Communication Research

When Jen Guzman�chief executive of Stella & Chewy�s pet food company�was asked ( NYTimes , April 28, 2013, BU 2) what three questions she would ask in interviewing someone for a job, she said: (1) �Why do you want this job?� (2) �Why do you think you would be good at this job?� and (3) "What do you think are the five most important qualities or things that you need to be good at this job?� I thought this would make an interesting exercise in an interviewing class as students prepare their responses to potential employment interview questions.

  Here�s a great public speaking example to illustrate how to make large numbers real to an audience, courtesy of the HuffingtonPost.com: Walmart�s CEO earns an annual salary of $20.7 million. To make the same amount of money, it would take an average Walmart worker (earning $12.67 per hour, working 40 hour weeks, 52 weeks a year, without paying any taxes) 785 years. A great brief exercise would be to ask students to illustrate this discrepency in other ways.

  One way to introduce computer-mediated communication and its role in our everyday lives would be to identify important lifestyle habits that we�d be willing to give up as long as we could keep our Internet connection. It would be interesting to poll a class on this and compare the results for different age groups, for men and women, and even for academic major. Here, for example, are some interesting statistics, reported in the Harvard Business Review (October, 2012, pp. 32-33), on the percentage of people in various countries who would be willing to give up an important lifestyle habit to keep the Internet: �          89% of those in Indonesia and 65% of those in the United Kingdom would give up alcohol instead of the Internet.   �          91% of those in the United Kingdom and 67% of those in India would give up fast food rather than the Internet.   �       ...

Here is a brief table that I created for use in  the current edition of Interpersonal Messages to stimulate different ways of thinking about culture and also about metaphors. I thought it might be useful more generally in a variety of different courses/classrooms.   These insights are taken from a variety of sources including Edward Hall's Beyond Culture; Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind; and the websites of Culture at Work and Culturally Teaching: Education across Cultures.   Seven Metaphors of Culture                                                            Metaphor Metaphor�s Claim/assumption ...

  Here is an exercise for stimulating class discussion of empathy that I wrote for the conversation chapter in the next edition of Human Communication. But, I thought it might be of interest more generally. Conversational Empathy Empathy is a quality of interpersonal communication that involves feeling what another person feels from that person�s point of view without losing your own identity. Empathy enables you to understand emotionally what another person is experiencing. To sympathize, in contrast, is to feel for the person�to feel sorry or happy for the person, for example. Although empathy is one of the most important qualities of interpersonal communication, expressing it is not always easy. This exercise is designed to help you identify some of the responses that are not empathic and the reasons they fail to express this essential interpersonal connection. Here are ten possible responses to the �simple� statement, �I guess I�m feeling a little depressed.� For this ...