A study was conducted to identify teacher behaviors that college students deem unethical, measure the strength of student attitudes toward the 20 most frequently mentioned behaviors, and measure the degree to which the students have personally found the 20 behaviors to be problems. The first part of the study elicited examples of unethical teacher…

Intended for researchers and teachers of the small group process, decision making, and negotiation, this paper offers a review and critique of J. Habermas's theory of universal pragmatics. The first section of this paper retraces Habermas's theory, which seeks to free social action from false consciousness (that is, political ideologies) that…

Based on the assumption that communication skills are a critical component of organizational effectiveness and "promotability," a study was conducted to investigate the perceptions supervisors have of their female employees' communication proficiency. In particular, comparisons were made between evaluations of supervisors on a variety of…

Communication skills are important in every part of organizational life. However, a number of people are unable to realize their organizational potential because of communication apprehension (CA). Its pervasiveness has ranked it as the single most severe handicap facing Americans today. The Intraview Communication Intervention Strategy may be a…

Quantitative data on various indexes of national development--mass media, "horizontal communication" (mail, telephones, and telegrams), democracy, social growth, literacy, and urbanization--were collected and estimated for more than 100 developing countries for roughly the decade between 1970 and 1980. These data were then used to test…

Although inconsistent, research findings indicate that men and women self-disclose differently in terms of depth and frequency and interpret disclosures differently during varying stages of their relationships. A review of the literature concerning communication within stable, enduring relationships reveals that, overall, there are no apparent sex…

Focusing on current scholarship in the evolving field of political communication, this publication is organized in three sections. Part 1, "Current Perspectives on the Spiral of Silence," features essays by Charles T. Salmon and F. Gerald Kline, Klaus Merten, Carroll J. Glynn and Jack M. McLeod, and a response by the theory's original…

Results of a study based on earlier research, which showed that the amount of research published by faculty is one indicator of the quality of an individual faculty member and the entire faculty of a department, are reported in this paper. It reports (1) the amount of research published by members of speech communication departments in major…

A study of the structure of the speech act known as an apology looked at the differences in linguistic strategies used by advanced nonnative English language learners and native speakers in apology behavior, and whether the differences result from the severity of the offense or the familiarity of the interlocutors. An apology is seen as consisting…

The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant resulted from a communication failure. Following an incident at an Ohio plant a year and a half earlier, B. M. Dunn, manager of Emergency Core Cooling Systems Analysis at Babcock and Wilcox (engineers), wrote a memorandum making specific recommendations on written instructions for nuclear…

To illustrate decision making as negotiation, this report utilizes P. H. Gulliver's theories concerning negotiation and two case studies of decision making by cooperative labor-management Quality of Work Life (QWL) committees. Negotiation as joint decision-making is discussed and two models that are central to Gulliver's theories of processual…

Three research projects were completed and a fourth undertaken at Temple University to assess students' and faculty members' perceptions about the communication competency students should have upon entering college. Results suggest that faculty expectancies for students' communication competency can be defined, that student perception of such…

It is generally believed that the reason some children do not have satisfactory peer relationships is that they lack or will not use the interpersonal skills necessary to initiate and/or maintain such relationships. On the basis of this belief, a study was conducted to examine the conversational behavior of accepted and rejected children in a…

Quality circles may be regarded as a form of organizational intervention strategy to enhance productivity and product quality through employee participation. Operationally, small groups of individual employees voluntarily meet regularly to (1) identify problems relating to productivity and product quality, (2) discuss them, (3) identify and…

Based on Vygotsky's notion of the zone of proximal development, this study aimed to determine the extent to which parents' teaching of children become less directive as a function of children's age and communicative status and to describe relations between parents' interaction styles and children's verbal I.Q. One hundred and twenty families…