Matching Items (9)
Description
This project examines how civil communication can be beneficial in organizations and the work place. It examines how conflict, power differences, and incivility contribute to uncivil atmospheres and applies a framework of civil communication to address the issues. The analysis is based upon a third party's published description of an organizational narrative sample and the civil communication framework of civil listening, civil speech and civil actions are then applied. The goal of this project is to determine the relationships between communication and productivity, conflict and productivity as well as if civil communication can address conflict and organizational productivity.
ContributorsWilson, Jenna Marie (Author) / Linde, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Alberts, Jess (Committee member) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This study examines the interactions and intentions of D/deaf and hearing students who participate in the American Sign Language (ASL) Club and deaf Devils Club at Arizona State University (ASU). By exploring how and why students choose to participate in these organizations, one can better understand interactions between D/deaf and hearing communities. This study explores reasons hearing students become involved with d/Deaf communities, the types of interactions the hearing and d/Deaf students participate in, and how student involvement can benefit from these interactions. Qualitative interviews with students of different hearing abilities and observations inside both clubs inform this study. The implications of this research may be applicable to other D/deaf communities.
ContributorsBalis, Sarah Michelle (Author) / Alberts, Jess (Thesis director) / Howard, Pam (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
This dissertation demarks the start of an empirical study of toxic romantic relationships. Three primary tasks were undertaken: (1) uncover characteristics of toxic romantic relationships, (2) develop a Toxic Relationship Behaviors scale, and (3) determine how toxic relationship behaviors and coping behaviors associate with breakup distress and post-traumatic growth following breakup. For aim 1, an inductive qualitative analysis examined toxic romantic relationships behaviors mentioned in Reddit and Quora threads. Data (n = 1,615) were classified under 14 themes representing toxic relationship behaviors and indicated one partner predominantly engaged in toxic relationship behaviors, characterized by power, control, and self-centeredness. For aim 2, a survey was launched to develop a Toxic Relationship Behavior scale and investigate relationships among toxic relationship behaviors, breakup distress, post-breakup coping behaviors, and post-traumatic growth. Exploratory factor analysis showed six Toxic Relationship Behavior subscales: (1) isolating, (2) displaying righteous self-centeredness, (3) walking on eggshells, (4) criticizing and conveying contempt, (5) surveilling, and (6) engaging in intermittent reinforcement. For aim 3, a quantitative study (n = 168) was conducted using the Toxic Relationship Behaviors scale to determine how toxic relationship behaviors and coping behaviors associate with breakup distress and post-traumatic growth. Results indicated emotional breakup distress was positively associated with focusing on the ex and seeking social support. Cognitive breakup distress was positively associated with surveilling and displaying righteous self-centeredness, as well as coping by focusing on the ex, seeking social support, and solitude. Personal growth positively associated with intermittent reinforcement, walking on eggshells, and righteous self-centeredness, as well as the coping strategies positive distraction and seeking social support. Thus, the combination of displaying righteous self-centeredness, walking on eggshells, and productive coping associated with the highest levels of personal growth. Walking on eggshells and seeking social support also predicted heightened appreciation of relationships and increased sensitivity toward others after the breakup. Coping through positive distractions was also positively related to increased sensitivity to others. The final chapter discusses findings across both studies and outlines directions for future research on toxic relationship behaviors.
ContributorsGraham, Callie (Author) / Guerrero, Laura K. (Thesis advisor) / Alberts, Jess (Committee member) / Randall, Ashley K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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
Description
Black male students experience a number of issues related to identity during the persistence process, which have potential to deter them from graduating. Some of these issues include feeling isolated and lack of access to resources due to their ethnic and/or racial identities. Recent statistics indicate that though there is an increase in college enrollment for Black students, the graduation rate is disproportionate to their enrollment. Using critical race theory, co-cultural theory, and communication theory of identity, this study investigated the role of identity in the persistence of Black male students’ graduation rates. Specifically, the central question was ‘What role, if any, do identity processes play in Black male students' decisions to continue or depart from a Predominantly White Institution?’ In order to answer this question, fifteen first-generation Black male college students were interviewed in order to understand the specific experiences that impacted them in relation to graduation. The study sample included a subset of Black male athletes who were found to have distinct differences in college experiences based solely on their athlete status. The overall results indicate that Black male students have expectations of the persistence process and that their personal identity also plays a significant role in the persistence process. In order to maintain their identities and continue with coursework, Black males enacted persistence strategies that were consistent with an overall goal of graduating. Research findings suggest that Black males must maintain a strong personal identity in order to maintain their personal commitment to graduation and college institutions can support them in this endeavor. Research outcomes also suggest that Black males should have a plan of persistence upon entering college, which is constantly reinforced as a graduation motivator.
ContributorsRobinson, Jennifer Christine (Author) / Martin, Judith (Thesis advisor) / Alberts, Jess (Committee member) / Jimenez-Castellanos, Oscar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Why don't women ask?: a mixed method analysis of gender and the propensity to initiate a negotiation
Description
Scholars have contemplated gender differences in negotiations for a number of years. Recently, attention has been directed to the early stages of a negotiation, particularly the propensity to initiate a negotiation. Indeed, there is evidence that men are significantly more likely than women to initiate a negotiation (Small, Gelfand, Babcock, & Gettman, 2007). In an effort to unpack these findings, the present mixed method study partially replicates the quantitative lab study by Small and her colleagues (2007) to explore gender differences and then extends this work with qualitative interviews to examine the rationales underlying the propensity to negotiate. In the quantitative phase of this study, undergraduate students were invited to complete a task in which they could earn between $3 and $10 in addition to course extra credit. All participants were offered $3 and could earn up to $10 if they initiated a negotiation for more money. The qualitative phase of this study included follow-up qualitative interviews to explore the reasons women and men chose to initiate or avoid a negotiation. Quantitative results demonstrate no significant gender differences in the propensity to negotiate. However, qualitative findings reveal trends suggesting that women maintained higher evaluations of money but lower probabilities of attaining more money during the negotiation. Findings support that clear gender differences exist with regard to perceived risks and the value in the decision to negotiate. Thus, findings suggest that gender differences in the propensity to negotiate are more complex than which can be quantitatively measured using a simple ask-no ask dichotomy.
ContributorsLeier, Cassaundra Renee (Author) / Alberts, Jess (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Katherine (Committee member) / Hinshaw, Art (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Generative Adversarial Networks are designed, in theory, to replicate the distribution of the data they are trained on. With real-world limitations, such as finite network capacity and training set size, they inevitably suffer a yet unavoidable technical failure: mode collapse. GAN-generated data is not nearly as diverse as the real-world data the network is trained on; this work shows that this effect is especially drastic when the training data is highly non-uniform. Specifically, GANs learn to exacerbate the social biases which exist in the training set along sensitive axes such as gender and race. In an age where many datasets are curated from web and social media data (which are almost never balanced), this has dangerous implications for downstream tasks using GAN-generated synthetic data, such as data augmentation for classification. This thesis presents an empirical demonstration of this phenomenon and illustrates its real-world ramifications. It starts by showing that when asked to sample images from an illustrative dataset of engineering faculty headshots from 47 U.S. universities, unfortunately skewed toward white males, a DCGAN’s generator “imagines” faces with light skin colors and masculine features. In addition, this work verifies that the generated distribution diverges more from the real-world distribution when the training data is non-uniform than when it is uniform. This work also shows that a conditional variant of GAN is not immune to exacerbating sensitive social biases. Finally, this work contributes a preliminary case study on Snapchat’s explosively popular GAN-enabled “My Twin” selfie lens, which consistently lightens the skin tone for women of color in an attempt to make faces more feminine. The results and discussion of the study are meant to caution machine learning practitioners who may unsuspectingly increase the biases in their applications.
ContributorsJain, Niharika (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Manikonda, Lydia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Background: Process mining (PM) using event log files is gaining popularity in healthcare to investigate clinical pathways. But it has many unique challenges. Clinical Pathways (CPs) are often complex and unstructured which results in spaghetti-like models. Moreover, the log files collected from the electronic health record (EHR) often contain noisy and incomplete data. Objective: Based on the traditional process mining technique of using event logs generated by an EHR, observational video data from rapid ethnography (RE) were combined to model, interpret, simplify and validate the perioperative (PeriOp) CPs. Method: The data collection and analysis pipeline consisted of the following steps: (1) Obtain RE data, (2) Obtain EHR event logs, (3) Generate CP from RE data, (4) Identify EHR interfaces and functionalities, (5) Analyze EHR functionalities to identify missing events, (6) Clean and preprocess event logs to remove noise, (7) Use PM to compute CP time metrics, (8) Further remove noise by removing outliers, (9) Mine CP from event logs and (10) Compare CPs resulting from RE and PM. Results: Four provider interviews and 1,917,059 event logs and 877 minutes of video ethnography recording EHRs interaction were collected. When mapping event logs to EHR functionalities, the intraoperative (IntraOp) event logs were more complete (45%) when compared with preoperative (35%) and postoperative (21.5%) event logs. After removing the noise (496 outliers) and calculating the duration of the PeriOp CP, the median was 189 minutes and the standard deviation was 291 minutes. Finally, RE data were analyzed to help identify most clinically relevant event logs and simplify spaghetti-like CPs resulting from PM. Conclusion: The study demonstrated the use of RE to help overcome challenges of automatic discovery of CPs. It also demonstrated that RE data could be used to identify relevant clinical tasks and incomplete data, remove noise (outliers), simplify CPs and validate mined CPs.
ContributorsDeotale, Aditya Vijay (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Grando, Maria (Thesis advisor) / Manikonda, Lydia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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