Kristen Lucas

Orientations to Video Games Among Gender and Age Groups

Questionnaires were completed by 5th-, 8th-, and 11th-grade public schools students in rural and suburban school districts and by undergraduates at two universities in the United States (n = 1,242). They were asked about their orientation to video games—the amount of time they played, their motives for doing so, and the game types they preferred—to better understand the context in which effects research might be organized. The conceptual schema for this research was the uses-and-gratifications perspective. The males in the sample played video games at twice the weekly average of the females, were consistently stronger in all measured motives than the females, and preferred physically oriented video games over the females’ preference for more traditional, thoughtful games. Younger players opted for the fantasy motive in their playing and older players more so for competition. Preference for physical games declined among the older males, and generally motives were stronger in the middle years of playing for both males and females than in the youngest and oldest age groups. Regression analyses explained considerably more variance in game playing for males than for females.

Blue-Collar Discourses of Workplace Dignity: Using Outgroup Comparisons to Construct Positive Identities

People generally possess a strong desire to construct positive, dignified work identities. However, this goal may be more challenging for some people, such as blue-collar workers, whose occupations may not offer qualities typically associated with workplace dignity. Interviews with 37 people from a blue-collar mining community reveal three central identity discourses about workplace dignity: All jobs are important and valuable; dignity is located in the quality of the job performed; and dignity emerges from the way people treat and are treated by others. Participants communicated these themes by backgrounding their own occupations and drawing comparisons between two outgroups, low-status, low-paid dirty workers and high-prestige, white-collar professionals. Implications for understanding how identity work is negotiated and for managing a blue-collar workforce are explained.

Memorable Messages of Hard Times: Constructing Short- and Long-Term Resiliencies Through Family Communication

We take a communicative and life course theory approach to understanding how resilience is constructed in families. Drawing upon interviews with 20 fathers, 16 mothers, and 23 children who dealt with financial hardship during the 1980s recession, we analyze the messages families communicated about finances when their children were young and how these messages contributed to the development of short- and long-term resiliencies. The family talk and material practices of numbers talk, tightening the belt, sidelining, and preparing, as well as general talk of resiliency, transmitted through the generations a dual-layer of resilience. The first layer involved persisting through the immediate financial crisis. The second dealt with shaping the value systems and attitudes of the younger generation in ways that taught long-term resiliencies they carried into adulthood.

The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account of Mobility-Based Ambivalences

In-depth interviews with 62 people with working class ties (blue-collar workers and adult sons and daughters of blue-collar workers) reveal a social construction of working class that imbues it with four core, positively valenced values: strong work ethic, provider orientation, the dignity of all work and workers, and humility. This constellation of values is communicated through a ubiquitous macrolevel discourse—which I coin the Working Class Promise—that elevates working class to the highest position in the social class hierarchy and fosters a strong commitment to maintain a working class value system and identity. However, this social construction is only a partial social construction. That is, these individuals do not question material, socioeconomic-based delineations of class boundaries (e.g., income, education level, occupational prestige). Consequently, their acceptance of structural class boundaries, combined with their high regard of working class values, positions social classes in ways that make the goals of the American Dream (i.e., class mobility) and the Working Class Promise (i.e., class maintenance) paradoxical. I argue that the paradox of social mobility that results from this partial social construction is the root of mobility-based ambivalences.

Creating and Responding to the Gen(d)eralized Other: Women Miners' Community-Constructed Identities

An analysis of interviews with mining families reveals that gender identity construction is a collaborative process that draws upon broader community discourses. Male miners and non-mining women created a generalized other for women as “unfit to mine” (i.e., women are physically too weak to mine, are easy prey, and are ladies who do not belong in the mines). Female miners responded with gendered discourses that distanced themselves from and linked themselves to the generalized other.

Socializing Messages in Blue-Collar Families: Communicative Pathways to Social Mobility and Reproduction

This study explicitly links processes of anticipatory socialization to social mobility and reproduction. An examination of the socializing messages exchanged between blue-collar parents (n = 41) and their children (n = 25) demonstrate that family-based messages about work and career seldom occur in straightforward, unambiguous ways. Instead, messages take several paths (direct, indirect, ambient, and omission). Further, the content of messages communicated along these paths often is contradictory. That is, sons and daughters receive messages that both encourage and discourage social mobility. Ultimately, these individuals must negotiate the meanings of family-based anticipatory socialization communicated to them through a mix of messages.

Constrained and Constructed Choices in Career: An Examination of Communication Pathways to Dignity

Choice is foundational to contemporary careers. Yet, it often is constrained and contested in imperceptible ways. We reposition Ciulla’s (2000) four reasons for work—meaningful work, leisure, money, and security—as discursive frames whereby people make career choices, craft their choice-legitimizing stories, and overemphasize the rhetoric of individual choice. These frames attend to, as well as underplay, profound discursive and material differences and socio-political and economic forces that enable and constrain career choice across lifespans. We describe and critique communication and related literature that extends and chal challenges each frame. We conclude by advancing a research agenda on communication, choice, and dignity.

A Round-Table Discussion of “Big” Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research

The forum guest editor Ryan Bisel in this issue takes on the topic of big data and presents a round table that grew out of a conference panel. Five scholars engage in a discussion of the social and cultural trend of big data and implications to qualitative organizational communication research. The contributors respond to questions and delve into a number of issues, from theoretical, to institutional, to operational, to practical, by sharing thoughts and experiences about definition, assumptions, theory building, execution at every stage of a big data project and reflections beforehand and afterward.

The Competency Pivot Introducing a Revised Approach to the Business Communication Curriculum

In this article, we outline a competency-based approach to teaching business communication. At the heart of this approach, classroom instruction, assignments, and evaluation center on a goals-oriented and receiver-centric understanding of communication in which students are taught strategies for meeting five core competencies of business communication: professional, clear, concise, evidence driven, and persuasive. This is not a reinvention of the curriculum but instead a pivot that positions existing disciplinary knowledge and best practices into a clear, memorable, and professionally oriented framework to help students build critical communication skills that can be applied strategically across a range of business situations.

Child development and genre preference: research for educational game design

As the movement to capitalize on unique affordances of video games for learning continues to grow, relatively little research in that area has examined how formal features, such as genre and game mechanics, draw and hold childrens attention. This study examines which genres children prefer and the reasons why children prefer those genres by reporting on a video game uses and gratifications survey of children of various ages (n=685). Results show distinct patterns of game use and preference tied to typical child developmental ecology at each age, indicating that genre preference varies by age and developmental context. Implications for game research and educational gaming are provided.