purpose. Newer measures of higher‐order affective learning were found to be highly associated with the older measure. Teacher evaluation measures were found to be distinct from both the newer and the older affective learning measures. The construct validity of the commonly used affective learning instrument is good.     

A Defense of Publishing Nonsignificant (ns) Results

An argument is advanced for the propositions that a lack of statistically significant findings does not automatically justify rejecting a scientific article for publication or mean that the findings are necessarily uninformative. Systematically declining publication for nonsignificant results leads to negative consequences that include distorting scientific literatures, making hypotheses and theories less falsifiable, depriving meta-analyses of an accurate sample of prior findings, and encouraging questionable research practices. Providing effect sizes and confidence intervals can make findings more informative, regardless of whether the finding is p < .05.     

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.     

Media violence research: Interpreting the findings

The pages which follow are an attempt to stand back and assess what we know about the effects of media violence in an effort to sort into a usable pattern the results of hundreds of reported studies. Timothy P. Meyer is assistant professor of speech in Mass Communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; James A. Anderson is associate professor of radio‐television and director of the Broadcast Research Center at Ohio University, Athens.     

A Methodology for Calculating Prestige Ranks of Academic Journals in Communication: A More Inclusive Alternative to Citation Metrics

The problem of how to rank academic journals in the communication field (human interaction, mass communication, speech, and rhetoric) is one of practical importance to scholars, university administrators, and librarians, yet there is no methodology that covers the field's journals comprehensively and objectively. This article reports a new ranking methodology based in empirical criteria. The new system relates independent measures of the prestige of the field's doctoral departments to information about where faculty members from those departments have published scholarly articles. This new approach identifies the field's most influential journals as those that more frequently publish the work of the field's top scholars and programs as perceived by their peers. This system was used to compute prestige weights (P-weights) for 65 communication journals. P-weights were found to be strongly correlated with ISI Web of Science journal impact factor scores and can be used to identify an overall prestige hierarchy for communication journals as well as prestige rankings by subject specialty.     

Power Lines: The Rhetoric of Maps as Social Change in the Post–Cold War Landscape

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe, cartographers were faced with choices on how the new post–Cold War political landscape would be mapped. One such group called the Pluto Project had been producing atlases since 1981 with a progressive point of view about the nature of state power in the Cold War. This essay examines two of the Pluto Project's atlases as they function to identify a radical cartographic style that animates the social control of space by subverting traditional cartographic forms and defying scientific expectations and standards.