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Using communicated narrative sense-making model and discourse-dependence, the present study examined the retrospective narratives parents told their adult children with visible disabilities in order for them to make sense of their disabilities in their families and to build personal identity. Eleven participants ages 18 to 30 with visible disabilities participated in the study and told retrospective narratives while also relying on internal boundary management strategies to communicate in the family about disability. The results indicated that two narrative content themes emerged: limiting narratives and positive/normalizing narratives. Additionally, a narrative shift was found in narrative structure as some participants got older. Implications for family communication and disabilities, as well as for CNSM and discourse-dependence, are discussed. Finally, future research directions are discussed.

Master of Arts / Department of Speech Communication, Theatre, and Dance / Timothy R. Steffensmeier / On August 17, 1959 a jazz album entitled Kind of Blue hit record store shelves nationwide and changed the music forever. Recorded by the Miles Davis Sextet, the album popularly introduced a new sound, modal jazz, and has become one of the best selling jazz records of all time. A week after the release, following a concert promoting the album at the Birdland in New York, Davis was walking a white female friend to a taxi when he was stopped by a policeman. The officer told Davis to move along, and the two exchanged a few words and looks before the cop clubbed Davis over the head and arrested him. Davis was released shortly, but this incident is illustrative of a time in history where African-American music was embraced while the people themselves were treated as second-class citizens. This study explores rhetorical connections between jazz music and American democracy as it existed during the late 1950s. Using Sellnow & Sellnow's (2001) 'Illusion of Life' Rhetorical Perspective, this study analyzes the music of Kind of Blue as it connects with the political upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement. It concludes that the incongruity between the political and social tension of the country and the relatively laid-back sound of the music correlates with the non-violent resistance strategies used in the Movement. Implications are drawn about Sellnow & Sellnow's (2001) methodology, jazz music's potential in promoting/maintaining an inclusive democracy, and areas for future study.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre, and Dance / William Schenck-Hamlin / According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overweight and obesity rates in the United States continue to increase. And yet, despite their resources to encourage healthy lifestyles, college campuses reflect the national trend. Colleges and universities often utilize health campaign strategies such as social norms marketing and peer health education to encourage campus-wide health initiatives. However, based on an application of effective health communication attributes, both strategies demonstrate limitations that must be addressed in future collegiate health campaign approaches. I analyzed the effectiveness of adopting an induced hypocrisy health campaign to encourage nutrition. The induced hypocrisy paradigm has resulted in successful behavioral change by having participants create a pro-attitudinal message. Then, participants are reminded of their past failure to engage in the behaviors they advocated. It was hypothesized that hypocritical subjects would purchase more nutrition bars than subjects in any of the other conditions. The results indicate that, although more hypocritical subjects purchased more nutrition bars than subjects in the other conditions, the findings were not found to be statistically significant. Interpretations of the study findings as well as implications for future nutrition campaign initiatives are discussed.

This investigation attempted to ascertain whether managerial perceptions of potentially unethical business conduct, and recommendations for social control, vary according to the social characteristics of the employee committing the behavior. Subjects consisted of management personnel from a variety of industries. Data was gathered via instruments developed for this research. Instruments consisted of (1) a description of an employee; (2) a description of a potentially unethical behavior committed by the employee; and (3) scales for subjects to (a) rate the seriousness of the employee's behavior and (b) recommend the social control they would use against the employee. Perceptions of seriousness did vary significantly with variations in the employee's social characteristics. However, recommendations for social control did not vary with changes in employee characteristics. Thus, whereas observers may judge the ethicality of socially decontextualized behaviors against universally held standards of morality, observers become less adamant about these standards as the behavior becomes more contextualized.

Four college instructors and the students (N = 329) in each of their two communication classes completed the Teacher Communicator Style (TCS) instrument at five different times during the same semester. The data were used to test two underlying assumptions of Norton's (1983) Communicator Style theory. Namely, that perceptions of a person's communication style become increasingly stable as a function of more association with that person, and that separate classes of students differ in their perceptions of the same teacher's communication style. Five related research questions were also explored. / Of the ten communicator style subconstructs measured, the "Relaxed" and "Friendly" subconstructs were consistently ranked highest while the "Dominant," "Dramatic," and "Contentious" subconstructs were consistently ranked lowest. The data revealed a trend of increasing stability of students' perceptions of their teacher's communication style. This trend seems to "peak" around mid-term. However, only some of the increases in stability are statistically significant. The data also revealed that two separate classes of students differ in their perceptions of several aspects of the same teacher's communication style. Question 1 revealed that as the semester progresses, students do not move toward consensus about their teacher's communication style. Question 2 indicated that there are differences in students' perceptions of many aspects of their teacher's style based on gender, year in school, major, grade point average, expected course grade, previous experience with course content, freedom to elect a course, satisfaction with the class, and satisfaction with the teacher. Question 3 identified "satisfaction with the teacher" as the single best attitudinal predictor of the teacher's overall communication image. Question 4 identified "Friendly" as the single best communication style subconstruct predictor of the teacher's overall communication image. Question 5 revealed that there are statistically significant differences between some of the teachers' self-reports and their classes' perception of their style. / The data yielded general trends and statistically significant findings which support the assumptions underlying Norton's theory. With this and future confirmations, the theory can continue to provide a strong framework for the study of communication style. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-12, Section: A, page: 3792. / Major Professor: C. Edward Wotring. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

An experiment examined how speakers, level of prejudice would affect several dimensions of their communication to either an outgroup or an ingroup member. Stereotypes influence a person's expectations about the not only through their generally negative valence, but also through implicit information a stereotyped group's competence. Therefore, someone who consciously believes stereotypes of African-Americans (i.e., a high prejudiced person) should be more likely to interact with an African-American in a Americans in a way that 'talks down' to him or her. Previous research has shown that, compared to low prejudiced people, high prejudiced people tend to use higher levels of linguistic abstraction in describing stereotype-consistent behaviors of African-Americans when speaking about them to a European-American audience. However, this difference has never been examined in speech to an outgroup member. A second line of research has demonstrated that people use more presumptuous speech when they assume that they have higher status than their conversation partner. However, how presumptuousness may vary as a function of an individual difference variable, such as prejudice level, has never been examined. In the present study, high and low modern racists played the role of a 'peer counselor' to an alleged African-American or European-American target person. Four main hypotheses were tested. First, it was expected that high modern racists would use higher levels of linguistic abstraction when describing stereotypical behaviors of the African-American target than would low modern racists. Second, it was expected that high modern racists would use more presumptuous speech when describing stereotypical behaviors of the African-American target than would low modern racists. For both linguistic abstraction and presumptuousness, the hypothesized effects were expected to be, most evident in descriptions of negative stereotypical behaviors. Third, high modern racists were expected to spend more time counseling the African-American target than would low prejudiced participants. Finally, high modern racists were not expected to use more overt negativity in their communication to the African-American target than would low modern racists. The hypotheses generally were supported. The findings are discussed as evidence for subtle indicators of prejudice in the speech of high modern racists, although the possibility that a suppression mechanism is operating in low modern racists also is considered / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation studies computer-mediated communication (CMC), in which interpersonal communication content between library users and reference librarians who engaged in service encounters is evaluated. The computer-mediated form of reference services, called virtual reference (VR), was the context for this research. In the CMC research, the analysis of naturally occurring interactions, analysis of face-work, face threat and friction, and impacts of identity on and in face threatening situations are not well represented. This study applied face-work (Goffman, 1967), Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1978; 1987) and social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) (Lea & Spears, 1992) to virtual interactions to analyze transcripts that contained friction. The term friction was used to frame interactions that contain real or inferred elements of discord, incivility, impoliteness, or other factors that may detract from a positive working relationship between VR users and VR librarians. / Findings indicate that in transcripts that contained friction, users and librarians did not exhibit concern for either party's negative or positive face wants. Friction between participants included reprimands, abrupt endings without closing rituals by librarians and users, as well as refusals to attend to face threats issued. When librarians issued refusals to users' initial requests, the frequency of users enacting a second face threat dropped dramatically. Findings also indicate that librarians were more likely to instigate friction in the service encounters than users. Moreover, when instances of friction were present, one instance of friction was likely to spark additional instances of friction. / CMC service encounters, such as VR, in the public and private sectors are proliferating. At one point in time, customer service interactions were a face-to-face modality, then they moved to telephone interactions, but increasingly organizations are providing customer service via CMC, such as online banking and shopping. This dissertation research is significant to any organizations or individuals that utilize CMC as a means of customer interface, such as VR, or any other mediated transaction that bridges communication between organizations and the individuals that are served.