Meeting communication needs: topics of talk in the nursing home

Nursing home residents primarily rely on staff for communication and interpersonal relationships. Challenged by staffing shortages and increasingly complex care, staff who provide the most communication with residents lack awareness and skills to effectively communicate with older adults. This study, a secondary analysis of staff-resident interactions from one nursing home, explores communication topics and the effects of an intervention. Staff from one unit were recorded during 2 hours of caregiving to provide a representative sample of their communication with residents. Staff then attended an educational program targeting improved awareness of communication needs and reducing "elderspeak". Recording was repeated post-intervention. Baseline conversations focused on activities of daily living (ADLs), personal-social, technical care, and health assessment. Post-intervention ADL talk decreased in staff-resident interactions, while personal-social topics increased. These findings suggest that residents' limited opportunities for communication with staff are primarily focused on care tasks. With increased communication awareness, staff can learn to modify conversational topics to better meet older adults' psychosocial needs.     

免费师范生人际交往方式调查研究

采用问卷调查法与访谈法相结合的形式,对某大学的免费师范生进行了调查研究。以免费师范生的人际交往方式为主要内容,主要从人际交流方式、人际交往对象、人际交往场所、人际交谈内容、人际交往能力、人际关系几个方面进行了调查研究,并进行了相应分析,以了解免费师范生的真实人际交往方式现状,并对免费师范生教育工作提出一些建议。     

Towards a Communication Dialectic: Embedded Technology and the Enhancement of Place*

Communication literature traditionally divides interaction into two forms: mass media and interpersonal communication. These ideal types are unquestionably useful heuristic tools. Yet their conceptual utility is often undermined when researchers place them at opposite ends of a linear, historical transformation in which mass media technology is believed to supplant interpersonal communication and the locations in which it occurs. This article abandons the polar, historical relationship in favor of a communication dialectic that recognizes the synthesis of ideal types into composite forms of interaction. Embedded technology demonstrates the dialectic by exploring how electronic media fixed within a physical location can combine with the interpersonal communication taking place there to enhance group interaction. The resulting hybrid defies the assumption that mass media simply displace interpersonal interaction, pointing instead to a dialectic relationship in which ideal types continually challenge and transform one another.     

A Strengths Perspective in Working with an Adolescent with Self-cutting Behaviors

This paper describes the use of a strengths perspective in working with an adolescent with self-cutting behavior. While a disease model stresses diagnosis, labeling, medication, control, and manipulation; a strengths perspective advocates understanding of feelings and meaningfulness behind symptoms, identifying needs, and developing abilities, facilitating interpersonal communication, and building a better social environment for the adolescent client with self-cutting behaviors. A case example demonstrates this approach.Prof. Kam-shing Yip is a Professor, Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.     

Children's Understanding of Emotion Communication in Families

SUMMARY

There is a paucity of research on children's awareness of how emotion communication varies within relationships. Indeed, we operate on the assumption that a very significant function of emotion is to regulate interpersonal interaction. In this essay we discuss how children come to understand such phenomena as: (a) emotional-expressive behavior can have powerful interpersonal consequences; (b) relationship dimensions such as degree of power and closeness interact with intensity of emotion in how emotion is communicated; and (c) maintenance of relationship quality (e.g., equilibrium, attenuation, or deepening) requires different strategies of emotion communication. Among the constructs that we address are several that are useful for understanding the dynamics of interpersonal communication; they have also proven their utility over a considerable period of time. However, these constructs derive from social psychology and family systems; they have not been systematically investigated from a developmental perspective     

I Want to Be Your Friend: The Effects of Organizations’ Interpersonal Approaches on Social Networking Sites

Publics tend to use social networking sites mainly for interpersonal communication purposes. Corporate communication focusing on promotional activities, thus, might create negative sentiments toward the organization within those platforms. This experimental study examined the effect of organizations’ interpersonal approaches to communication (e.g., nonpromotional messages, high interactivity) in social networking sites using real and fictitious companies. Our results suggest that publics consider corporate activities in social networking sites more negatively when they perceive those platforms as a personal space. However, publics evaluate an organization more positively when it is highly interactive with its publics on these platforms. Finally, publics who perceive the platform as a personal space have a more positive attitude toward the organization when the organization is both highly interactive and employs nonpromotional messages.     

Public relations education in Thailand

Public relation education in Thailand, offered at undergraduate and graduate levels at 21 universities, has become one of the most popular and competitive programs chosen by Thai students. This article discusses the development of public relations education in Thailand, the structure of current programs' curricula and course content at eight universities (three public, five private), graduate programs, instruction, and faculty.The in-depth interviews with public relations faculty revealed that while public university professors believed their students were well-prepared academically, most at private universities did not think the current curriculum sufficiently prepared students to be competitive in the work force in the future. The faculty uniformly agreed, however, that courses in interpersonal communication, intercultural/international communication, marketing communication, and new media technology should be added to the curriculum to help better prepare future practitioners to work in the global communication era.     

Permanently online and permanently connected: Taiwanese university students’ attachment style,mobile phone usage,and well-being

Taiwan has been the top country worldwide in terms of its adoption and use of mobile phones. This study explores the permanently online (PO) and permanently connected (PC) phenomenon in mobile phone use among Taiwanese university students. It seeks to determine whether attachment styles are a distinctive factor that influences PO and PC (POPC) behavior and leads to various levels of well-being. The results of this study provide initial evidence that Taiwanese users highly depend on their mobile phones for PC and PO activities but perceive that being permanently connected causes interpersonal stress. Although the findings showed that all styles were positively associated with PO, only the secure and anxious styles predicted PC. Regarding mobile phone activities, the avoidant attachment style was not associated with any activities, the secure attachment style was positively associated with online and voice communication as well as information-seeking activities, and the anxious attachment style was associated only with voice communication. Furthermore, attachment styles lead to various levels of interpersonal stress through PO and PC behavior. The anxious style interacts with PO on interpersonal stress. This study provides evidence that attachment style is a significant antecedent of POPC and its consequences in mobile phone usage.     

E-Priming the Listener: Sensitizing Students to Listening for Verbal Aggression

This paper argues that the concept of E-Prime (E′) holds practical benefits to effective listening for students of interpersonal communication. In advancing this argument, the paper includes a concise review of relevant literature on E-Prime, defensiveness, and conflict, with particular emphasis on verbal aggression. The literature demonstrates that traditional imperatives to reduce listener defensiveness need careful consideration. In fact, offering unqualified assertions for listeners to reduce defensiveness may place students at undue risk for harm. This paper reviews pedagogical uses of E-Prime in interpersonal communication courses.     

Sources,contents, and students' social learning about persons with a disability

A secondary analysis of survey data of Hong Kong school students (N = 2,865) examines social learning about persons with a (physical) disability (PWDs). Path models, connecting recalled information in communication about PWDs of different sources (media, significant others, and contact) and content (assistance, pity, and fear) with perceptions, general attitude, and behavior inclination toward PWDs, showed content as better predictor than either media channels or interpersonal sources. Interpersonal sources were better predictors than media channels were. The effects were also mediated by perception of PWDs' capabilities, perception of PWDs' inner state, and general attitude toward PWDs. The findings are interpreted and discussed.     

The Death of a Dyad

The purpose of this study was to replicate a 1978 qualitative research project entitled "The Death of a Dyad." Twenty unstructured retrospeclive interviews were conducted wilh urban divorced individuals in order to test the validity of four phases in marital relationship dissolution and nine interpersonal problem areas. Through content analysis, contemporary inquiry also discerned four "diseased states." The nine conflict variables observed in 1978 continue to be problematic in marriages a decade later. The primary problem area in bolh studies was interpersonal communication between spouses. Seven additional variables were also found to be significant contributors to relationship dissolution.     

Channel selection and knowledge acquisition during the 2009 Beijing H1N1 flu crisis: a media system dependency theory perspective

This study uses secondary data from a four-wave repeated cross-sectional survey to examine communication channel usage patterns and their effects on health knowledge acquisition during the different phases of the 2009 H1N1 crisis in Beijing, China. The results suggest that channel choice, particularly for mobile phone and interpersonal communication, varies as a function of different levels of threat during a crisis. Moreover, social groups like students, retirees, and professionals differed in their channel selection. The study concludes that television users have more H1N1 knowledge than non-users and that in most cases, interpersonal communication does not contribute to knowledge gains. The theoretical implications are discussed at the end.     

Redefining sewardship: Examining how Fortune 100 organizations use stewardship with virtual stakeholders

Although Kelly's (2001) stewardship strategies have been discussed conceptually in public relations literature, they have not been examined through scholarly inquiry outside the fundraising realm despite repeated suggestions in relationship management literature. Through content analysis of the Fortune 100 organizations’ websites, this study examines how the four stewardship strategies are used by for-profit corporations. Results indicate that the current conceptualization of stewardship strategies for virtual behavior may be a better representation of relationship cultivation strategies than relying on the adaptation of interpersonal communication strategies to organizations.     

Cultivating employee creativity through strategic internal communication: The role of leadership,symmetry, and feedback seeking behaviors

Using a survey of 405 full-time employees, this study examined how organizations’ internal communication influenced by leadership communication at the supervisory- and senior-levels impacts employee creativity and how employees’ feedback-seeking behaviors mediate these relationships. The results suggest that leadership communication at the supervisory and senior levels positively influence symmetrical internal communication system. The analysis also shows that symmetrical internal communication and leadership communication cause employees to seek more feedback from different interpersonal sources including supervisors, coworkers, and peers in other departments, which in turn enhances creativity. This paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for public relations and internal communication.     

Defining Social Listening: Recognizing an Emerging Dimension of Listening

Social listening occurs in a variety of mediated contexts, but it has yet to be clearly defined in the realm of communication and listening studies. This report explores social listening as a developing listening type extending from the existing taxonomy of listening, posits a definition of its meaning, evaluates its role in organizational and interpersonal communication, and discusses its value as an additional listening dimension. Based on a review and synthesis of literature across multiple fields of study, we describe social listening as a dimension of listening comprising a blend of purposes complementary to the existing appreciative, comprehensive, critical, discriminative, and therapeutic listening types discussed in Wolvin and Coakley’s (1993) listening taxonomy. As mediated communication continuously evolves within the communication landscape, the urgency to understand social listening will surely increase. With this in mind, we introduce and define social listening as an emerging type of listening and as a means of attaining interpersonal information and social intelligence that can empower relationships and influence the way we listen to and communicate with one another through increasingly popular mediated channels.     

Alcoholism/Drug Abuse Counselors in Industry:

A basic premise in the canons of therapy is that all counselors possess interpersonal skills. To many this means counselors enter the profession with an a priori compassion to "help people" and perform services expected of them by agencies. This premise is so standard that many clinical training programs rarely require courses in public speaking, empathy, and business diplomacy skills. But clinical personnel employed in industry and conducting Employee Assistance Programs may, in fact, have interpersonal deficits that jeopardize their jobs. This paper examines a workable model for interpersonal communication between counselors and those employees diagnosed "at risk" by a referral team.     

Social Workers' Postgraduate Use of the IFD Interpersonal Communication Model

Interpersonal communication assessment models have become very popular as a means of quickly establishing rapport in many settings across the United States. Despite their popularity and possible utility, there has been minimal research into the impact of these models, especially over time and in educational settings (more than 6 months after the training is over). In the master's of social work (MSW) program at Brigham Young University (BYU), the interpersonal family dynamics (IFD) model is used as a tool to better understand human behavior and strengthen relationships in the social work practice environment. This training is provided to first-year students in the foundation human behavior in the social environment course and to field supervisors in their field training conferences. BYU's MSW program graduates were surveyed to find out their perceptions of the utility of IFD. With a relatively high level of accuracy, the graduates reported IFD was a useful approach to better understanding human behavior in their daily practice. Graduates used the model as much in their personal lives as in their professional lives.     

Toward a Model of Political Organization–Public Relationships: Antecedent and Cultivation Strategy Influence on Citizens' Relationships with Political Parties

This study examined the organization–public relationship between citizens and their political parties against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential general election. Employing a telephone survey of registered voters (n = 508), we investigated the interaction of politically relevant relationship antecedents, relationship cultivation strategies used by political parties, perceptions of the organization–public relationship between voters and their party, and outcomes of the relationship to test a model of political organization–public relationships (POPRs). Time, interpersonal trust, mediated communication, interpersonal communication, and dialogic communication emerged as significant predictors of POPR strength. The findings lay the groundwork for further investigation of POPRs.     

Virtual Worlds and Social Work Education

ABSTRACT

The introduction of computerised virtual worlds in the early twenty-first century was considered to be an innovation that would be widely used in higher education. There are a number of examples of virtual worlds used for higher education in medicine, nursing, and allied health, including examples in social work. The aim of this article is to explore the potential value of virtual-world technology to enhance the student learning experience for social work education in interpersonal communication skills in a virtual health centre. Findings of a study of Australian undergraduate social work students who engaged in a role play in a virtual health centre for skill development in interpersonal communication are presented. The study findings highlight issues for social work educators to consider when deciding whether or not to use virtual-world technology in social work education, and when designing further research on similar innovations.     

Theory and Research in Teaching. Arno A. Bellack,Editor. New York: Teachers College,Columbia University, 1963. 122 pp. $2.50 Softbound

This study compares the efficacy of experimental, competency-based methods of teaching the interpersonal skills of empathic communication, respect, and genuineness with traditional didactic methods. An experimental design using randomly-chosen experimental and control groups of first-year graduate students was employed. Experimental conditions involved communication laboratories consisting of didactic and experiential learning opportunities organized in a systematic and sequential fashion. The findings supported the hypothesis that the experimental groups would significantly outperform the control groups on the criterion variable. A second hypothesis, that the control groups would not achieve significant gains, was refuted.