Faculty Research

Faculty Grants

Jennifer Stromer-Galley received a FRAP (Faculty Research Awards Program) grant to hire a research assistant to help her with a forthcoming book titled  “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age”. The book provides a history of presidential campaign tactics using information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the last four election cycles, and examines how presidential campaigning has changed as candidates have adopted ICTs. 

Professors Annis Golden and Anita Pomerantz also received a FRAP award from the College of Arts and Science to support a research project titled “Communication Among Healthcare Providers and Families of Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injuries in a Rehabilitation Setting.” The study will take place at the Northeast Center for Special Care, and will combine analysis of conversations between staff and families with analysis of follow-up interviews. The project’s goal is to arrive at a better understanding of the range of problems that staff and families encounter in their interactions, and to identify interactional resources that might be useful in resolving them.

The University at Albany Faculty Research Awards Program (FRAP) is a competitive award that provides seed funding to support faculty research and other creative endeavors.

Debate Watch

During the presidential campaign this fall, several debate watches were held here on campus giving students an opportunity to view the debates with peers and discuss their impressions afterwards.  The debate watches were hosted by the Department of Political Science and the Department of Communication, along with the College Democrats, the College Republicans, and the Office of Student Involvement and Leadership.

Professors Kelli Lammie, Mihye Seo, and Jennifer Stromer-Galley are interested in young adults’ reactions to various kinds of political communication during the 2008 presidential election, and conducted a study with students during the debate watches.  The purpose of the study was to get people together to talk about the election and what they've seen during the debates before the media and the campaigns had a chance to react.  Their study tries to assess quantitatively how students feel about the debate and the discussions they’ve had with other students.  Our professors are specifically interested in whether or not students learn from the debates and if there are other effects as well– do they make students cynical, or more likely to get involved?  Our faculty also hope that the discussions lead to more knowledge and interest among the students.  The team is still in the process of collecting data, but expects to have results as early as this spring.

Scholarly Commuication

Professor Tim Stephen traveled to Lansing, Michigan to deliver an invited presentation of his research on scholarly communication at Michigan State University's School of Communication on October 17.  His research addresses the publication  process in the communication field, considering such topics as historical trends and norms, measuring faculty performance, and severe problems for the field that have resulted from the takeover of the academic publishing industry by for-profit publishers.  

Professor Stephen described new procedures for tracking the research productivity of the field's leading universities and demonstrated web-based systems for assessing productivity that he has authored and made available online.

Doctor-Patient Interaction

Professor Anita Pomerantz' research on doctor-patient interaction has attracted the interest of scholars in several disciplines.  In October 2008 she presented her research on negotiating roles during the medical consultation in the Sociology Department at Boston University.  In July 2009 she will give a plenary lecture at the Penn State Summer Institute in Applied Linguistics, addressing how patients actualize their agendas during a medical visit .  Also in July 2009, she will be a plenary speaker on the topic of practices for achieving patient literacy at the International Meeting on Conversation Analysis and Clinical Encounters in Exeter, England.

Award Winning Paper for the Communication Department and the CTG

The American Society for Information Science and Technology recently awarded to authors from the Department of Communication and UAlbany’s Center for Technology and Government the John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology) Paper Award.
   
The paper, entitled Geographic Information Technologies, Structuration Theory, and the World Trade Center Crisis, was a collaboration between Teresa M. Harrison, chair of the Communication Department, and CTG’s Theresa Pardo, deputy director, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, research fellow, Fiona Thompson, and Dubravka Juraga. 
   
This award recognizes the best refereed paper published in the volume year of JASIST preceding the ASIS&T annual meeting.  The paper was based on interview data from a CTG research project that explored how government used information technology in the response to the World Trade Center crisis.  In the article, the authors argued that awareness and appreciation of the potential value of GIT (geographic information technologies) changed dramatically as a result of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. 
   
ASIS&T considers a number of criteria when selecting a paper for this award, including professional merit, creativity and originality, scientific and professional quality of the research, and the scholarship embodied in the presentation.  The committee also looked at the paper’s contribution in terms of societal or scientific/technical significance of the topic, usefulness of the paper to practicing professionals, and the paper’s relevance to the interests of information science and technology, in addition to the overall quality of the paper.

Deliberative E-Rulemaking

Jennifer Stromer-Galley recently received a $400,000 three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for her grant entitled "Collaborative Research: Deliberative E-Rulemaking Decision Facilitation Project (DeER)". The grant provides funding for an experiment to test a new electronic system of deliberation with the potential to improve the quality of input to government agencies about rule changes. The rulemaking comment process, which engages the public in discussion of proposed regulatory rules, faces a number of problems, including poorly informed and distrustful participants, lack of dialog among participants, and problems of scale such as the large number of comments generated. Researchers believe that most rulemaking comments are low in quality or redundant- a product of form letters used by public interest groups. The DeER project will address existing problems by immersing citizens in small discussion groups, assisted by discussion facilitation software. The software will use cutting-edge language processing technologies to help answer questions, summarize discussion, and provide feedback and suggestions on the discussion. Discussion itself will be organized into groups to help the best ideas spread among participants and rise to the top. The value of the technology and of the deliberation methods will be thoroughly tested using experimental methods and data collected via surveys, focus groups, and by the software.

Technology Innovation

The IBM Center for the Business of Government, Washington, D.C. has awarded a research stipend of $20,000 to Senem Guney to start a longitudinal study of IBM@Albany NanoTech, a first-of-its-kind collaborative enterprise housing multiple R&D consortia among international partners. This study investigates the development of novel organizational forms and communication practices used by IBM@ANT and its academic and industrial partners as they engage in inter-organizational collaboration for high-technology innovation at Albany NanoTech. Complex collaborative enterprises such as Albany NanoTech are increasingly becoming the norm for innovative product development in the high-technology industry, as organizations face the need to make investments that go beyond their individual capabilities in order to stay ahead of changing competitive threats. Prof. Guney is beginning an organizational ethnography of a key partner in Albany NanoTech. One of the objectives of this study is to demonstrate the significance of the disciplinary perspective of Communication Studies in providing insights into social-organizational phenomena that are crucial in the maintenance and success of these collaborative enterprises. The collection of ethnographic data for this study started in May 2007 and will continue through the next academic year.

Increasing Rates of Organ Donation

A consortium consisting of Anita Pomerantz and Teresa Harrison at the University at Albany, Carla Williams of New York Alliance for Donation, and Tom Feeley at the State University of New York at Buffalo have recently finished a research study aimed at understanding the factors that are related to students' intentions to donate organs and their experiences in notifying their families of their donation wishes. The research team studied the effects of public relations courses at UAlbany and UBuffalo in which undergraduate students learned to design, implement, and evaluate a public awareness campaign focusing on organ and tissue donation. The team used a multi-method approach, including surveys, itnerviews, and qualitative analyses of tapes of family discussions. The research was funded by a three year grant from Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which enabled the universities to hire public relations professionals to teach the courses and which also funded courses of study for the graduate students involved. Anita Pomerantz and Paul Denvir, her research assistant and doctoral student, conducted two qualitative studies as part of the larger project. One study, drawing on interviews of the pracicum students, determined the impact of taking the practicum on the students' perspectives and conduct. The other study, an analysis of the dynamics of family discussions, explored the discursive practices that family members use when they expect their views will be unfavorably received and that advocates used to overcome resistance to donation.