Matching Items (3)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Interpersonal communication
- Creators: Kambhampati, Subbarao
- Creators: Alberts, Jess
Military couples' communication during deployment: a proposed expansion of affection exchange theory
Description
Affectionate communication is one way individuals express love and appreciation (Floyd, 2006). Recently, communication scholars have recommended individuals increase their expressions of affection for health benefits (Brezsnyak & Whisman, 2004; Floyd et al., 2009; Floyd & Riforgiate, 2008). However, because communication is limited during military deployment, increasing affectionate communication is difficult for military families to implement. One form of affectionate communication that shows the promise of health benefits for military couples during deployment is affectionate writing. Working from Pennebaker’s written disclosure paradigm and Floyd’s affectionate exchange theory, the purpose of the current study is to identify whether at-home romantic partners of deployed U.S. Navy personnel can reap the benefits of affectionate communication during military deployment. To test a causal relationship between affectionate writing and communication outcomes, specifically relational satisfaction and stress, a four-week experiment was conducted. Eighty female at-home romantic partners of currently deployed U.S. Navy personnel were recruited for the study and randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (a) an experimental condition in which individuals were instructed to write affectionate letters to their deployed partners for 20 minutes once a week for three weeks, (b) a control condition in which individuals were instructed to write about innocuous or non-emotional topics for 20 minutes once a week for three weeks, or (c) a control condition in which individuals were not given instructions to write for the duration of the study. Individuals who engaged in affectionate writing reported higher levels of relational satisfaction than both the control groups, however, there were no differences in reported stress for the three groups. In fact, stress decreased throughout the duration of the study regardless of the condition in which participants had been placed. Additionally, individuals with secure attachment styles were more satisfied and less stressed than individuals with preoccupied and fearful attachment styles. Finally, individuals who perceived their relationship to be equitable, and to a slightly lesser extent, overbenefitted, during deployment reported higher levels of relational satisfaction. Overall, the findings support and extend affectionate exchange theory. Specifically, the results suggest that individuals can experience distance from their partners and still benefit from affectionate communication via writing; additionally, expressions of affectionate communication need not be reciprocal. Theoretical, methodological, clinical, and pedagogical implications are discussed.
ContributorsVeluscek, Alaina M (Author) / Guerrero, Laura (Thesis advisor) / Alberts, Jess (Committee member) / Brougham, M. Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
With the rise of social media, user-generated content has become available at an unprecedented scale. On Twitter, 1 billion tweets are posted every 5 days and on Facebook, 20 million links are shared every 20 minutes. These massive collections of user-generated content have introduced the human behavior's big-data.
This big data has brought about countless opportunities for analyzing human behavior at scale. However, is this data enough? Unfortunately, the data available at the individual-level is limited for most users. This limited individual-level data is often referred to as thin data. Hence, researchers face a big-data paradox, where this big-data is a large collection of mostly limited individual-level information. Researchers are often constrained to derive meaningful insights regarding online user behavior with this limited information. Simply put, they have to make thin data thick.
In this dissertation, how human behavior's thin data can be made thick is investigated. The chief objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate how traces of human behavior can be efficiently gleaned from the, often limited, individual-level information; hence, introducing an all-inclusive user behavior analysis methodology that considers social media users with different levels of information availability. To that end, the absolute minimum information in terms of both link or content data that is available for any social media user is determined. Utilizing only minimum information in different applications on social media such as prediction or recommendation tasks allows for solutions that are (1) generalizable to all social media users and that are (2) easy to implement. However, are applications that employ only minimum information as effective or comparable to applications that use more information?
In this dissertation, it is shown that common research challenges such as detecting malicious users or friend recommendation (i.e., link prediction) can be effectively performed using only minimum information. More importantly, it is demonstrated that unique user identification can be achieved using minimum information. Theoretical boundaries of unique user identification are obtained by introducing social signatures. Social signatures allow for user identification in any large-scale network on social media. The results on single-site user identification are generalized to multiple sites and it is shown how the same user can be uniquely identified across multiple sites using only minimum link or content information.
The findings in this dissertation allows finding the same user across multiple sites, which in turn has multiple implications. In particular, by identifying the same users across sites, (1) patterns that users exhibit across sites are identified, (2) how user behavior varies across sites is determined, and (3) activities that are observed only across sites are identified and studied.
This big data has brought about countless opportunities for analyzing human behavior at scale. However, is this data enough? Unfortunately, the data available at the individual-level is limited for most users. This limited individual-level data is often referred to as thin data. Hence, researchers face a big-data paradox, where this big-data is a large collection of mostly limited individual-level information. Researchers are often constrained to derive meaningful insights regarding online user behavior with this limited information. Simply put, they have to make thin data thick.
In this dissertation, how human behavior's thin data can be made thick is investigated. The chief objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate how traces of human behavior can be efficiently gleaned from the, often limited, individual-level information; hence, introducing an all-inclusive user behavior analysis methodology that considers social media users with different levels of information availability. To that end, the absolute minimum information in terms of both link or content data that is available for any social media user is determined. Utilizing only minimum information in different applications on social media such as prediction or recommendation tasks allows for solutions that are (1) generalizable to all social media users and that are (2) easy to implement. However, are applications that employ only minimum information as effective or comparable to applications that use more information?
In this dissertation, it is shown that common research challenges such as detecting malicious users or friend recommendation (i.e., link prediction) can be effectively performed using only minimum information. More importantly, it is demonstrated that unique user identification can be achieved using minimum information. Theoretical boundaries of unique user identification are obtained by introducing social signatures. Social signatures allow for user identification in any large-scale network on social media. The results on single-site user identification are generalized to multiple sites and it is shown how the same user can be uniquely identified across multiple sites using only minimum link or content information.
The findings in this dissertation allows finding the same user across multiple sites, which in turn has multiple implications. In particular, by identifying the same users across sites, (1) patterns that users exhibit across sites are identified, (2) how user behavior varies across sites is determined, and (3) activities that are observed only across sites are identified and studied.
ContributorsZafarani, Reza, 1983- (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Leskovec, Jure (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The rapid advancements of technology have greatly extended the ubiquitous nature of smartphones acting as a gateway to numerous social media applications. This brings an immense convenience to the users of these applications wishing to stay connected to other individuals through sharing their statuses, posting their opinions, experiences, suggestions, etc on online social networks (OSNs). Exploring and analyzing this data has a great potential to enable deep and fine-grained insights into the behavior, emotions, and language of individuals in a society. This proposed dissertation focuses on utilizing these online social footprints to research two main threads – 1) Analysis: to study the behavior of individuals online (content analysis) and 2) Synthesis: to build models that influence the behavior of individuals offline (incomplete action models for decision-making).
A large percentage of posts shared online are in an unrestricted natural language format that is meant for human consumption. One of the demanding problems in this context is to leverage and develop approaches to automatically extract important insights from this incessant massive data pool. Efforts in this direction emphasize mining or extracting the wealth of latent information in the data from multiple OSNs independently. The first thread of this dissertation focuses on analytics to investigate the differentiated content-sharing behavior of individuals. The second thread of this dissertation attempts to build decision-making systems using social media data.
The results of the proposed dissertation emphasize the importance of considering multiple data types while interpreting the content shared on OSNs. They highlight the unique ways in which the data and the extracted patterns from text-based platforms or visual-based platforms complement and contrast in terms of their content. The proposed research demonstrated that, in many ways, the results obtained by focusing on either only text or only visual elements of content shared online could lead to biased insights. On the other hand, it also shows the power of a sequential set of patterns that have some sort of precedence relationships and collaboration between humans and automated planners.
A large percentage of posts shared online are in an unrestricted natural language format that is meant for human consumption. One of the demanding problems in this context is to leverage and develop approaches to automatically extract important insights from this incessant massive data pool. Efforts in this direction emphasize mining or extracting the wealth of latent information in the data from multiple OSNs independently. The first thread of this dissertation focuses on analytics to investigate the differentiated content-sharing behavior of individuals. The second thread of this dissertation attempts to build decision-making systems using social media data.
The results of the proposed dissertation emphasize the importance of considering multiple data types while interpreting the content shared on OSNs. They highlight the unique ways in which the data and the extracted patterns from text-based platforms or visual-based platforms complement and contrast in terms of their content. The proposed research demonstrated that, in many ways, the results obtained by focusing on either only text or only visual elements of content shared online could lead to biased insights. On the other hand, it also shows the power of a sequential set of patterns that have some sort of precedence relationships and collaboration between humans and automated planners.
ContributorsManikonda, Lydia (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / De Choudhury, Munmun (Committee member) / Kamar, Ece (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019