Communication Research Works

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http://hdl.handle.net/1903/1616

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    Maternal Health Information Disparities Amid Covid-19: Comparing Urban and Rural Expectant Mothers in Ghana
    (2023) Khamis, Sahar; Agboada, Delight Jessica
    The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted mothers’ access to credible and reliable health information from their healthcare providers. However, the impact of the pandemic on maternal health information access among rural and urban mothers has not been studied, especially in the Global South. Guided by the channel complementarity theory, we examined the sources of maternal health information rural and urban Ghanaian mothers used during the pandemic. Specifically, we analyzed the role access to technology plays in determining the quantity and quality of maternal health information expectant mothers had during the pandemic. Through purposive and snowball sampling techniques, we recruited and conducted in-depth interviews with 15 mothers, eight from rural communities and seven from urban communities in Ghana. We thematically analyzed the data and found that rural and urban mothers used medical and non-medical sources to obtain maternal health information. While medical sources remained the most credible information source even amid the pandemic, the mothers equally appreciated the immense benefits of other sources, particularly the internet. Our findings also suggest that the motivations for using maternal health information sources complementarily were not limited to the mothers’ functional needs, level of interest, and source characteristics but also covered the mothers’ location, resources, and health information literacy levels
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    The Evolving Weather Service: Relationship Dimensions that Drive Strong Partnerships
    (2020) Liu, Brooke; Seate, Anita Atwell
    Since the tragic tornado outbreaks in Central Alabama and Joplin, Missouri in 2011, the National Weather Service (NWS) has increasingly emphasized the importance of supporting community partners who help protect public safety. Through impact-based decision support services (IDSS), NWS forecasters develop relationships with their core partners to meet their partners’ decision-making needs. These core partners include broadcast meteorologists, emergency managers, and trained storm spotters. As part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s VORTEX-SE program, we conducted a survey in 2019 to examine how NWS forecasters and managers assess their relationships with core partners. Here we present the survey instrument from this project, which can be used by forecasters and others to assess the strength of their relationships with core partners.
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    How Forecasters Decide to Warn about Tornadoes: Multi-Sited Rapid Ethnography Training Guide
    (2019) Liu, Brooke; Atwell Seate, Anita
    Social scientists are prolific in their recommendations on how to better warn about tornadoes. However, social scientists rarely work in partnership with operational forecasters, begging the question of how applicable their recommendations are to the “real world.” As part of a two-year project funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with the goal of better understanding how forecasters decide to warn about tornadoes, we conducted a multi-sited rapid ethnography (along with telephone interviews and a cross-sectional survey of forecasters and managers). Here we archive our ethnography training guide should other researchers conduct similar research.
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    Leadership under fire: How governments manage crisis communication
    (2019) Liu, Brooke Fisher; Iles, Irina A.; Herovic, Emina
    Crisis leadership is fundamental to preventing, preparing for, managing, and learning from crises. Despite leadership during crises being heavily reliant on communicative processes, the research record predominantly reduces crisis communication leadership to managing organizations’ images. To contribute to limited knowledge on leadership communication during crises, we interviewed 24 U.S. government leaders and conducted a content analysis of U.S. government communication leadership during a major wildfire. We find that crisis communication leadership involves crisis perceptiveness, humility, flexibility, presence, and cooperation. We offer a message catalog of crisis response options for government leaders, and show how leaders employed some of these messages in response to a large-scale wildfire. This study expands the state of the art in crisis communication leadership research with implications for theory and practice.
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    The Vietnam Veteran: A Victim of the War's Rhetorical Failure
    (1988-02-22) Hollihan, Thomas A.; Klumpp, James F.
    Argues that from defense and media coverage of the Vietnam War, an image of the character and activities of those fighting the war emerged. Within the defense of the war two justifications fought for dominance: a romantic call to idealism and a pragmatic materialist call to complete a task started. These contradictory motivations for the war colored the image of the soldier who fought the war as he became a concrete symbols caught in the contradiction. After the war, survivors had to then struggle with this image produced to defend the war.