This paper presents a comprehensive picture of informal problem solving (IPS) meetings where gatherings of workers meet around computer screens, at their desks, in doorways, and in halls to accomplish multiple work-related tasks. It attempts to uncover interactional details of informal meetings by providing a micro-analytic model of informal…

An ethnographic study examined a distinctive and recurrent form of problem solving interaction that has been previously unreported in the organizational communication and problem solving literatures--Informal Problem Solving Meetings (IPSs). The fact that participants in IPS meetings themselves neither name or ordinarily formulate Informal Problem…

Strategic communication scholars agree that planning is critical to human action. An investigation tested plan modification aspects of cognitive planning theory. Two experiments tested whether success and failure of a plan served as predictors of plan modification and whether individuals can accurately predict whether and how they will modify a…

Three studies investigated the effects of concrete versus abstract wording and negative versus positive premises on the difficulty subjects had in solving several kinds of reasoning tasks. Subjects for all three studies were college undergraduates who received booklets containing either hypothetical, disjunctive, or linear syllogisms. Each booklet…

A replication study tested functional theory utilizing untrained full-fledged groups. One hundred forty undergraduate students who were enrolled in a small group communication course at a large midwestern university participated in small group discussions analyzing a plagiarism case used in an original study by R. Y. Hirokawa. Results indicated…

Based in a stream of community-based health promotion activities rather than a fixed framework of hypothesis testing, the study described in this paper tried to solve the problem of the one-sided communication between Japanese health care providers and receivers by visualizing health-related feelings and concepts for both parties involved in the…

In the history of small group studies (in the field of communication theory and research), two factors contributed to the changes that led to Ernest Bormann publishing in 1970 his work questioning the value of the knowledge being reported and the appropriateness of the methods by which it was being generated. First, prior to 1965, a limited amount…

A study investigated how the attribution of a problem solution to an individual or group affects the consumer's perception of the solution's quality. Based on the tendency to support group decision-making (Hydra phenomenon) it was predicted that decisions attributed to groups would be perceived as higher in quality than those made by individuals,…

As a step toward the study of invention, an investigation dealt not with public arguments or the results of invention, but with arguments that may have occurred to the rhetor but were discarded. To avoid problems of self-presentation and retrospection, thinking aloud and reconstructive protocols were avoided in favor of providing 37 college…

A field study was conducted to examine the communication behaviors by which seven bank executives identified problems. Data on the subjects' communication behaviors were obtained through observations, the written documents pertaining to the identification of problems by the subjects, and postobservational surveys and interviews of the subjects.…

If being a competent small group problem solver is difficult, it is even more difficult to impart those competencies to others. Unlike athletic coaches who are near their players during the real game, teachers of small group communication are not typically present for on-the-spot coaching when their students are doing their problem solving. That…

Group decision support systems (GDDS) represent a technological aid for the decision-making process, combining communication, computers, and decision technologies to support problem formulation and solution in group meetings. A study examined communicative influence strategies used in a GDDS meeting. Subjects, 201 high- and low-influence persons…

The number of women participating in intercollegiate debate is proportionately lower than their representation on campuses. Furthermore, women's rate of success at the highest level of the Cross Examination Debate Association national competition is far lower than their representation in the organization. However, as women enter fields such as…

To negotiate a balance between an ideological concern for society's historical-economic development and an understanding of the individual's need for a sense of self-realization, social theory researchers should look to B. Dervin's "gap theory model" of communication. Adapted from Kenneth Burke, it offers a dynamic means of understanding…

Expert systems are computer programs that solve selected problems by modelling domain-specific behaviors of human experts. These computer programs typically consist of an input/output system that feeds data into the computer and retrieves advice, an inference system using the reasoning and heuristic processes of human experts, and a knowledge…