-child relationships (Heatherington & Lavner, 2008; Savin-Williams, 2001, 2005). The present dissertation brought attention to the inherently intergroup nature of SGM offspring's parent-child relationships by examining how SGM adult children's parent...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Foster care is becoming a more prevalent diverse family form and serves a critical role in our society. Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners ...

Protests and social movements are a part of the history of Higher Education in the United States. In this study I use grounded theory to understand the process of identity management for administrators, faculty, and staff ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Foster care is becoming a more prevalent diverse family form, and serves a critical role in our society. Little is known about the role siblings play ...

This study examined the communicative construction of mental health in correctional work. Using narrative interviews with 25 current and former correctional officers, I explore how macro, meso, and micro D/discourses both ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This experiment uses a 2x2x2 experimental design to assess the influence that type of appearance-related surgery (reconstructive or cosmetic), stigma ...

This project examined communication in distal parent-child relationships. Distal relationships are relations in which people are physically separated for a period of time. Little research has focused on distal relationships, ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This investigation utilized the Functional Theory of Campaign Discourse (Benoit, 2007) and previous content analyses of television advertisements to ...

This qualitative study of high-technology projects investigated how enduring conflict can operate as a precursor to project failure. Three types of conflict were found to be indicative to the outcome of projects. Unexposed ...

This dissertation looks at queer representation in the media and highlights a particular representational strategy that is used in a stereotypical fashion. My first chapter does two things. First, it centers on an exemplar ...

In this study, 42 participants (including newlyweds, parents of newlyweds, and siblings of newlyweds) were interviewed about their relationships with their in-laws. Most of the participants reported that they liked their ...

Sexual communication between parents and adolescents is believed to be challenging. Ample research has examined parent-adolescent sexual communication, but has been limited. The current study was designed to overcome some ...

This research focused on accounts and attributions following marital infidelity using a two-part investigation. In Study One, 250 married or previously married participants responded to a hypothetical scenario which asked ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Mental health concerns continue to be stigmatized in traditional media, in spite of -- or perhaps contributing to --high prevalence rates of mental ...

The present analysis examined the impact of celebrity gossip magazine coverage on pregnant women through both quantitative and qualitative methods. Study 1 employed both objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) ...

Guided by social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Gergen, 1985), and discourse-dependence (Galvin, 2006; Galvin & Braithwaite, 2014) theorizing, the present study illuminated ...

This experiment assesses the effects of ingroup versus outgroup communication in an online, one-on-one, anonymous setting on perceptions of deliberation quality in a conversation task pertaining to abortion policy. ...

To understand the role of mediated messages in organizational socialization, this study analyzes the constructions of class and gender in popular business advice books (BABs). The books are used as training tools in many ...

Political partisanship has long occupied a central position in the study of American political rhetoric, but scholarly understanding of intraparty political communication has lagged behind that of interparty conflict. While ...

The objective of this research was to understand the relationship between viewer motives for watching reality TV, reality TV exposure, and interpersonal relationship perceptions. The interpersonal relationship perceptions ...