A systematic review of 3 years of popular magazines sought to determine if articles are published that constitute rhetorical criticism of the mass media. The survey revealed that rhetorical criticism was published in a wide variety of popular magazines, but was not labelled as such. Television (TV) was the focus of most of these critical analyses,…

Focusing on the special needs of employees who are part of a two career couple, a study examined the (1) relationship between the employees' level of commitment to their employers and their perceptions of maintenance communication concerning dual career issues and (2) differences in organizational commitment between workers in dual and single…

A study examined developmental differences in students' recognition of the types of explanations that help most in mathematics peer-group interactions. Scripted interactions of eight male and eight female dyads working on math problems were videotaped. In each interaction one actor in the dyad would request non-specific assistance and the other…

Political communication researchers recently have emphasized conditional relationships as crucial to specifying and understanding the effects of the mass media. In many cases, however, researchers will not predict which variables will modify the form or existence of media effects. They therefore will not include measures of the conditional…

The news media of the 1990s will probably not use videotext systems or three-dimensional holograms to replace the newspaper. Instead, simpler combinations of news media that mimic the characteristics of print may replace advertising in newspapers, causing them to downgrade journalism or increase subscription cost, thereby decreasing circulation…

To investigate several questions concerning the perceptions held by undergraduate students enrolled in communication courses, a 32-item questionnaire was first mailed to employers to determine their evaluation of various communication skills. They were instructed to suppose they were to hire a college graduate with special preparation in the…

A study explored the universality of widely accepted descriptors of the ideal speaking voice in cross-gender and cross-cultural perspective. To construct and contrast the ideal voice types, university students from Mexico and Arizona described the ideal voice type under consideration and completed a semantic differential indicating the collective…

A typology developed from case structure and argumentation theory was used in an analysis of case types that evolved in the discussion of 12 issues during a 10-hour bargaining session between negotiators for teachers and a school board. Case types in the typology were (1) need-plan, which argues for the need to change the status quo; (2)…

A study was conducted to amplify previous research efforts concerned with the identification of similarities and differences between Brazilian men's and women's managerial communication behaviors. Previous findings have indicated that, in contrast with American managers, Brazilian men and women managers were more likely to use power to resolve…

This paper begins with a literature review of the objectives of general education, giving special consideration to the possible role of communications skills. Because of current discussion and disagreement about what the basic general education requirements of a university should include, a survey was administered in 1981-82 to full-time faculty…

A study was undertaken (1) to examine the theoretical relationship between communicating and understanding, (2) to test this relationship in the Korean National Assembly's communicative context, and (3) to evaluate how well the assembly's activities were communicated to the public. Twenty respondents from each of three groups surveyed--reporters,…

A study examined Carol Gilligan's theory of moral reasoning, seeking evidence to either support or deny the claim that individuals primarily use one of two different sets of sex-related constructs to arrive at decisions when faced with moral dilemmas. Subjects, 20 young lawyers and psychologists (equally divided as to men and women), were…

In order to identify causes of spousal abuse, current research efforts have attempted to reconstruct the communicative components of physically aggressive encounters within the family. An interactionist model of intrafamily violence, proposed by D. A. Infante, suggests that the interaction of personal, situational, and societal conditions may lead…

A study of the preferences of 49 college honors students enrolled in a basic speech-communication course demonstrated that current teaching practices in honors courses do not match the students' optimal learning styles. The students answered questions about their expectations and experiences in an honors speech-communication course and 25 of them…

A study looked at an agricultural extension project in south India to examine comprehension of the extension team's intentionality by the poorest farmers. Subjects, 50 farmers in the village of Porandla in the state of Andhra Pradesh, were interviewed and measured to see if their knowledge and comprehension approximated a constant across all…