Research

Social media platforms have experienced unprecedented levels of growth and usage over the past decade, with Facebook hosting 2.7 billion active users worldwide, including over 200 million users in the United States. Facebook users have been underutilized and understudied by the academic community as a resource for participant recruitment. We performed a pilot study to explore the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of Facebook advertisements for the recruitment of an online agricultural health and safety survey. We undertook a 1-week advertising campaign utilizing the integrated, targeted advertising platform of Facebook Ads Manager with a target-spending limit of US $294. We created and posted three advertisements depicting varying levels of agricultural safety adoption leading to a brief survey on farm demographics and safety attitudes. We targeted our advertisements toward farm mothers aged 21-50 years in the United States and determined cost-effectiveness and potential biases. No participant incentive was offered. We reached 40,024 users and gathered 318 advertisement clicks. Twenty-nine participants consented to the survey with 24 completions. Including personnel costs, the cost per completed survey was US $17.42. Compared to the distribution of female producers in the United States, our advertisements were unexpectedly overrepresented in the eastern United States and were underrepresented in the western United States. Facebook Ads Manager represents a potentially cost-effective and timely method to recruit participants for online health and safety research when targeting a specific population. However, social media recruitment mirrors traditional recruitment methods in its limitations, exhibiting geographic, response, and self-selection biases that need to be addressed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, it affected every aspect of life, including education. The spread of this pandemic compelled the world to shift from traditional classroom education to online learning. This exploratory qualitative research study investigates the critical and timely topic of the sudden transition to online teaching amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It studies its multiple implications through in-depth interviews with a diverse group of international educators from different higher education institutions, representing different nationalities, ethnicities, genders, ranks, and generations. The findings reflect an early snapshot of the continuous teaching and learning development efforts on a large scale, across different regions of the world, and provide insights for future research and practice in the field of international education. The results also reveal some areas of concern in the educational digital environment, requiring further investigation moving forward, such as the digital divide, the gender gap, especially the gender digital gap, and the importance of meeting the needs of students with various physical and mental disabilities. The study offers suggestions to improve online education strategies, both amid the pandemic and in the post-pandemic era.

This study explores the impact of organization–public relationships (OPRs) and issue-related situational factors on publics’ intention to participate in CSR campaigns, based on relationship management theory and the situational theory of problem-solving (STOPS). We surveyed 698 respondents living in the United States about two CSR campaigns, one focused on girls’ empowerment and one on deforestation. The results showed that situational motivation and OPRs were strongly and directly related to publics’ participation intention for both CSR campaigns. Only two situational perceptions – constraint recognition and involvement recognition – were indirectly related to publics’ participation. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.

Self-affirmation theory has inspired numerous studies that have tried to understand the effects of self-affirmation on defensive processing of threatening health messages and subsequent behavior. Despite the overall positive effects of self-affirmation, psychological processes through which self-affirmation exerts such impact remain unclear. We examined Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC) as a potential moderator of the effects of self-affirmation on responses to graphic cigarette warning warnings, in an attempt to shed light on the psychological processes. We conducted an experimental study in which 925 African American smokers were instructed to self-affirm (or not) prior to viewing graphic cigarette warning labels. We found that smokers with stronger present time orientation (PTO) experienced higher defensive responses as measured by anger, perceived message manipulation, and message derogation, after viewing graphic cigarette warning labels; whereas smokers with stronger future time orientation (FTO) reported less message derogation. PTO interacted with self-affirmation in predicting defensive processing measures, such that self-affirmation reduced message derogation at lower levels of PTO and increased message derogation and perceived message manipulation at higher levels of PTO. Self-affirmation also had a conditional indirect effect on smoking intentions and intention to quit smoking through measures of defensive processing. We discuss implications of our study.

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.