This study examined the interaction effect of nonverbal immediacy and expected instructional technology use on students' initial reports of instructor credibility. Participants included 549 college students who were randomly assigned to one of eight scenarios depicting first-day class sessions across four levels of technology use and two levels of…

In this article, we report on our qualitative study involving eight individuals hired to transcribe research tapes in university contexts. We consider issues of data analysis and data trustworthiness and the implications for both when transcription is assigned to someone other than the researcher. We explore the challenges transcribers faced…

New analyses of archival data from a parent training study are presented for ten troubled mother-child dyads. All the mothers participated in verbal discourse sessions with their clinicians during the same weeks in which they participated in clinic-based parent training. The discourse was guided by clinicians to focus mothers on their narratives…

This paper examines the believability of strong warnings about the negative consequences of drug use among young adults in Australia who have never tried, currently use, or have tried and rejected cannabis. It finds that the strong warnings about cannabis are generally believed by never-triers. The same warnings are perceived by current users as…

Children's credibility as witnesses in court cases has become an important issue in recent years. When testifying, younger children are considered to be more susceptible to suggestion than are older children. The present study examined the possibility that knowledge of an interviewer's mental states (intention and false belief, in this study)…

In recent years, tenure has increasingly come under fire as an anachronism, not only for appearing to be out of touch with modern society but also as protection for the allegedly incompetent. Administrators and governing boards find themselves spending inordinate time defending it. So, in March 2005, the University of Colorado took the…

Background: Publication is the primary means of contributing to and establishing credibility within the scientific community. Some researchers have reported an increase in the average number of authors per manuscript for some scholarly journals in the past two decades. Whereas author proliferation may be warranted in some cases, other reasons for…

Are state FFA officers' awareness levels of agricultural topics reported in mass media superior to those who do not serve in leadership roles? The purpose of this study was to determine elected state FFA officers' awareness of biotechnology, and their confidence and trust of biotechnology information sources. Descriptive survey methods were used…

This experimental study examined the effects of teacher self-disclosure via Facebook on anticipated college student motivation, affective learning, and classroom climate. Participants who accessed the Facebook website of a teacher high in self-disclosure anticipated higher levels of motivation and affective learning and a more positive classroom…

This paper addresses the difficulty involved in creating easily understood information. The act of communicating is not complete until the message has been both received and understood by the audience. Messages must always be comprehensible, otherwise they will have no effect. The readability, legibility, and reading value of a graphic message is…

In college-level forensic competitions, the three major weekly magazines, "U.S. News and World Report,""Time," and "Newsweek," are taking a beating. Students are purposely looking for specialized sources; they firmly believe that judges look down on the use of these weekly publications. Indeed, judges do seem to be…

This paper examines the charges made in the highly publicized report, "How Schools Shortchange Girls," published by the American Association of University Women (1992). The paper shows how the findings in this report are based on a selective review of the research and how findings contrary to the report's message were suppressed. The paper reviews…

Motivational and cognitive aspects of children's reports of an event to which they were the only "witness" and the prime "suspect" were examined. Subjects were 67 children of 3 to 10 years of age. After a test and play session to assess the children's receptive vocabulary and their understanding of the term "believe,"…

The extent to which children evaluated non-television advertisements differentially on the basis of performers' gender, expertise, and attractiveness was assessed. Participating were 56 girls and 47 boys attending first-, third-, and fifth-grade classes in Galveston, Texas. A total of 24 pairs of specially prepared advertisements were used as…

This study reports on four possible feedback sequences to be used in groups. The acceptance and desirability of the feedback, as well as subjects' endorsement of group attractiveness, are compared for various feedback conditions. (Author)