A study examined the effects of parental divorce on college students, comparing college students in five areas of social development according to parental marital status: evaluation of parent/child relationships; relationship commitment and satisfaction; dating frequency and satisfaction; attitudes toward marriage; and sexual activity and…

A study examined the likelihood of using compliance-gaining strategies when engaging in safe-sex situations. A sample of 110 college students from a large midwestern university completed a 16-item questionnaire that utilized G. Marwell and D. Schmitt's compliance-gaining typology. Results indicate that female college students were significantly…

A study investigated the impact of teachers' use of immediacy behaviors in the college classroom. Behavior patterns of teachers often affect the behavior patterns of students. Teacher immediacy has been found to positively impact student cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning. Subjects, 70 students, enrolled in a communication course in a…

A study examined whether students in synchronous distance education settings experience anxiety, reluctance, and frustration (i.e., communication apprehension) when using technologies to interact and, if so, what factors (e.g., prior experience with technology) might function to attenuate such negative reactions. Measures of traitlike- and…

Presumably, during persuasion, a violation of a subject's expected distance would act as a distraction, increase the likelihood of message acceptance, create fewer counterarguments, and shift the listener's focus from message content to speaker characteristics. Forty-nine undergraduate speech students participated in a study at a major…

A study measured student agreement or disagreement with statements related to G. Hofstede's dimensions of culture and compares those responses with various cultural characteristics of the respondents. A 40-item Likert-type questionnaire was administered to 535 university students (301 females, 234 males) enrolled in business and communication…

A study examined communication majors' attitudes toward job opportunities in their chosen areas (and communication in general) and how communication majors have proactively prepared themselves to enter the work world. A convenience sample of 140 undergraduate students enrolled in communication programs at 4 different universities responded to a…

This research tries to determine effective intercultural classroom communication in the American higher education setting. Theories on classroom communication and intercultural communication (Uncertainty Reduction and Communication Accommodation) are used to build the framework. Subjects were four professors from three different academic…

A study focused on investigating perceptions of sexist humor, specifically on how people perceive others' reactions to sexist humor. Subjects, 206 college men and women, rated communication competence and attraction of actors in vignettes depicting 2 different reactions to sexist humor. Results indicated that sex of both the joke teller and the…

A preliminary study identified areas of success and impact of a peer mediation program to be implemented in 60 middle and senior high schools in the Philadelphia Public School District during the 1993-1996 academic year periods. During the 1992-1994 period, 719 students and adults received peer mediation training. Data were collected from…

A study investigated the listening experiences of American university students who interviewed people from other cultures as part of a class project. A total of 103 individuals from African, Asian, European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern cultures were interviewed. Each of the American interviewers described his/her perceptions of five…

Finds that graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) experience eight interrelated types of communication concern (self, task, impact, role conflict, teaching, area knowledge, procedural knowledge, and time management). Shows that GTA variables of expected duties, prior teaching experience, newness to area, foreign or domestic birth, and age are likely…

An exploratory study sought to gain more information about the initial interactions of newly arrived international students on United States campuses--how new international students described their feelings of uncertainty before leaving their home countries and how these uncertainties impacted their interpretations of their initial interactions.…

A study investigated the effects of Interactive Television (ITV--a two-way television system of instruction which is a near replication of face-to-face classroom instruction) on learning. Sixty-seven rural, midwestern high school students who were taking classes via ITV were asked to complete a network analysis survey to identify the frequency of…

A study examined how the SPEAK (Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit) Test is perceived by both International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and instructors at a major midwestern university where it is used as a screening instrument for hiring ITAs. Subjects, 24 ITAs from the social sciences and 24 ITAs from the math-based sciences who took the…