This dissertation is an attempt to explore first year college students' Facebook use in association with their relationship development with their previously unacquainted roommates. Survey data indicated that it is very common for freshmen to look up their roommates on Facebook after receiving their roommate assignment from school. Being able to get an idea of who the roommate is helps reduce a student's uncertainty about living with a complete stranger. Both the uncertainty reduction theory (URT) and the predicted outcome value (POV) theory provide a solid theoretical framework to predict students' information-seeking behaviors on Facebook. Social information processing (SIP) theory and hyperpersonal model are proved to be helpful in explaining students' impression formation process on Facebook. This research predicts that information-seeking behaviors as well as the impressions formed based on information available on Facebook will reduce students' uncertainty about the roommates. Moreover, the study aims to take a further step by applying expectancy violations theory to investigate whether the discrepant impressions formed between Facebook and offline experience have an impact on students' level of uncertainty upon move-in with the roommates, and more importantly, the impact on the development of roommate relationship closeness. / A combination of a three-wave survey method and in-depth interviews with 19 students was used for this study. Survey data were collected at three different time points: (1) two weeks before college freshmen moved in with their roommates; (2) one week after they moved into the dormitory; and (3) seven weeks after living together with the roommates. The interviews were conducted after the three-wave survey was completed. / Statistical analyses using multiple linear regressions, multiple analysis of variance, and mixed-design ANOVA were applied for the hypotheses testing. The findings were mostly consistent with the hypotheses: (A) before moving in with the roommates, incoming first year students' uncertainty level was affected by how often they interacted with the roommates on Facebook, how many channels they used to communicate with the roommates, and their impressions of roommates' appearance and task attractiveness; (B) freshmen who formed positive initial Facebook impressions engaged in more information-seeking behaviors and had greater certainty than those who formed negative initial impressions of the roommates; (C) upon moving in with the roommates, students' uncertainty level was influenced by their offline impressions of the roommates' social and appearance attractiveness; (D) discrepancies between initial Facebook and offline impressions produced significant group differences in students' level of uncertainty and relational outcomes with the roommates; and (E) students' uncertainty and the impressions of roommates change over time and among groups.

One area of health promotion research rich with potential for both theoretical and empirical investigation is the entertainment-education (EE) strategy. Though a growing body of evidence points to the effectiveness of the EE strategy, further investigation is needed to explore the underlying cognitive and affective processes that make EE an effective tool for health persuasion. The goal of this study was to explore the various dimensions of audience involvement with four award-winning EE programs about sexual and reproductive health topics made for primetime television audiences. Audience involvement with EE messages was assessed using Green and Brock's transportation scale, Busselle and Bilandzic's (2010) narrative engagement scale, and several measures of processes related to involvement with the EE program characters. These measures include perceived similarity, parasocial interaction, experiential identification, likability, and wishful identification. Findings suggest that audience involvement influences a number of cognitive and affective responses to EE messages including counterarguing, the perception that message-related health topics are personally relevant, state reactance, and program enjoyment. Findings also indicate that some of the dimensions of audience involvement are related to story-consistent changes in participants' health beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. The results of this study suggest that audience involvement with EE programs is multifaceted and important to the outcome of exposure to this programming. The EE strategy holds great promise for future health promotion efforts aimed at improving the health and well-being of diverse audiences.

Fire service field staff instructors seek and share information and use information sources during their instructional work of teaching, training and curriculum development. This study is the first attempt to study their information-seeking and sharing behaviors, which have not previously been investigated empirically. Twenty-five fire service instructors who are field staff instructors of the Fire Academy were recruited to participate in the study. Semi-structured interviews as primary data along with secondary data were employed and examined to answer the research questions. / Today's firefighters' responsibilities cover a wide range of emergencies in areas such as firefighting, emergency medical care, hazardous materials incidents, rescue operations, terrorism and other emergency responses. The increasing complexity of the fire service requires firefighters to continually hone their skills and improve their knowledge of various hazards through training. This study's findings reveal that the field staff instructor participants rely extensively on multiple types of information sources, while seeking and sharing information during the instructional process. These sources include formal/institutional, informal/personal and group network-mediated sources of information. This study identifies three collaborative information-seeking forms of joint, tag team, and intra-group and categorizes sequences of information activities the instructor participants undertake. It also characterizes their unique attributes as information seekers. Fire service knowledge structures of KSA -- (Knowledge [cognitive], Skills [psychomotor] and Affective [attitude]) -- influence the changing needs of instructor participants, define the boundaries of information sources in these three required domain areas that firefighters learn and train, and dictate multiple types of information sources that are used and needed by the instructor participants. The dynamic nature and uncertainty of the fire service business as well as the task complexity are basic catalysts for the instructor participants' information-seeking and sharing behaviors, which motivate them to keep seeking the best piece of information to ensure the safety of firefighters. The Recognition-Primed Decision model leads instructor participants toward a heavy reliance on experiential knowledge. Furthermore, the selection of information sources is determined by the quality of the source, and multiple types of sources of information are constantly integrated to meet the field staff instructors' constantly changing needs. Armed with new evidence, this study revises and expands Leckie's model of information-seeking of professionals. / This study recognizes the critical roles of field staff instructors in fire service training as they create, retain and share knowledge, skills and experience. The study also conceptualizes their multi-dimensional information environment with a cyclical and interactive informationseeking process that would best support their work activities. It makes suggestions for future research and lays out recommendations to improve library and information services, so fire librarians and information professionals can better provide more timely services to support fire service field staff instructors' information-seeking and sharing in a complex information use environment for their daily work, practices, and routines.

In this dissertation, I provide a qualitative examination of rights-based organizational tensions generated in a crisis over human/labor rights concerns. This project is motivated by two research problems: First, even though rights are often honored, articulated, and acclaimed, the actual organizational practices of rights often result in tensions and contradictions. Second, despite the overwhelming acceptance of rights in political and social domains, rights often become points of conflict and disagreement rather than a means to a resolution. In this project, I analyzed a case of the unionization of parish workers within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church in order to illustrate how individuals used rights to navigate these problems. / The case examines, in particular, how human and labor rights are related and seen as separate or as intersecting, how they are strategically mobilized in organizational settings, and how they are negotiated in larger institutional contexts. Furthermore, this case study observes how participants negotiate and manage the institutional contradictions and tensions they experience in institutionalizing rights discourse. The case, thus, provides an ideal setting for examining rights-based tensions. / Institutional theory and various qualitative research methods provided the theoretical and practical ground from which I engage these problems. Specifically, institutional theory helped me unravel one particular way that individuals experienced these tensions by foregrounding how rights become institutionalized through symbolic negotiation. This theoretical frame was used to address the following research questions: (a) When, how, and by whom are labor rights treated as human rights? (b) How do individuals manage the contradictions they experience regarding various applications of rights? I engage these questions through in-depth moderately scheduled interviews and archival research. / The ensuing analysis explores how participants' understanding of rights enable particular movements of discourse and how participants went about negotiating the contradictions they experienced. Ultimately, I argue that rights served as a type of organizing discourse that is fragmented and contingent rather than stable and constant. This shows that when individuals institutionalize a symbol, the process is often one of discursive alignment and misalignment.

Fighting from the home front| A qualitative analysis of non-deployed military wives' blogs

The Challenge of System Justification for Acknowledging and Responding to Environmental Dilemmas and Climate Change

<p> This study examines the ways in which Mexican literary elites, or <i> literatos,</i> sought to engage new readers and expand the reach of their literary practice in the 1920s. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the efforts of Manuel Maples Arce (1898&ndash;1981) and Germ&aacute;n List Arzubide (1898&ndash;1998) to publicize the vanguard aesthetic movement known as <i> Estridentismo</i> between 1921 and 1927. During the 1920s, as Mexicans reconstructed a nation that had been torn asunder by the violence and upheaval of the Mexican revolution (1910&ndash;1920), Maples Arce and List Arzubide sought to expand the relevance of their literary efforts to communities that included more than just other literary elites. </p><p> In seeking to resonate with broader reading publics, the <i>Estridentistas </i> turned to manifestos, illustrated magazines, books, and literary journals&mdash;the genres of literary publicity available to <i>literatos </i> at the time. I understand the discursive products of these engagements as <i>Estridentismo</i>'s "public faces," a term I use to analyze the ways in which Maples Arce and List Arzubide engaged with social expectations about who <i>literatos</i> were or why they mattered. </p><p> The first half of this study focuses on Maples Arce's time in Mexico City from 1921 to 1925. By analyzing <i>Estridentismo</i>'s founding manifesto and Maples Arce's regular appearances in the magazine <i>El Universal Ilustrado,</i> I show the difficult and limited ways in which <i> Estridentista</i> social engagement emerged. The second half centers on List Arzubide's reenvisioning of <i>Estridentismo</i>'s social mission after leaders of the movement relocated to the provincial capital of Xalapa in 1926. In this second phase of the movement, List Arzubide made addressing nonelites a fundamental part of <i>Estridentista</i> literary practice and, in many ways, drastically altered the public faces of <i>Estridentismo.</i> </p><p> I argue that despite these important differences, Maples Arce and List Arzubide were both committed to socializing their aesthetic practice and resonating with new readers at a moment in which few <i>literatos</i> explicitly addressed anyone but other <i>literatos.</i> By focusing on the development of the public faces of <i>Estridentismo,</i> this dissertation shows how a small group of iconoclastic poets helped to reimagine literary practice by publicizing their aesthetic rebellion to a nation emerging from civil war.</p>

This study of 51 couples with one or two recovering alcoholic partners examined the daily communication practices and contextual variables as predictors of partner abstinence efficacy, relationship satisfaction, and well-being. A conceptual model based on a systems perspective was applied to male and female partners. 34 dual-alcoholic couples and 17 single-alcoholic couples recruited from A.A., Al-Anon, and two local treatment programs completed individual questionnaires and conjoint interviews in their homes at Time 1, and brief telephone interviews at 3 months follow-up. Results indicate that women and men differ in the ways they respond to circumstances in their recovery and in their relationships. For men, abstinence efficacy was linked to poor conflict management, negative talk among partners, sobriety length, and relationship satisfaction. Women's abstinence efficacy was linked to their emotional well-being, and changes in women's temptation to drink were predicted by poor couple conflict management, less positivity among partners, and less emotional disclosure in men. High levels of daily stress in men were related to both partners' daily communication, particularly men's conflict management and women's negative talk. Couples with less than 15 months of sobriety differed from couples with more than 29 months of sobriety in conflict management and stress in the last year. In all, communication practices and daily stress play important but differing roles in maintaining sobriety and relationship satisfaction in male and female partners. The model was partially supported by the data, but needs modifications to reflect dissimilar relationships among variables in male and female partners. Policy implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

This qualitative study of classroom processes focuses on the roles students play in two different environments, a regular classroom and an anonymous, collaborative, technological environment using GroupSystems. As students from an urban high school engaged in a brainstorming session about complex, ethical issues, they participated differently in each setting. The research questions that this study addresses are: Given a discussion of complex, ethical issues, what is the nature of classroom participation roles? In addition, in what ways are participation roles in a regular classroom structure different from a collaborative, technological environment? Furthermore, in each environment, how do ethnically diverse students participate in discussions of complex, ethical issues, as defined by their participation roles? Then to view gender issues in each environment, how do male and female students participate in discussions of complex, ethical issues, as defined by their participation roles? An analysis of these questions provides a deeper understanding of the roles students take in a classroom discussion. In addition, it provides similarities and differences between such discussions in a regular classroom versus an online setting. The insights provided in this study may contribute to a better understanding for teaching and teacher education in constructing activities and environments that support student voice, equity, and active participation in society as a whole.

The purpose of this study was multifold: it aimed to investigate similarities and differences between Chinese and English telephone conversations, to test the validity of the theoretical distinction between transactional talk and interactional talk, and to examine L2 learners' use of the target language. Comparisons along four dimensions were conducted: (1) across languages--Chinese and English, (2) across functions--transactional and interactional talk, (3) across settings--China and the U.S., (4) L1 vs. L2--English as native language and English as a second language. The data consist of natural telephone conversations in Chinese and in English recorded by eighteen female participants (native speakers of Chinese and native speakers of American English) and interviews with the participants. Four sets of data were analyzed: Chinese telephone conversations recorded in China, Chinese telephone conversations recorded in the U.S., English telephone conversations recorded in the U.S., and English telephone conversations recorded in the U.S. by native speakers of Chinese. The findings suggest that primary differences between Chinese and English telephone conversations occur in identification, phatic talk, and leave-taking. Transactional calls and interactional calls display variation in greeting, phatic talk, initiation of closing, and register. The comparison of the use of language between the two settings reveals differences predominantly in transactional calls. The examination of L2 discourse suggests that learners' communicative competence will be further enhanced with the promotion of sociolinguistic knowledge and pragmatic awareness of the communicative event.