Synthesizes past studies of illness, stress, coping, and social support and offers a model of communicative support, based on problematic integration theory, that emphasizes two major dimensions of meaning in the breast cancer experience. Suggests that supportive messages are designed to help the breast cancer patient manage both perceptions of…

Notes that relational framing theory asserts that dominance-submission and affiliation-disaffiliation tend to displace each other as frames for processing social interaction. Replicates and extends previous tests of these claims by evaluating three hypotheses. Finds that results are consistent with all three of the hypotheses, but relational…

Makes three main points in response to their critics. Suggests multiple methodologies are appropriate for the study of almost any communication phenomenon and that organizational assimilation is akin to or encompasses many issues that have been stated as outside its parameters. Identifies with disagreements in the use of several concepts. (SC)

Long before the first day of class, students have preconceived notions about what a communication research methods class will consist of: mathematics, incomprehensible topics, boring content, and overall agony. These notions automatically make a research methods instructors' job quite difficult (Denham, 1997). Not only do they have to explain…

Prolonged visual deprivation from early childhood to maturity is believed to cause permanent visual impairment. However, there have been case reports of substantial improvement of binocular vision in human adults following lifelong visual impairment or deprivation. These observations, together with recent findings of adult ocular dominance…

Overlaps with one's interlocutor in the choice of words are called lexical entrainment. This article looks at accounts for these overlaps in word use. The question addressed is the extent to which the word use of the addressee, as opposed to available words from other sources, has a special impact on experts' choice of words. A laboratory…

Research on graphic symbol learning suggests that symbols with a greater visual resemblance to their referents (greater iconicity) are more easily learned. The iconicity hypothesis has not yet been explored within the intervention protocol of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS). Within the PECS protocol, participants do not point to a…

This article reports on key aspects of a theory generative study into social presence in text-based online learning environments. The focus of the article is the nature of social presence as experienced by online learners in those environments. Employing a collective case study design, the study accessed online learners' experience-based heuristic…

Isolation and a lack of support contribute to high attrition rates among novice teachers. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is one mechanism for providing anytime, anywhere support to teachers. Previous research in this area has focused on structuring such discussions to encourage cognitive engagement, yet little attention has been paid to how…

Although parents are often thought to be the primary communicators of sexual information, studies have found that many adolescent boys report receiving little or no parental communication about sex. Instead, boys report learning about sex mostly from their peers and the media. However, little is known about the content of these communications,…

In this paper, we present a synchronous text-based communication tool, referred to as Adaptive Communication Tool (ACT), which provides capabilities for adaptation and personalization. ACT supports both the free and the structured form of dialogue. The structured dialogue is implemented by two types of Scaffolding Sentence Templates (SST); i.e.…

Although researchers and scholars have extolled the virtues of multi-method approaches to research by triangulation for at least two decades, implementation of these approaches to research has been slow. This is due primarily to the complexities inherent in the combination of different orders of data, theoretical constructs, and methodological…

The particular way in which songs (and especially the songs of social movements) accumulate persuasive force has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry. This paper investigates the rhetorical power of the popular musical text, "We Shall Overcome," arguing that the song endures as an almost expected rhetorical feature of any social…

This paper argues that legal research, particularly in the areas of freedom of expression and comparative law, would benefit from utilizing the broader perspectives associated with the cultural studies approach used in communication research. The paper begins with an overview of traditional media law scholarship, maintaining that legal research,…

Although social science research methods have been successfully applied to the phenomenon of deception, these efforts have universally been limited to laboratory study. In order to broaden the generalizability of deception research, the present study assessed the verbal and nonverbal correlates of naturally-occurring, high-motivation deceptive…