Research

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.

This study explores the National Weather Service’s communication through a multi-sited rapid ethnography that extends the fully functioning society theory. National Weather Service field offices do not employ public information officers. Instead, forecasters predict the weather, craft messages, and build relationships with their publics. Scholars have called for public relations research that examines messages, including how crisis communication can help publics cope. Additionally, scholars have noted that all organizations need public relations, even if they do not employ formal public relations personnel. In our study, forecasters emphasized the need to build their publics’ tornado threat awareness and provided strategies to make weather science accessible. Forecasters discussed a variety of message strategies including avoiding fear appeals, humanizing the organization, and visualizing risks. Forecasters also built relationships with active publics through soliciting weather spotters and empowering them to prepare others for severe weather. Overall, findings expand knowledge about how organizations can employ strategic public relations to benefit society, thereby extending fully functioning society theory.

Basic Course Directors (BCDs) are typically expected to assess course learning outcomes, but few formal guidelines and resources exist for new BCDs. As one part of a larger multi-methodological assessment tool development project, this manuscript maps existing quantitative measures onto the six essential competencies and associated learning outcomes established by the Social Science Research Council Panel on Public Speaking. This manuscript compiles dozens of measurement resources, aligned by outcome, and also identifies areas where future assessment measures development is needed. While there are many measures available for evaluating outcomes related to creating messages, critically analyzing messages, and demonstrating self-efficacy, there are measurement gaps for outcomes related to communication ethics, embracing difference, and influencing public discourse.

This study explored the formal and informal resources students enrolled in a basic communication course use to gather information and receive feedback about their course experience, including presentations and work in the class. To do so, an online survey was completed by 393 students at three universities. The data were analyzed thematically using an iterative process facilitated through NVivo coding software. This process not only allowed for a descriptive summary of the students’ responses and the creation of a typology of resources, but also revealed four emergent themes related to student motivations to seek out and use sources of information/feedback: (1) the level of availability (2) the value of personalized feedback, (3) the perceived authority, and (4) need for of examples. Taken together, these findings inform practical implications about information literacy, availability of vetted examples, and family/friend involvement, all of which are important for basic course administrators and instructors to consider in order to support student success and learning in the basic communication course classroom.

While much research on Arab and Muslim diasporas in the West focuses on the War(s) on Terror, in this article, we explore how two particular diasporic groups, Egyptian and Saudi activists, work to shape public perceptions of the authoritarian regimes in their countries of origin. Contextualizing the efforts of these activists in the post-Arab Spring political and mediated environments, we investigate how these political exiles employ communication to disrupt, expose and resist the resurgent authoritarianism taking root in their countries of origin. Using a comparative framework, we analyze the discourse of two prominent activists, Mohamed Ali and Omar Abdelaziz, to illustrate the larger dynamics of online cyberactivism amongst these diasporic groups. Critically, we argue, the differences in these two activists’ communicative practices demonstrate how ostensibly similar resistance movements may lead to disparate political outcomes, as their calls for change diverge when it comes to issues of reform versus revolution. In doing so, we seek to complicate overly simplistic understandings of Arab anti-authoritarian resistance taking place online in the post-Arab Spring era.

During public health crises like infectious disease outbreaks, news media and governments are responsible for informing the public about how to protect themselves. A large body of health communication research finds that persuasive narratives motivate protective behaviors, such as intentions to vaccinate. In their seminal book on crisis narratives, Seeger and Sellnow (Narratives of crisis: Telling stories of ruin and renewal. Stanford University) theorized five narrative types: blame, renewal, victim, hero, and memorial. In this study, we tested how the public responds to crisis narratives about a hypothetical infectious disease crisis, modeled after narratives emerging from the 2014–2016 Ebola pandemic, through an online experiment with a U.S. adult sample (N = 1050). Findings showcase which crisis narratives positively affect public protective behaviors as well as emotional responses, assessments of information credibility, and attributions of crisis responsibility.