This report presents preliminary findings concerning the utility and validity of a new fuzzy matrix procedure for the measurement and identification of leader emergence and hierarchical structure of leadership in small groups. The instrument was designed to reflect the interactive, perceptual and shared nature of leadership. Several leadership…

To ascertain the audience's perception of the homosexual stereotyped character in reference to the social contact variable, two groups were shown a television situational comedy that depicted two homosexual characters. The two groups, one composed of 45 homosexual and the other of 95 heterosexual college students, were then asked to evaluate the…

More than 100 classroom communication observation instruments are surveyed and assessed from a communication-based perspective in this paper. In an overview, a schema designating three main types of approaches is established; they include behavioral descriptive, message functional, and cognitive/affective inferential observational categories.…

Uses and gratifications research involves a critical appraisal of conceptual and theoretical issues in mass communication and is concerned with what audience members do with the media. Activation theory understands people as active manipulators of their environment. (Activation refers to that level of psychological and physiological excitement an…

The focus of the contributions to this journal issue is communication theory and research. Following an introductory article that deals with the need for quality control in the criticism of communication research, eight articles offer discussions of the following topics: the nature of criticism in rhetorical and communicative studies, some issues…

Noting that societies are inherently elitist in their structuring, this paper argues that a greater understanding of society and the communication process can be gained by comprehending the nature of communication among the elite and from the elite to the nonelite. It attempts to provide a theoretical foundation for the investigation of elite…

Based on the idea that tolerance for disagreement is not other-directed but rather reflects a personality trait maintained by individuals across time and situation, a study was undertaken to develop a measure of tolerance for disagreement that would help further the conflict conceptualization by being able to predict negative affective…

A total of 79 college students participated in an investigation designed to clarify the function of conversational closings. Multidimensional scaling was used to derive a three-dimensional representation of the semantic meaning conveyed by 20 frequently used conversational closings. Regression analyses of the scaling solution suggested that the…

In research to test the link between children's failure to engage in comparison activity and their poor communication performance, elementary school students were trained to engage in comparison activity to learn whether such training would improve their referential communication accuracy. Two training experiments with third and fourth grade…

An examination of the impact that process instructions have on jury deliberations was conducted using ten juries of six members each. Five of the juries were given standard jury instructions, while the remaining five were given step-by-step instructions in the deliberation process designed especially for that trial. The results indicated that…

The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss a conceptual model for experimentally investigating the effects of advertising puffery. The various sections contain a discussion of puffery as a legal concept, a description and discussion of the proposed model, research support for the model, and implications for future research on puffery.…

Of 782 undergraduate students enrolled in either interpersonal communication or public speaking courses, the 125 students scoring high in communication apprehension were retested upon completion of the courses and analyzed for their responses to a student attitudes survey. Significantly greater numbers of the high communication apprehensive (HCA)…

This study explores male/female patterns of dominance in dyadic speech communication in order to determine the influence of speaker's sex, speaker's commitment to the women's movement, and observer feedback on those patterns. College students (30 males and 30 females) responded to an "attitudes-toward-women" questionnaire and were classified as…

This paper discusses communication and physical-setting variables as a subset of organizational climate variables and attempts to provide a theoretical and methodological framework for organizational communication research. Attention is focused on the effects of immediate physical surroundings, the physical settings in which people work, and how…

Drawn from papers presented at the East-West Communication Institute Seminars on popular culture held yearly from 1974 to 1976, the essays in this report focus on popular images of America held in four countries. Essay topics are: images of the American woman in Japan, the changing images of America in Korean literature, images of America in Malay…