Issue advertising is intended to inform an audience--most commonly with the intent of changing unfavorable opinions or reinforcing favorable ones--to affect cognition (in contrast to the behavioral emphasis of product and service advertising, intended to stimulate trail and adoption). To explore public reactions to printed and televised issues…

Focusing on situational and personality factors as predictors of two common types of sales behavior (the customer-oriented/marketing approach, and the adversarial/bottom-line approach), a study conducted a national survey of advertising sales people and media buyers in the summer and fall of 1987. A total of 3669 questionnaires were sent to…

To examine working-class women's attitudes and perceptions about the Women's Movement, a study reviewed 14 collections of interviews with low-income women conducted in the 1970s. Interviews were collected from a variety of sources--academic studies, books written for the general reader, and a large-scale study commissioned by a publisher of…

To examine the educational backgrounds of public relations practitioners and their relationship to certain key variables in professionalization, a study surveyed a nationwide sample of fulltime public relations practitioners of all ages and from all levels of management in a variety of agencies, companies, and nonprofit organizations. In November…

In light of cultural stereotypes in which Black women function as strong heads of households while Hispanic women serve as obedient wives, a study examined whether Black and Hispanic subjects evaluated assertive speech differently when attributed to a male or female speaker. Subjects, 75 Blacks and 100 Hispanics, all undergraduate students…

Q methodology, a theory-based research technique begun by William Stephenson, permits a scientific approach to the study of subjective ideas, and proves useful in studying intrapersonal communication processes in a variety of contexts. The Q-sort, which incorporates Q methodology into a measure, allows respondents to sort statements (pictures or…

To determine if there is a distinction between the forensics community's idea of quality and that of the general population, tournament rankings of forensics judges and those of a lay audience were compared. Undergraduate students enrolled in a variety of speech related courses were asked to attend rounds of competition at a midwest collegiate…

The "sense making" process structures humans' categorization, perceptual, and expressive processes. These "sense making" references are ultimately derived from four distinct "root metaphors": mechanism or mechanistic thinking (machine), formism or formistic thinking (similarity), organicism or organistic thinking (organic process), and…

Communication scholars have recently focused attention on songs as artifacts of popular culture. Current literature implies that the contexts of music communication are defined by the relationships that songs establish between artists and their audience: persuasive, expressive, and commercial. As the commercialization of music is an inherently…

A systematic analysis was made of the communications of 5- and 6-year-old children in two kindergarten classrooms to discover whether children's face-to-face interactions with peers included "face work" components (rituals through which individuals manage impressions when it becomes difficult to maintain a social situation) and, if so,…

Prepared as part of a program to develop both a system to assess information needs of teacher education decision makers and impact strategies to increase the probability that teacher educators will make appropriate use of research and development findings and products, this document reports on the literature review that led to the initial…

Within Australian contexts, and within a dialogic, constructivist framework, this paper reports the development of an instrument (COMCOMP) designed to measure perceptions of communication competence among others at the interpersonal-organizational interface and the use of COMCOMP to identify personal characteristics and skills associated with…

Health communication, gerontology/geriatrics, and the interdisciplinary team approach to health care are considered together in this paper as a critical field for communication research. The first section of the paper offers a definition of interdisciplinary health care teams, then reviews their goals, composition, history and training. The second…

Noting that recent research and theory from the expanding field of psychobiology have not been integrated into the study of human communication, this paper offers a synthesis of principles from several leading psychobiological scientists as a step toward a possible unifying approach to communication philosophy, theory, and research. The paper…

This paper reviews recent social psychology studies on the influence of message characteristics, issue involvement, and the subject's cognitive response on perceptions of the communicator. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) is used as a framework to discuss various approaches to persuasion, particularly central and peripheral routes to…