Autumn 2012

COMM 7802 Narrative and Communication (McDonald)

Over the past decade, a number of researchers have focused on aspects of narratives and their implications for understanding communication processes and effects – especially in areas of health comm, political comm, comm tech, entertainment, and media effects. Work grounded in narrative is likely to be part of current reading in all of these areas. This course takes a broad view of narratives, focusing on what they are, how they evolved, and how audiences process and understand them. We will try to avoid readings that are applications within specific subareas in favor of developing a deeper understanding of the general process and its implications for the audience. My intent is to have students finish the course with enough knowledge of the nature of narratives to enable them to work through the implications for their particular specialty area.

Course objectives are:

To provide you with a basic knowledge about narrative from a variety of different perspectives.

To enable you to develop an understanding of the assumptions you make when you conduct research or evaluate research involving narrative

To help you on your way to becoming a better researcher and university instructor.

Text: none

Readings: primarily a mix of articles and book chapters

Evaluation: based on short papers, class participation and a larger final paper

COMM 7850 Communication Technologies (Fox)

This course will feature an overview of theories and methods in communication technology research in both computer-mediated communication (CMC) and human-computer interaction (HCI). The goal of this course is to explore and critically analyze the role of technologies in communication. We will examine and deconstruct concepts such as presence, media richness, interactivity, embodiment, and agency. Technologies we will discuss include (but are by no means limited to) virtual environments, social networking sites, video games, online dating, texting and mobile interfaces, and robotics. In addition to thoughtful discussion based on course readings each week, this course will feature several learning components oriented toward research productivity. 1) Students will be required to keep a study journal reflecting on readings and accumulating study ideas throughout the course. 2) Students will submit a proposal to learn a new technology throughout the course of the class that will benefit their research (e.g., learning to create media stimuli for experiments using a specific software, learning basic programming skills, or learning how to build an app). 3) Students will formulate groups within the class based on shared research interests to brainstorm, launch, and present preliminary findings from a research study during the course of the class. Previous experience conducting research is recommended.

COMM 8970 Communication and Health Decision-Making (Raup-Krieger)

This interdisciplinary seminar is designed for graduate students in the social and health sciences with an interest in understanding how communication influences decision-making about behaviors associated with physical, mental, and social well-being. The syllabus is organized around theoretical approaches to understanding the cognitive, relational, and social processes underlying individual and collective decision-making. Specific topics to be covered include models of health decision-making, affect and emotion, risk perception, health literacy and numeracy, and health inequities. Evaluation will be based on contributions to class discussion, reflection papers, and a detailed research proposal on a topic of the student's choosing (no exams). Alternatives to the research proposal can be negotiated.

COMM 8970 Mass Communication and Children (Nathanson)

This course examines the uses and effects of mass communication among children and adolescents. By taking a developmental perspective, we will consider how youngsters at different stages of cognitive development watch, understand, and respond to media content. Students will be encouraged to consider the effects of mass media in light of the research on children's uses and processing of media. By the end of the semester, students should be able to understand how children represent a unique audience of the mass media that deserves careful attention and consideration, how theories of cognitive development and mass communication inform our understanding of children's uses of and responses to the mass media, and some of the challenges associated with conducting communication research among children.

COMM 8801 Special Topics in Communication Research Methods (Hayes)

After a review of the fundamentals of ordinary least squares regression, this class focuses on a nontechnical extension of the principles of linear regression analysis to models of discrete, ordinal, and count outcomes. Topics include binary and multinomial logistic regression, various forms ordinal regression (e.g., logit and probit), and models of counts such as Poisson and negative binomial regression. Toward the end of the class, multilevel modeling is introduced as a means of modeling the role of contextual influences on individual-level processes and accounting for non-independence produced when individual-level data are nested under higher-level organizational units or clusters.

The books for the course are

Orme, J. G., & Combs-Orme, J. G. (2009). Multiple regression with discrete dependent variables. Oxford University Press.

Luke, D. A. (2004). Multilevel modeling. Sage Publications.