Background: Bullying and cyberbullying are serious public health concerns that involve more roles beyond the bully and the victim (pro-bullies, defenders, bystanders). However, students often perceive the phenomena as dyadic. Aim: The purpose was to examine students' perceptions of different roles when observing bullying and cyberbullying scenes…

The author reads with great interest Rhoda Bernard's (2005) article "Making Music, Making Selves." Bernard's concerns about the multiple identities that she holds, and people's tendency to compartmentalize their various identities according to audience and role are issues for the author as she designs and teaches within music teacher education…

An investigation of the functions performed by talk radio programs involved in-depth interviews with 184 call-in listeners to one such program over a seven-day period. During the interviews, the callers listened to tape recordings of their conversations with the program host to help them focus on the motivation that prompted their calls, the…

An experiment was conducted to study the effect that audience attitude toward, and identification with the main character of a film has on learning from the film. Two hypotheses were formulated. 1) People for whom the occupational role of the main character has a high prestige value will learn more factual information from the film and also change…

A synthesis is presented of the work of Lindblom and Cohen, MacDonald and Walker, and the current authors. The synthesis considers issues in the usefulness of social science theory and research, and how observer roles in qualitative field studies yield multiple kinds of usable knowledge to a variety of audiences. (Author/BW)

A study of doctrinaire rhetoric and extremism which notes consistent patterns of thought and of audience-speaker interaction amoung diverse doctrinaire groups. Concludes that doctrine shapes rhetorical styles as well as content and suggests the possibility of interpreting and evaluating social phenomena through the analysis of rehetoric. (JB)

The shaping of social reality has become the task of the mass media due to the fact that audience members base interaction and social judgments upon the information they process from the mass media. Theorists have developed various paradigms linking individual media use and interpersonal communication with cultural effects and mass media. Although…

A unit is described for teaching audience analysis in a high school expository writing course. The five main sections of the unit are (1) an analysis of audience as part of writing, (2) the writer as a decision maker, (3) testing audience reaction during the composing process, (4) post-communication audience reaction assessment, and (5)…

Discusses two studies which indicate that student audiences rated speeches of their peers significantly higher if they thought that the speakers had completed a course in public speaking. (MH)

The way in which agricultural scientists of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station research staff pereive aspects of the uses and importance of the mass media in communicating their research work was surveyed. The profile developed from the 65 responses to the survey shows that agricultural scientists place only moderate importance on mass…

A study investigated the impact that the portrayal of doctors and nurses on television had on the expectations of viewers, particularly on communication within the doctor-patient relationship. Approximately 200 adults responded to telephone interview questions about their television viewing habits, their information-seeking behavior regarding…

The purpose of this study was to determine the amount of social information received by audiences viewing "Sanford and Son" and "All in the Family." It was hypothesized that whites perceive "Sanford and Son" as being more real than blacks do; middle-class viewers rate each program as being more real than lower-class…

Two adult educators offer their personal evaluations of nationwide needs for (and existing provision of) public affairs education, and each offers recommendations for improving university adult education on issues of national and international concern. Referring to the problem of a relatively uninformed public, Freedman calls for deeper, more…

This research examined viewer reaction to the television program "The Jeffersons" in order to study differences between racial groups in exposure to the program, its perceived entertainment value, and the degree to which the characters portrayed reveal "real" behavior. Viewer reaction to the racially integrated married couple…

Two hundred forty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effect of camera angle on an audience's perceptual judgments of source credibility, dominance, attraction, and homophily. The subjects were divided into four groups and each group was shown a videotape presentation in which sources had been videotaped according to one of four…