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Description
In an effort to understand and improve interactions between homeless young adults and the nonprofit organizations that serve them, I engaged in a long-term, qualitative, participatory action project. My project involved input from homeless young adults, nonprofit organizations, volunteers/staff, and communication scholarship. While taking a community-engaged, participatory, and qualitative approach, I focused on the interactions between youth and the organizations. Particularly, I drew on homeless young adult experiences to inform services and illuminate compassion within the context of the nonprofit organizations. In the end, this project extends the individual model of compassion to include presence, identifies potential ruptures in the process of compassion, and models compassionate dynamics in organizations. It also articulates a method I call pragmatic fieldwork, a qualitative and pragmatic approach to participatory action research. Each of these outcomes speaks to varied community interests, from theoretically nuancing scholarly models of compassion to informing policy in the interest of more effectively and compassionately serving homeless youth.
ContributorsHuffman, Timothy (Author) / Trethewey, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Committee member) / Hagar, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The lack of food safety in a grower's produce presents the grower with two risks; (1) that an item will need to be recalled from the market, incurring substantial costs and damaging brand equity and (2) that the entire market for the commodity becomes impaired as consumers associate all produce as being risky to eat. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the leafy green industry, where recalls are relatively frequent and there has been one massive E. coli outbreak that rocked the industry in 2006. The purpose of this thesis is to examine insurance policies that protect growers from these risks. In doing this, a discussion of current recall insurance policies is presented. Further, actuarially fair premiums for catastrophic revenue insurance policies are priced through a contingent claims framework. The results suggest that spinach industry revenue can be insured for $0.02 per carton. Given the current costs of leafy green industry food safety initiatives, growers may be willing to pay for such an insurance policy.
ContributorsPagaran, Jeremy (Author) / Manfredo, Mark R. (Thesis advisor) / Richards, Timothy J. (Thesis advisor) / Nganje, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The purpose of this dissertation was to develop a Compassionate Communication Scale (CCS) by conducting a series of studies. The first study used qualitative data to identify and develop initial scale items. A series of follow-up studies used exploratory factor analysis to investigate the underlying structure of the CCS. A three-factor structure emerged, which included: Compassionate conversation, such as listening, letting the distressed person disclose feelings, and making empathetic remarks; compassionate touch, such as holding someone's hand or patting someone's back; and compassionate messaging, such as posting an encouraging message on a social networking site or sending a sympathetic email. The next study tested convergent and divergent validity by determining how the three forms of compassionate communication associate with various traits. Compassionate conversation was positively related to compassion, empathetic concern, perspective taking, emotional intelligence, social expressivity, emotional expressivity and benevolence, and negatively related to verbal aggressiveness and narcissism. Compassionate touch was positively correlated with compassion, empathetic concern, perspective taking, emotional intelligence, social expressivity, emotional expressivity, and benevolence, and uncorrelated with verbal aggressiveness and benevolence. Finally, compassionate messaging was positively correlated with social expressivity, emotional expressivity, and uncorrelated with verbal aggressiveness and narcissism. The next study focused on cross-validation and criterion-related validity. Correlations showing that self-reports of a person's compassionate communication were positively related to a friend or romantic partner's report of that person's compassionate communication provided cross-validation. The test for criterion-related validity examined whether compassionate communication predicts relational satisfaction. Regression analyses revealed that people were more relationally satisfied when they perceived themselves to use compassionate conversation, when they perceived their partner to use compassionate conversation, and when their partner reported using compassionate conversation. This finding did not extend to compassionate touch or compassionate messaging. In fact, in one regression analysis, people reported more relational satisfaction when they perceived that their partners used high levels of compassionate conversation and low levels of compassionate touch. Overall, the analyses suggest that of the three forms of compassionate communication, compassionate conversation is most strongly related to relational satisfaction. Taken together, this series of studies provides initial evidence for the validity of the CCS.
ContributorsRamos Salazar, Leslie (Author) / Guerrero, Laura (Thesis advisor) / Roberto, Anthony (Committee member) / Millsap, Roger (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study investigates how well prominent behavioral theories from social psychology explain green purchasing behavior (GPB). I assess three prominent theories in terms of their suitability for GPB research, their attractiveness to GPB empiricists, and the strength of their empirical evidence when applied to GPB. First, a qualitative assessment of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Norm Activation Theory (NAT), and Value-Belief-Norm Theory (VBN) is conducted to evaluate a) how well the phenomenon and concepts in each theory match the characteristics of pro-environmental behavior and b) how well the assumptions made in each theory match common assumptions made in purchasing theory. Second, a quantitative assessment of these three theories is conducted in which r2 values and methodological parameters (e.g., sample size) are collected from a sample of 21 empirical studies on GPB to evaluate the accuracy and generalize-ability of empirical evidence. In the qualitative assessment, the results show each theory has its advantages and disadvantages. The results also provide a theoretically-grounded roadmap for modifying each theory to be more suitable for GPB research. In the quantitative assessment, the TPB outperforms the other two theories in every aspect taken into consideration. It proves to 1) create the most accurate models 2) be supported by the most generalize-able empirical evidence and 3) be the most attractive theory to empiricists. Although the TPB establishes itself as the best foundational theory for an empiricist to start from, it's clear that a more comprehensive model is needed to achieve consistent results and improve our understanding of GPB. NAT and the Theory of Interpersonal Behavior (TIB) offer pathways to extend the TPB. The TIB seems particularly apt for this endeavor, while VBN does not appear to have much to offer. Overall, the TPB has already proven to hold a relatively high predictive value. But with the state of ecosystem services continuing to decline on a global scale, it's important for models of GPB to become more accurate and reliable. Better models have the capacity to help marketing professionals, product developers, and policy makers develop strategies for encouraging consumers to buy green products.
ContributorsRedd, Thomas Christopher (Author) / Dooley, Kevin (Thesis advisor) / Basile, George (Committee member) / Darnall, Nicole (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The Holocaust and the effects it has had upon witnesses has been a topic of study for nearly six decades; however, few angles of research have been conducted relating to the long-term effects of the Holocaust upon the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors--the After Generations. The After Generations are considered the proof--the living legacies--that their parents and grandparents survived. Growing up with intimate knowledge of the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust, members of the After Generations not only carry with them their family's story, but also their own vicarious experience(s) of trauma. From this legacy comes a burden of responsibility to those who perished, their survivor parents/grandparents, the stories that were shared, as well as to future generations. Using grounded theory method, this study not only explores the long-term effects of the Holocaust upon members of the After Generations, but what it means to responsibly remember the stories from the Holocaust, as well as how individuals might ethically represent such stories/memories. Findings that developed out of an axial analysis of interview transcripts and journal writing, as well as the later development of a performance script, are embodied in a manner that allows the actual language and experiences of the participants to be collectively witnessed both symbolically and visually. Through their desire to remember, members of the After Generations demonstrate how they plan to carry on traditions, live lives that honor those that came before them, and maintain hope for the future. In so doing, the stories shared reveal the centrality of the Holocaust in the lives of members of the After Generations through their everyday choices to responsibly and actively remember through their art, writings, life-work, as well as from within their work in their local communities. Such acts of remembrance are important to the education of others as well as to the construction and maintenance of the After Generations' identities. The representation of these voices acts as a reminder of how hatred and its all-consuming characteristics can affect not only the person targeted, but multiple generations, as well.
ContributorsRath, Sandra (Author) / de la Garza, Sarah Amira (Thesis advisor) / Underiner, Tamara (Committee member) / Corey, Frederick C. (Committee member) / Eisenberg, Judith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Law enforcement, schools and universities, health service agencies, as well as social service agencies, each acquire information from individuals that receive their services. That information gets recorded into the respective application system of each organization. The information, however, gets recorded only in the context of each service rendered and within each system used to record it. Information that is recorded by the police department for one individual is entirely different from the information that is recorded by the hospital for that same individual. What if all the organizations used the same system to record information? What if all the organizations followed the same protocols to record information as well as access it? The goal of this research was to analyze a system that allows for all organizations within a community to share information with each other. Technically, this system is feasible. However, public opinion says sharing personal information is unethical, and Federal regulation says it is unlawful. To accomplish an information-sharing system of this type, both regulation and public opinion need to be addressed.
ContributorsPullin, Britton Scott (Author) / Schildgen, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Prewitt, Deborah (Committee member) / Ralston, Laurel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In order to be competitive in the hotel market, more and more hotels have proposed various types of "wow" services to inform customers' impressions of the hotel in a positive way. Many customers consider these services excellent, and they often exceed their expectations. However, some "wow" services only generate the effect of amazement instead of meeting customers' needs and wants. Applying the notion of the Zone of Tolerance (ZOT: the range between customers' desired and adequate levels of service expectations) to the unique services provided by the Hotel Royal Chiao Hsi Spa in Taiwan, this research study explores hotel customers' service expectations and perceived service quality while revealing the relationship between service quality, satisfaction, and future behavioral intentions. The findings indicate that the ZOT indeed exists in customers' service expectations through the significant difference between the desired and adequate levels of expectations. In addition, findings indicate that customers have diverse tolerance zones toward different hotel services regarding the perceived level of essentialness. Ultimately, the findings specify that customers' perceived service quality has a direct effect on both customer satisfaction and future behavioral intentions.
ContributorsChiu, Chien-Fen (Author) / Lee, Woojin (Thesis advisor) / Larsen, Dale (Committee member) / Tyrrell, Timothy (Committee member) / Kim, Yushim (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Customer participation in service conversations: an investigation of the dynamics of service context
Description
In this research, I focus on service conversations in professional services. For most Business-to-Business or Business-to-Consumer professional services, the service conversation is an important part of the service experience and is critical to solutions co-creation as well as customer satisfaction. In this research, I examine service conversation sequences at the micro-level and explore two important research questions: (1) how do I explain the dynamics of moment-by-moment Customer Participation in Service Conversations (CPSC)? and (2) how do the temporal and process dynamics of CPSC relate to customer satisfaction and solution compliance? From a dynamic context perspective, I develop a conceptual framework that explains the co-existence of stable and dynamic customer participation behavior in a service conversation. I conduct a series of lab experiments and an observation study of online conversations between 173 customers and 52 doctors to empirically validate the conceptual framework. This research demonstrates that at any given moment, customers manage their information sharing and interaction control based on their mental representation of the context complexity. Although the context-behavior relationships are stable, the service conversation context is dynamic. The service provider's behavior can constantly change and introduce new context cues. When the context changes so does the CPSC behavior. Finally, this research shows that to improve customer satisfaction, customer perceived service quality, and customer solution compliance, service providers should focus on helping customers reduce their perceived context complexity as early as possible, by providing information and educating customers. This research makes important theoretical and managerial contributions. Theoretically, it defines and develops measures of service context complexity in terms of its psychological features. It develops a conceptual framework to explain the temporal dynamics of CPSC on multi-dimensions. Empirically, this research adopts a phase-based sequence analysis approach and uses a negative bi-nominal model to examine the temporal process effect of the service conversation on service outcomes. Managerially, the research findings provide firms important and actionable guidelines to manage conversation-based professional services.
ContributorsWang, Si (Author) / Binter, Mary Jo (Thesis advisor) / Ostrom, Amy L. (Committee member) / Olsen, G. Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
As a result of the district program evaluation, a follow up on teacher perceptions of an online collaboration versus face to face collaboration approach was deemed necessary. The interviews were conducted with eight teachers from a suburban southwest K-8 public school district. After all teachers had participated in a 10 week program evaluation comparing online team teacher collaboration with face-to-face team teacher collaboration, the interview process began. One teacher from each grade level team was randomly selected to participate in the interview process. Analysis of the interview responses was inconclusive. Findings were confounded by the apparent lack of understanding of major concepts of Professional Learning Communities on the part of the participants. Assumptions about participant knowledge must be tested prior to investigations of the influence of either face to face or online format as delivery modes.
ContributorsTucker, Pamela K (Author) / McCoy, Kathleen (Thesis advisor) / Gehrke, Rebecca (Committee member) / Ham, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Performance is a public speech act that can present the experience of difference and generate relations across lines of difference. In personal narrative performance, performers do not just tell stories, the stories they tell are strategic hailings that call attention to discourses that produce the conditions of their exclusion and form intimate relations in public. Personal narrative performance renders the private public. Performers take to the stage, the space of the public, to offer their stories, their bodies, and their relations to audiences for collective consideration. In turn, the act of performance generates further relations: among performers and audiences, and between performance and discourse. This study analyzes these two layers of relation in performance through looking at the ways neoliberalism and performance interanimate one another. Through looking at three sites of neoliberal relationality--same-sex marriage, family, and immigration and multiculturalism, it asks questions of how performers narrate and represent non-normative experiences within neoliberalism, the historical and cultural context through which they are living and narrating. In order to understand the cultural work, the resistive and relational potential, of the relations that occur in and through personal narrative performance, we also need to understand the political, cultural, and historical conditions under which narratives in performance are produced. My argument is that in and through performance intimacy is queered: it takes the private--the stuff of the personal presented as aesthetic communication--and renders that private very public. In public and through relations, performance can raise awareness and shift consciousness, reify orders of relation or generate alternate imaginaries. This is to say that a lot of different types of work are done in performance, and although performance is often seen as resistance, under the weight of neoliberalism, it is important to tend to what arguments performances are making and how in turn that shapes the relations that occur in the site of performance. Queer intimacy offers a way of engaging performance, an analytic that considers the text of performance as well as the relational context among performers and audiences, and turns back on larger cultural questions of belonging. The potential of performance, of the concept of queer intimacy, provides a lens to read performance, to tend to the conditions that give rise to and inform performance in the current historical moment. It brings together the critical impulse of intercultural communication and cultural studies with performance studies. From a critical cultural perspective, it tends to the structural in performance, and through performance emphasizes the lived experience as narrated and embodied as and through communication. Coupled with the impulses of queer theory, queer intimacy offers both resisting normativity and imagining beyond it. To consider queer intimacy in performance is not only to recognize that relations are made possible, but to tend closely to the belongings we are making.
ContributorsPérez, Kimberlee (Author) / Corey, Frederick C. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Honegger, Gitta (Committee member) / Langellier, Kristin M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014