Research

Background: Depressive symptoms are the most prevalent mental health concern among older adults (possibly heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic), which raises questions about how such symptoms can be lowered in this population. Existing research shows that offline social connectedness is a protective factor against depression in older adults; however, it is unknown whether web-based social connectedness can have similar effects.

Objective: This study investigates whether social connectedness on a support website protects older adults against depressive symptoms over the course of a year, above and beyond the protective effect of offline social connectedness. The secondary aim is to determine whether older adults with increased depressive symptoms are more likely to engage in social connectedness on this website. Thus, we examine depressive symptoms as both an outcome and predictor of web-based social connectedness to fully understand the chain of causality among these variables. Finally, we compare web-based social connectedness with offline social connectedness in their ability to lower depressive symptoms among older adults.

Methods: A total of 197 adults aged 65 years or older were given access to a social support website, where they were able to communicate with each other via a discussion forum for a year. Participants’ social connectedness on the web-based platform, conceptualized as message production and consumption, was measured using behavioral log data as the number of messages participants wrote and read, respectively, during the first 6 months (t₁) and the following 6 months (t₂) of the study. Participants self-reported their offline social connectedness as the number of people in their support networks, and they reported their depressive symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire-8 both at baseline (t₁) and at 12-month follow-up (t₂). To ascertain the flow of causality between these variables, we employed a cross-lagged panel design, in which all variables were measured at t₁ and t₂.

Results: After controlling for the effect of offline support networks at t₁, web-based message consumption at t₁ decreased older adults’ depressive symptoms at t₂ (β=−.11; P=.02), but web-based message production at t₁ did not impact t₂ depressive symptoms (β=.12; P=.34). Web-based message consumption had a larger effect (β=−.11; P=.02) than offline support networks (β=−.08; P=.03) in reducing older adults’ depressive symptoms over time. Higher baseline depressive symptoms did not predict increased web-based message consumption (β=.12; P=.36) or production (β=.02; P=.43) over time.

Conclusions: The more messages older adults read on the web-based forum for the first 6 months of the study, the less depressed they felt at the 1-year follow-up, above and beyond the availability of offline support networks at baseline. This pinpoints the substantial potential of web-based communication to combat depressive symptoms in this vulnerable population.

Resilience is an ongoing sensemaking process that relies on communicative interactions – including those that occur between stakeholders and organizations – in order to understand and respond to a given adversity. Resilience communication is enacted through discursive processes that align with the tenets of fully functioning society theory (FFS). In order to integrate these two theoretical frameworks, we completed a qualitative content analysis of AARP’s #DisruptAging campaign. In doing so, we found that the campaign provided information about age/aging in a way that countered commonly held stereotypes about older adults at multiple-levels (e.g., individual, organizational, societal). The processes of resilience were reflected in the organizational discourse, as was a new strategy – acceptance/appreciation. These findings illuminate the societal role of organizational discourse by showing how inclusive organizational-public communication can disrupt meta-narratives and enrich the marketplace of ideas, and thus contribute to the building of a fully functioning society through (re)constructing the meanings of resilience on individual, organizational, and societal levels.

The coronavirus pandemic brought to light the numerous challenges faced by students that are often not considered in the classroom (e.g., food/housing insecurity, limited Internet access). The rapid transition to online learning shattered the perception that the classroom is independent of greater societal and institutional contexts. Shifting courses online midsemester brought into focus various inequities present in higher education and how they influence students’ experiences in the teaching/learning process. To help instructors create more inclusive and equitable classrooms, communication education scholars need to advance interpretive research agendas that center students and instructors’ lived experiences and consider the context teaching/learning occurs in.

This article revisits the potentials and limita­tions of the phenomenon of cyberactivism, or the reliance on social media to enact change, ten years after the eruption of the Arab Spring uprisings. In doing so, it urges us to engage not only in an evaluation of the current dynamics of cyberactivism, but also in a prediction of its future directions, in the midst of the ongoing digital tug of war between regimes and their opponents in the volatile Arab region, and beyond. (Published in Italian in 2020 and in English and French in 2021.)

Risk perception is a critical determinant for individuals’ health behavior change, especially for behaviors with distal future consequences. Building on construal-level theory, this study investigates if and how thinking concretely about the negative consequences of opioid misuse influences people’s risk perception toward opioid misuse. Two message cues – images and concrete (vs. abstract) language – are proposed to influence concrete thinking and perceived temporal distance, which in turn influence risk perception directly and through negative affect. Using a factorial online experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (N = 220), this study found that messages using concrete language made people think more concretely about the negative consequences of opioid misuse. Perceived concreteness, in turn, increased risk perception and negative affect. Negative affect also increased risk perception. The use of images decreased perceived temporal distance, which in turn, changed risk perception through its influence on negative affect. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study drew from literature on organizational socialization, namely an early phase called vocational anticipatory socialization (VAS), to examine the sources of information from which young adults learn about retirement, the meanings they ascribe to retirement, and associations between sources of retirement information and meanings. In study 1, quantitative content analysis was used to code 671 responses from young adults. In study 2, semi-structured interviews with 16 young adults were conducted and abductively analyzed. Results revealed 16 sources of information about retirement with grandparents and parents emerging as primary sources, and 13 meanings of retirement (e.g., freedom from work, financial issues, how time is spent, life phase, physical decline) that can be combined to construct negative or positive framings. In addition, chi-square analyses indicated significant associations between some source-meaning combinations in study 1, whereas study 2 revealed the nature of explicit and implicit advice from family members. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Using the health risks of nuclear plant accident as a context of enquiry, this study focuses on how peoples’ reactions to a piece of online news are affected by social media engagement metrics associated with the story. Based on the bandwagon heuristic, it assumes that online news with a high social media engagement metrics – high-sharing, -liking, and -commenting, show direct and mediated effects on respondents’ online news consumption and news sharing behavioral intention. Findings suggest that high engagement metrics show more considerable influences on willingness to read the full news story, bandwagon perception, and perceived newsworthiness than low engagement metrics. Also, news readership, bandwagon perception, and perceived newsworthiness served as mediators of the relationship between social media engagement metrics and news-sharing behavioral intention while there is no significant direct association found at the statistical level. The findings, however, indicate that social media engagement metrics affect when conditions are low-risk. The discussion highlights the theoretical implications of this research.

This article tackles the complex struggles faced by Arab women, including multiple layers of invisibility, marginalization and inequality, all of which have significantly worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. This examination includes a special focus on how and why the “digital divide,” defined as the gap between the technological haves and have-nots, has been a major contributing factor to this accelerating inequality. It proposes adopting an alternative ‘digital socialism’ model and a comprehensive, gender-centered leadership approach to address this situation.

This article explores the rhetorical life and times of “the Manchurian candidate” in America’s rhetorical/political culture. It specifically addresses the lasting capacity of the “Manchurian candidate” to operate as a political trope, a signifier divorced fully from its original signified, yet still filled with meaning and power, particularly for ordering conspiracy rhetorics in contemporary political campaigns as an emblem of the “paranoid style” in American politics. The essay examines the conversion of the “Manchurian candidate” into a political trope, from its initial expression in its Cold War context and the subsequent rearticulations of the “Manchurian candidate” for audiences living in varied non–Cold War contexts. Ultimately, the migration of this narrative and its conversion over time into a political trope for active use in U.S. political discourse is a compelling example of the lasting influence of Cold War culture in the American consciousness as well as the malleability, the flexibility, of Cold War characters, cultural themes, and rhetorics.

Roughly one in five U.S. children live in rural areas and they are more likely than nonrural children to experience chronic illnesses, unfulfilled medical needs, and poverty – yet health literacy intervention research for rural children is lacking. Thus, this study explores a health literacy intervention in two rural public elementary schools that have very different socioeconomic levels, educational achievement rates, and initial health literacy scores. Findings show significant improvement in health literacy in the low-income school, such that the initial differences in health literacy between the two schools were no longer present at posttest (p < .001). There was a slight improvement in School 1 students' perceived confidence to communicate with healthcare providers, but School 2 students' communication confidence did not change from pre to post intervention. The hopeful outcomes suggest implications for future school-based interventions that teach young children about health communication, self-efficacy, and critical decision-making.