A survey of business people was conducted to assess the importance of listening and the deficiency in that skill and to identify existing listening training programs for future study. The questionnaire was developed to assess the importance and status of listening by placing it randomly among several other communication competencies. Subjects were…

Arguing that a systems theory can be applied to the description and analysis of families and other close relationships, this paper first describes a method for coding verbal interaction that involves three steps: categorizing messages according to grammatical form and response mode, assigning control directions to those categories, and combining…

The research described in this paper concerns nurses' alleged use of an indirect communication style, "The Doctor-Nurse Game," to influence physicians to change an order believed to be inappropriate for the patient. The paper is organized to (1) point out the parallels of the inappropriate order situation with a larger class of…

Noting that communication apprehension contributes to failed communication, which in turn places business organizations at risk, this paper describes the rationale and methodology of a study to determine whether managers can predict an employee's sense of responsibility and willingness to improve following an incident of failure, based on the…

A study was conducted to determine if the Japanese use logic and argument in different ways than do Westerners. The study analyzed sample rebuttal speeches (in English) of 14 Japanese debaters using the Toulmin model of argument. In addition, it made comparisons with a sample of speeches made by 5 American high school debaters. Audiotapes of the…

J. Hage and F. Hull (1981) developed a typology of organizations based on two major dimensions--scale and complexity. The typology delineates four types of organizations: Type 1, "traditional" organizations, typically small-scale structures with low complexity; Type 2, "mechanical" organizations that are large scale, low complexity structures…

Teaching interpersonal values in an "ideal" setting, such as a college classroom, differs greatly from teaching in a "real" setting, in this case a maximum security prison for males. The practice of prison indoctrination dehumanizes inmates, diminishes their self-esteem, and deprives them of positive role models. The nature of the collective…

Only about 9% of the eligible American population actually donates blood, and the rate of donors who fail to give a second time is very high. Since many people who view blood-giving as a humanitarian act also see it as an unpleasant experience, persuasive appeals that promote a sense of moral obligation may be ineffectual in prompting donations. A…

To provide an assessment of current instruments being used by communication scholars, investigators examined and identified the most frequently used instruments that had been published in the past five years in the nine major speech communication journals. Each article was examined for the identification of the instruments used, constructs…

Data were collected over a three-year period from 10 sections of an advanced public speaking course at a midwestern university in a study to determine (1) the extent to which debaters who are not ego-involved can accurately judge classroom debate speeches, and (2) the specific variables that affect this accuracy. All 10 sections were taught by the…

In addition to assessing observed communication behaviors, this paper suggests that SYMLOG--a System for the Multiple Level Observation of Groups--can be used by participant-observers as a foil for interpreting how their own value orientations affect their data collecting and theorizing. The first section of the paper examines the research role…

A study was conducted to describe the speech patterns of four adolescent girls. All four subjects were in the same eighth grade class and knew each other. Approximately 19 hours of observational data and 9 hours of interview data were collected. The descriptive framework of D. Hymes (1972), which focuses specifically on settings, participants,…

Interpersonal communication plays an important role in health and health care. Five topic areas of problem-oriented interpersonal health communication research demonstrate this important role: lack of patient compliance, miscommunication and misinformation, insensitivity, unrealistic and unfulfilled expectations, and dissatisfaction. More…

In order to study the relationship between self-esteem and communication anxiety, 1202 college students in a basic communication course completed scales developed to measure the two variables. To make sure that the variables were independent and that one was not a subset of the other, a factor analysis of all the items in each scale was performed.…

A theory of interpersonal communication called "the coordinated management of meaning" (CMM) involves three propositions. (1) The fundamental unit of communication is the "speech act," something that the speaker does to the listener by making that particular message at that time. (2) The structure of communication is episodic, consisting of a…