Cronbach's Alpha Versus Components of Variance Approach (COVA): Dispelling Three Myths about Alpha and Suggesting an Alternative Reliability Statistic for Communication Trait Research

This study examined the effects of sociocultural factors and perceptions of mental illness on preferences for indirect disclosure. We surveyed 354 college students from China and the U.S. The results indicated that (a) males and members of the collectivistic culture reported more stigmatized attitudes; (b) stigma endorsement was positively associated with preferences for indirectness; and (c) males, members of the collectivistic culture, and individuals without previous interpersonal contact with someone with a mental illness were more likely to recommend an indirect disclosure strategy. The findings demonstrate the importance of considering how sociocultural factors can affect individuals’ preferences for disclosing stigmatized identities.     

Economics Journals

Abstract

This paper evaluates the comprehensiveness and composition of university library holdings of economics journals of three types of institutions: schools that offer a doctoral degree program in economics; schools that offer a master's degree in economics, and schools that offer only a baccalaureate degree in economics. The results offer useful information for university libraries and economics educators responsible for deciding whether the current holdings should be maintained or, if not, which journals should be added or deleted.     

Building bridges across fields,universities, and countries: Successfully funding communication research through interdisciplinary collaboration

Even though there are few directorates explicitly dedicated to communication research at places like the National Science Foundation, there are significant opportunities for funding of interdisciplinary research on "communication problems." This article informally shares some principles, rules of thumb, and ideas about funding communication technology research projects, though it applies to other areas as well. The article draws on the experience of the communication technology research experience at the international, cross-university, and interdisciplinary network of Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Labs.     

Private foundation funding of applied communication research

Communication researchers increasingly have a primed and attentive audience in private foundations. Yet most foundations are quite dissimilar to the types of organizations that we as communication scholars know and understand. Here we discuss private foundation funding for applied communication research, including how funding priorities are set, and how potential grantees may position themselves for foundation funds. In doing so, we focus on five norms that characterize American private foundations and their program staff: (1) social betterment, (2) organizational interdependency, (3) personal commitment, (4) future orientation, and (5) external generalizability. How well you and your proposal match up with these norms will affect your success with private foundations.     

The Case for e-Book Literacy: Undergraduate Students' Experience with e-Books for Course Work

This paper investigates how electronic books (e-books) are used for scholarly activity. It focuses on the end-users of e-books in a case study which aimed to establish how scholars use and learn from e-books and the limitations of academic e-books.     

Organizational Surveys: A System for Employee Voice

Although surveys are often used to assess and track employee attitudes and opinions over time and are used quite frequently by applied communication researchers, the use of surveys as a channel to voice employee attitudes and opinions has not been fully explored in the employee voice or basic organizational communication literature. With the increased call for accountability, effective applied communication researchers can play an important role in ensuring that organizations engage in the survey process in a manner that is “safe” for employees, and ethical and practical for the organization. Because the question of how to accomplish this task is complex and cannot be fully addressed within the constraints of a commentary, I offer three general principles to guide future researchers in helping overcome organizational communication problems:

1. Build trust in the organizational survey process, the researcher(s), and the organization.

2. Eliminate the adversarial relationship that often exists between management and employees who speak up.

3. Provide evidence that the organization does more than purport to value the things that it says it values.

     

Personal Malpractice Liability of Reference Librarians and Information Brokers

No abstract available for this article.     

Local Databases:

No abstract available for this article.     

Experimental Linguistic Indexing for Information Retrieval

Abstract

The primary goal of the ELIXIR project was to achieve improvements in the performance of text-retrieval systems by confronting some of the challenges presented by the indexing of full-text documents. We explored two hypotheses involving the use of linguistic analysis to improve the automatic creation of indexes: (1) if it is possible to develop algorithms that index only the words which most closely capture the document's content-not the complete text, as is done in existing sys-tems-the retrieval of irrelevant documents might be minimized; (2) if it is possible to create indexing algorithms that perform a minimal syntactic parse required to capture important phrases, the index may represent the document's content even more accurately, increasing the likelihood that the article can be retrieved by a relevant query.     

The Rise of the Small: The Effects of Industry Consolidation on Small Legal Publishers

Summary

The legal publishing industry has experienced waves of acquisition and consolidation, with almost all of the established players becoming affiliated with either Thomson or Reed Elsevier. A widespread assumption is that this consolidation is driving out the smaller participants in the market, especially in conjunction with the expansion of free Web sites for primary source material. It is presumed that the entrepreneurs who have smaller, profit-based companies are becoming less interested in the market due to financial pressures, increased difficulty of capturing market share, and threat of acquisition (friendly or hostile).

In order to confirm or refute this assumption, the author reviews the industry consolidations, describes the delineation of representative small legal publishers, and analyzes their responses to questions about how the recent industry changes have affected their strategies, markets and product lines. The resulting picture is of an environment much different than that painted by current media pundits. Contrary to the presumption of a disappearing landscape of small players, there is a positive perception of “ripe opportunity” pushing companies into this marketplace-companies armed with new technology tools and strong convictions that they can reach customers ready and willing to do old business in new ways. The small publishers seem to be weathering the climactic industry changes, and have expectations of growth and expansion.