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.     

The choice among past trends as a basis for the prediction of future trends in old-age mortality

We explored the extent to which projections of future old-age mortality trends differ when different projection bases are used. For seven European countries, four alternative sets of annual rates of mortality change were estimated with age-period log-linear regression models, and subsequently applied to age-specific all-cause mortality rates (80+) in 1999 to predict mortality levels up to 2050. On average, up to 2050, e80 is predicted to increase further by 2.33 years among men and 4.03 years among women. Choosing a historical period of 25 instead of 50 years results in higher predicted gains in e80 for men but lower gains for women. Choosing non-smoking-related mortality instead of all-cause mortality leads to higher gains for women and mixed results for men. In all alternatives there is a strong divergence of predicted mortality levels between the countries. Future projections should be preceded by a thorough study of past trends and their determinants.     

Seeking control in the midst of uncertainty: Women’s experiences of choosing mode of birth after caesarean

Problem

Clinical practice guidelines indicate that over 80% of women with a previous caesarean should be offered a planned vaginal birth after caesarean (VBAC), however only one third of eligible women choose to plan a VBAC. To support informed choices for birth after caesarean, it is necessary to understand the factors that influence women’s decision-making.

Intermarriage and the risk of divorce in the Netherlands: the effects of differences in religion and in nationality, 1974-94

A textbook hypothesis about divorce is that heterogamous marriages are more likely to end in divorce than homogamous marriages. We analyse vital statistics on the population of the Netherlands, which provide a unique and powerful opportunity to test this hypothesis. All marriages formed between 1974 and 1984 (nearly 1 million marriages) are traced in the divorce records and multivariate logistic regression models are used to analyse the effects on divorce of heterogamy in religion and national origin. Our analyses confirm the hypothesis for marriages that cross the Protestant-Catholic or the Jewish-Gentile boundary. Heterogamy effects are weaker for marriages involving Protestants or unaffiliated persons. Marriages between Dutch and other nationalities have a higher risk of divorce, the more so the greater the cultural differences between the two groups. Overall, the evidence supports the view that, in the Netherlands, new group boundaries are more difficult to cross than old group boundaries.     

The role of vertical conflict in the relationship between leader self-enhancement and leader performance

Although studies have shown that inflated self-perceptions of transformational leadership behavior negatively affect leader performance, insight into the underlying processes explaining this relationship is lacking. The current study addresses this gap by identifying vertical conflict between leaders and subordinates as one such underlying process. Using a sample of 52 leaders supervising 259 subordinates, it was found that leader self-enhancement of transformational leadership behavior is significantly and positively related to vertical conflict about both task and relationship issues. Results further indicate that vertical task conflict rather than vertical relationship conflict mediates the negative relationship between leader self-enhancement and leader performance.     

Linkages between internal and international migration: the Ilocos Norte experience

This paper reviews the arguments concerning whether internal and international migration can or should be incorporated in the same migration theories or models and examines the ways in which the 2 processes are linked in a variety of contexts. To provide some illustrative empirical results, reference is made to the Philippine Migration Study (PMS), a research project which incorporates both internal and international migration in its research design. The study examined migration from Ilocos Norte to the principal internal destination, Manila, and the principal international destination, Honolulu. Ilocos Norte is a largely rural, resource poor province with a long history of outmigration that is attributable primarily to population pressure in the region. Due to the fact that 1 of the principal migration streams from the Ilocos is within the Philippines and the other is outside the country, the Ilocos presents an ideal situation for a comparative analysis of internal and international migration. The study consists of 7 different surveys conducted in Ilocos Norte, Manila, and Honolulu between 1980-83. More than 5000 interviews were conducted in the 3 locations. The initial baseline survey in Ilocos Norte was conducted in 1980. After 2-1/2 years, the initial 830 households in the Ilocos Baseline Survey were recontacted to determine the migration behavior of the household members since the 1st survey. Those who had moved to either Manila or Hawaii during this period were traced to the destination and interviewed there. The PMS uses a single integrated model (the value-expectancy or VE framework) to explore migration decision making for both internal and external migration. Despite the complexity of the VE questions, respondents were able to distinguish different locations as being relatively good places or bad places to realize their different goals. Manila was not highly regarded by Ilocanos in most respects, and there was not a single value on which Manila ranked higher than both alternative locations. Relative to the other values, however, Manila is seen as being a good place for educational opportunities and entertainment. Hawaii rated very well on items having to do with wealth and status, but was regarded as a relatively poor place to satisfy one's desire for affiliation. Comfort, affiliation, and morality were viewed as being most easily achieved in the present barangay. Based upon the value-expectancy framework, the findings of the Philippine Migration Study confirm that a global model of migration decision making is feasible and that other important concepts in migration equally apply well in the case of both internal and international population movements.     

Who Enjoys the Fruits of Growth? Impact of Governments and Markets on Living Standards in Germany,The Netherlands and the U.S.A., 1987–1996

The 1980s and 1990s have been decades of quitegood economic growth in North America and muchof Western Europe. But how have the fruits ofgrowth been shared? This paper reviews changingincome distributions in the U.S., Germany and theNetherlands. These three countries may be takenas exemplars and leading economic performers in``the three worlds of welfare capitalism''(Esping-Andersen, 1990). The U.S. is a liberalwelfare-capitalist state, Germany a corporatiststate, and the Netherlands (less clearly) asocial democratic welfare-capitalist state. Thepaper focuses particularly on income changes inthe bottom, middle and top quintiles and takesa ten year period into account.Previous analyses have shown that labor andmarket income dispersion are increasing, withincreased returns to human capital. Thepotential impact of government through thetax-transfer system has been largely ignored.All three governments redistribute income fromthe rich to the poor. However, the paper showsthat only the Dutch government hasredistributed sufficiently to ensure that thebottom quintile has gained along with others.In Germany and the U.S. the poorest quintile wasconsiderably worse off in absolute terms at theend of the decade.than the beginning. TheGerman government somewhat counteracted thetrend towards greater income dispersion byredistributing to the poorest quintile, so theloss of market income was partly compensated. In the U.S. the impact of government on thepoorest quintile stayed about the same, so thisgroup ended up with about the same decrease indisposable income as market income.The U.S., Germany and the Netherlands are theonly three countries for which ten or moreconsecutive years of panel data are available.The data come from the PSID-GSOEP EquivalentFile 1980-97 and from a comparable fileconstructed from the Dutch SEP data.