Communication Studies

Bi, Da; Ploeger-Lyons, Nicole A.

doi: 10.1080/10510974.2022.2149583pmid: N/A

This study explores the positive nature of the funeral industry in rural communities and examines how rural funeral directors perform community services to destigmatize their profession. Analysis of interviews (n = 27) with rural funeral directors revealed that the funeral industry, although it is associated with death and dying, was needed and accepted in the community – a phenomenon the article labels (un)wanted and (un)sought services. This construct challenges the denial of death thesis and supports the contingent and discursive nature of death and dying. Moreover, rural funeral directors offer life enrichment programs, support local businesses, work as partial civic servants, and participate in community governance. This study argues that these supportive performances reflect the communicative mechanism of destigmatization, reinforcing the needed and acceptable nature and diminishing the unwanted and unsought nature of the profession. Lastly, the study advocates that urban funeral homes learn from rural funeral homes regarding communal characteristics to make a more supportive and cohesive urban life.

de Lenne, Orpha; Eggermont, Steven; Vandenbosch, Laura

doi: 10.1080/10510974.2022.2140174pmid: N/A

Research has rarely looked into links between adolescents’ media use, internal attribution of professional success, and well-being. The current study among 940 late adolescents (M = 17.21 years old, SD = .94; 60.9% girls) found that exposure to malleable professional ideals in traditional as well as social media was positively related to internal attribution of professional success, which was in turn positively related to professional performance pressure but negatively related to depressive feelings. Also direct positive relations between traditional and social media and performance pressure were found. These are the first empirical results supporting the malleability framework.

Li, Benjamin J.; Malviya, Shruti; Tandoc, Edson C.

doi: 10.1080/10510974.2022.2153894pmid: N/A

Videoconferencing has become an essential communication tool for employees to engage in virtual meetings with their colleagues and complete work tasks remotely. However, there have been reports of a phenomenon termed videoconference fatigue. Concurrently, there has been an increase in work-family conflict among individuals working from home, due to an imbalance from role demands and expectations between work and family. With the rise of videoconferencing that has come to characterize work-from-home setups, it is important to explore the role videoconferencing plays on work-family conflict. We propose a model where the increase in use of videoconferencing as a result of working from home may lead to higher levels of videoconference fatigue, which will in turn result in greater work-family conflict. An online nationwide survey was conducted in Singapore with 590 respondents to test the proposed hypotheses. Results of serial mediation analyses conducted using PROCESS macro supported all hypotheses and indicated support for serial mediation. Emotional and occupational videoconference fatigue were further found to be significantly related to work-family conflict, whereas physical videoconference was not. Our results suggest that as videoconferencing continues to become the default mode of work-related communication, sustained investigation on its implications on work-family conflict is crucial.

Dai, Yue; Shin, Soo Yun

doi: 10.1080/10510974.2022.2118341pmid: N/A

Although social network sites (SNSs) carry a wide range of information about a person, previous research discovered they did not reduce uncertainties about the person as well as direct interactions with the person. This paradox prompted a conceptual distinction between interpersonal and personal uncertainties. With a web-based experiment (N = 216), the study tested how one may gain personal and interpersonal certainties about a target person from reading different types of information on social media, focusing on the effects of information valence, information source, and an information seeker’s positivism bias. Results revealed reading SNS information about a person increased personal certainty more than interpersonal certainty. Negative information increased interpersonal certainty more than positive information but not for those with a higher positivism bias. The results provide initial empirical evidence for the distinction between personal and interpersonal certainties and how different types of information on SNSs influence them.

Kirkpatrick, Alex W.; Hmielowski, Jay D.; Boyd, Amanda D.

doi: 10.1080/10510974.2022.2121737pmid: N/A

Developing artificial intelligence (AI) equitably necessitates understanding how nonexperts conceptualize and share news about technoscientific risk. We examine a model predicting AI information sharing online from an interaction of framing strategies, through psychological proximity to the impacts of AI and perceived AI risk. A panel of N = 412 participants were exposed to either a control message; or one of four manipulated messages related to AI risks. Contrary to expectations, thematically framed explicit risk news primed psychological proximity compared to both a control message and episodic frame condition. Meanwhile, episodic explicit risk frames did not prime psychological proximity over a control message. These results contest the notion that episodic frames should be associated with psychological proximity to a risk over more general framing strategies. Our results support prior research suggesting that where risk-news primes psychological proximity, the decrease in distance is in-turn associated with greater risk perception and increased likelihood of news sharing online.

Ledbetter, Andrew M.; Fellers, Lauren E.

doi: 10.1080/10510974.2022.2145327pmid: N/A

To evaluate the foundational propositions of a nascent theory of relational entropy, this manuscript reports a longitudinal investigation of friendship across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants included 165 members of Greek-letter organizations (both current students and alumni), with data collected in Spring 2020 and again in Spring 2021. Results indicated that relationships exhibited greater entropy and less maintenance in Spring 2021 than in Spring 2020, with Spring 2020 maintenance predicting less entropy in Spring 2021. Although the personal impact of the pandemic predicted increased maintenance in Spring 2020, the direction of this effect was reversed a year later. These findings support key propositions of the nascent theory and identify directions for future refinement of it.

Masullo, Gina M.; Duchovnay, Marley

doi: 10.1080/10510974.2022.2129401pmid: N/A

Drawing on in-depth interview data from 56 Americans who live in politically divided communities, this study extends the spiral of silence by theorizing a typology of political self-silencing that articulates differing types of silencing with varying motivations and implementations. Using theoretical support from the concept of networked silence, we theorize three types of self-silencing: total, when people always stay silent about politics; misrepresentative, involving lying or hiding one’s beliefs to eschew conflict; and selective, employed for highly contentious topics or aggressive discussants. We posit that people surveil not just the media, society, their community, and their reference groups in deciding whether to self-silence, as the spiral of silence suggests. Rather, they also surveil individual actors and within the context of specific conversations in making assessments about whether to speak out in an evolving, dynamic process.