Alan K. Goodboy

West Virginia University | WVU · Department of Communication Studies

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is becoming an increasingly popular data analytic technique in communication studies. Reports of SEM analyses are published in communication journals (including Communication Research Reports) allowing for hypothesis testing with latent variables, estimation of direct and indirect causal effects, and validity test...

The purpose of this study was to explain workplace bullying as a symptom of high-strain employment. The Job Demand-Control-Support (JDCS) model of work design was used to frame this study and examine workplace bullying antecedents and consequences. Full-time American employees (N = 314) working in various organizations completed a questionnaire abo...

Bullying is a serious communication problem facing teachers, administrators, parents, and students alike. Although much research has examined bullying intervention and prevention efforts in schools, bullying on the bus has received little empirical attention, even though victimization regularly occurs in this school-related environment. The purpose...

This study examined two effective teaching behaviors traditionally considered by instructional communication scholars to associate positively with students’ academic experiences: instructor clarity and immediacy. Our study situated these teaching behaviors in a conditional process model that integrated two key assumptions about student learning: (a...

In this study we simultaneously tested theoretically specified predictions from relational turbulence theory (RTT) using a fully latent structural regression model. A total of 807 college students in dating relationships responded to survey items measuring variables embedded in RTT, including relationship parameters (relational uncertainty and inte...

PurposeSituational interest (SI) is influenced by features in the learning environment. Triggered SI (TSI) refers to initiating interest and maintained SI (MSI) is a deeper form of interest with meaningful connections to course content. This study set out to determine if third-year surgery clerkship experiences influence students’ situational inter...

According to relational turbulence theory, interdependent partners exert influence in their romantic relationships through the interference and facilitation of daily routines. Programmatic scholarship consistently reveals that interference is associated positively, whereas facilitation is associated negatively, with relational turbulence in romanti...

This study extends psychological reactance theory (PRT) to family caregiving by exploring autonomy-threatening messages adult child caregivers use to gain compliance from older adult parents. Results of focus groups and interviews with older adult care recipients (Study One) and caregivers (Study Two) corroborated three types of autonomy-threatenin...

Challenge is a key gratification sought in video games, and punishment by character death is often the repercussion for poor performance, requiring players to recover or restart. But some gamers go a step further and opt into games that feature permadeath: the permanent death of a game character with no opportunity to recover that character. These...

Studies guided by relational turbulence theory (RTT) emphasize negative emotions as the affective mechanism responsible for turbulence arising from interfering partners. However, a more complete examination of RTT’s affective mechanisms should study how interference and facilitation indirectly predict turbulence through intensified negative and pos...

Guided by the job demand-control-support model of workplace strain, this study tested a theoretical model of academic work environments to explain workplace bullying in academia. College professors ( N = 503) completed a questionnaire about working in academia and experiencing bullying at work. Results of a conditional process analysis revealed tha...

This study was conducted to model how teacher misbehaviors associate with reductions in students’ sustained attention. Participants (N = 423 college students) responded to measures of their perceptions of teacher antagonism, affect for their instructor, intrinsic motivation to learn, and sustained attention throughout the semester. Results of a pat...

Guided by an affective theoretical process, we surveyed college students (N = 397) to examine the effect of college instructors’ lecture misbehaviors on students’ emotional interest directly, and indirectly through affect toward the course content, among students who varied in their desire to master the course material (i.e., first- and second-stag...

Guided by self-determination theory, this study examined the dyadic effects of marital autonomy on relationship maintenance behaviors. Heterosexual married couples (N = 324 dyads) completed questionnaires assessing their need fulfillment of autonomy in marriage along with their enactment of relationship maintenance behaviors. Using multilevel model...

As emerging adults transition to college, they must adapt to new circumstances, both academic and personal. For partners involved in a romantic relationship prior to attending college, this transition has important relational implications, including potential fluctuations in relational uncertainty and interdependence. Guided by relational turbulenc...

Relational turbulence theory (RTT) articulates processes that explain why spouses evaluate their marriages as chaotic. Specifically, RTT predicts that relational uncertainty biases cognitive appraisals about the marriage and that partner interference with daily routines heightens negative emotions toward the spouse, both of which, culminate in rela...

Conducted during a semester of remote emergency instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this study examined the effects of rapidly switching an originally scheduled in-person course to an online course offering (after the course had already started in-person) on effective teaching behaviors and student learning outcomes. Results from 163 undergra...

Using a person-centered approach and guided by four mini-theories within self-determination theory, we investigated students’ motivation for pursuing their doctorate. Specifically, we examined students’ (N = 205) intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to persevere in their doctoral studies to ascertain if differences in the quality of their motivation...

This study examined negotiation outcomes following a distributive bargaining task where individuals communicated in dyads for the purchase a hypothetical product. We used an experimental manipulation to examine the impact of sharing one’s alternative on bargainers’ final negotiated price both directly and indirectly through their partners’ one-side...

The purpose of this study was to continue the trend of identifying the course offerings of National Communication Association (NCA) department members started by Wardrope (1999). A curricular profile of U.S. communication departments. Communication Education, 48(3), 256–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529909379173 and followed by Bertelsen and Go...

This study tested propositions of relational turbulence theory (RTT) from a latent variable mixture modeling perspective. A national sample of married individuals (N = 503) completed a questionnaire measuring RTT relationship parameters, experiences, and outcomes. A latent profile analysis provided support for RTT as (a) marriages were well-separat...

Relational uncertainty consists of self, partner, and relationship uncertainty, which are core parameters in relational turbulence theory (RTT). Advances in latent variable modeling allow researchers to examine the multidimensional construct as a bifactor model, including a general factor of relational uncertainty and residualized factors of self,...

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to model student trajectories of instructional dissent over the course of a semester. Participants were 312 undergraduate students who completed panel surveys on their worst course of the semester at three time points: during the beginning, middle, and end of a college course. Latent growth curve modeling...

The purpose of this teaching experiment was to examine the causal effect of relevant (compared to irrelevant) instructor self-disclosure on student affect and cognitive learning. Undergraduate students (N = 288) were randomly assigned to a 19-minute classroom lecture with an instructor who taught the same lesson but self-disclosed either relevant o...

Relational turbulence theory posits that external changes to the relational environment compel romantic partners to navigate transitions by establishing new daily routines as interdependent couples. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented transition fraught with difficult changes that have the potential to be especially disruptive to romantic par...

Relational Turbulence Theory proposes that when romantic partners interrupt everyday routines in response to transitions, affective arousal will be heightened in the form of more intense emotions. The goal of this study was to test this theoretical logic in a married sample of 165 spouses during the initial peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (April, 202...

Guided by rhetorical and relational goals theory, this study explores medical students’ preferences for effective teaching using a “build-a-professor” design (Senko, C., Belmonte, K., & Yakhkind, A. (2012). How students’ achievement goals shape their beliefs about effective teaching: A ‘build-a-professor’ study. British Journal of Educational Psych...

Cronbach’s alpha (coefficient α) is the conventional statistic communication scholars use to estimate the reliability of multi-item measurement instruments. For many, if not most communication measures, α should not be calculated for reliability estimation. Instead, coefficient omega (ω) should be reported as it aligns with the definition of reliab...

Two experiments examined the effect of teaching with content relevance strategies on student learning outcomes. In both experiments, college students were randomly assigned to one of three teaching conditions in which the instructor (a) made no effort to teach the lesson content as relevant (control), (b) taught the same lesson content in a relevan...

For social sciences such as communication studies, in which key variables are often indirectly measured using myriad operationalizations, issues of construct validity are critical to the veracity of claims made from empirical data. This manuscript considers the ways we can improve how we demonstrate construct validity when using survey items. Some...

A series of 27 meta-analyses was conducted to synthesize theoretical predictions, to date, of the relational turbulence model (RTM), which has informed relational turbulence theory (RTT). In line with theorized predictions, 12 random-effects meta-analyses (k = 9–15; n = 1,395–5,493) confirmed that RTM variables (i.e., self uncertainty, partner unce...

This study modeled the strain that academic demands (i.e., taking courses with demanding workloads) place on college students’ academic performance by exploring how sources of student academic support and stress might explain this association. Student participants (N = 302) completed a survey about their most demanding class of the semester and rep...

This experiment examined learning differences between students who read instructional examples that varied in the order that information was presented. In an online lesson about advice giving, 275 students were randomly assigned to a learning condition where the order of instructional information moved either from (a) concrete examples to abstract...

Instructors tell stories for pedagogical reasons, but not all classroom stories are necessarily relevant to students and their learning. This study examined how instructors tell stories in ways that students find relevant or irrelevant to their lives. Participants were 388 undergraduate students who responded to an open-ended survey asking them to...

Guided by warranting theory, this experiment examined students’ perceptions of mediated self-disclosive messages generated by a professor and members of a professor’s social network. Using a 2 (self-disclosive messages: professional or personal) x 2 (warranting cues: present or absent) factorial experiment with Twitter, students’ perceptions of pro...

In this study, we explore how students identify and navigate the social structure of higher education and how, in doing so, they communicatively (re)produce socializing norms. To this end, we draw upon the work of the late educational sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to outline a critical communication pedagogical understanding of institutional socializ...

This study examined how college students’ class-related achievement emotions are related to their tendencies to dissent about a college course. Student participants (N = 383) completed a survey about their worst course of the semester by reporting on their class-related achievement emotions and how they dissented about their class. Results from ord...

We conducted this study to create a measure of instructional narratives and to validate the new instrument by assessing its construct validity. In particular, we created an item pool reflecting three aspects of instructor-told narratives including their course orientation, concreteness, and memorability. Students (N = 598) responded to a series of...

When an individual is anonymous online, they may communicate more boldly than they would in a face-to-face situation—a phenomenon called the online disinhibition effect. While much is known about the toxic effects of online disinhibition, social effects (such as self-disclosure) receive less scholarly attention. This meta-analysis (k = 14, random e...

This study examined learning differences for students who were given instructor-provided examples during a lesson compared with student-generated examples. In an experiment, 348 students were exposed to an online lesson about fear appeals and were randomly assigned to either a condition where (a) examples of key concepts were provided by the instru...

Guided by self-determination theory, we conducted a live lecture experiment in two 50-min college courses to manipulate autonomy-supportive instruction (i.e., the amount of choices and rationales offered to students). Participants were 201 undergraduate students who either attended a lecture where the instructor gave students choices over the mater...

This quasi-experiment examined how incorporating an instructor narrative into teaching augmented students’ recall, affect, and sustained attention. One hundred and ninety-four undergraduate students were assigned to one of two teaching conditions in a college classroom: a lecture that included an instructor narrative summarizing the lesson’s key po...

PowerPoint has become a ubiquitous tool for instructors who teach college students. Almost two decades of student learning research has examined the impact of traditional instruction (i.e., chalk and talk) versus instruction aided by PowerPoint. This research has revealed inconsistent and contrasting results. To probe this inconsistency, a meta-ana...

Instructional communication and communication pedagogy are complementary areas of inquiry; that is, communication instructors will not be effective educators without strategically considering--for each course taught in a given semester--both pedagogical techniques (e.g., writing accurate course objectives; choosing or creating activities that align...

Guided by assumptions from the cognitive–affective theory of learning with media, we conducted a teaching experiment to corroborate past correlational research that suggested instructor misbehaviors, in the form of antagonism toward students, impede students’ cognitive learning. Participants were 472 undergraduate students who were randomly assigne...

This study was conducted to examine the impact of integrated humor on direct measures of students’ ability to retain and transfer information from educational lessons. In two experiments, participants were randomly exposed to either a lesson with humorous examples or standard examples and were subsequently asked to take tests on the material. Data...

The study applied self-determination theory to examine detrimental effects of instructor misbehaviors in the college classroom. Participants were 223 undergraduate students who reported on their instructor’s antagonism and lecture misbehaviors in a course, along with their basic psychological need fulfillment (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatednes...

Students enter college with varying degrees of academic self-efficacy, which influences how they respond to effective teaching behaviors. Teacher confirmation is one behavior that has received increased attention because it is thought to indirectly enhance students’ learning by reducing their receiver apprehension in the classroom. Findings from 20...

This study modeled motivational mechanisms that explain the negative effects of workplace bullying on work engagement. Guided by self-determination theory, workplace bullying was predicted to decrease worker engagement indirectly, due to the denial of employees’ basic psychological needs and their intrinsic motivation to work. From a sample of 243...

The purpose of this study was to determine how the ostracism of K-12 teachers influences their commitment to their schools and commitment to the teaching profession. The investment model was used to situate ostracism as a predictor of teacher commitment. Participants were 200 full-time K-12 teachers who completed a survey assessing their experience...

This study used attachment theory to examine romantic partners’ use of negative behaviors to maintain their relationships. Romantic couples (N = 227 dyads) completed self-reports of their attachment styles and use of negative relational maintenance behaviors. Actor-partner interdependence models provided dyadic results: (a) having a secure attachme...

This study examined the dyadic effects of relationship uncertainty and the use of negative relational maintenance behaviors. Romantic couples (N = 227 dyads) completed a survey assessing their current relationship uncertainty (i.e., definition, mutuality, behavioral, future) and their use of negative behaviors to maintain their relationship (i.e.,...

The purpose of this study was to assess students’ (N = 186) retrospective accounts of their bullying behaviors (in middle and high school), alongside their current, self-admitted intolerant schemas. Amidst intolerant schemas of sexism, ageism, classism, racism, religious intolerance, and sexual prejudice, all were correlated positively with the vic...

Over the last several decades, instructional communication scholars have studied and measured student motivation as an important learning outcome. Unfortunately, this research has lacked theoretical guidance and has treated student motivation as a construct that varies only in quantity, ignoring existing theory that suggests student motivation is b...

This study examined the conditional influence of relevant instructor self-disclosure on student interest (cognitive, emotional) and engagement (silent-in-class, oral-in-class, thinking about course content, out-of-class). College student participants (N = 169) completed a questionnaire on their instructor’s disclosures and misbehaviors in class, an...

This study explored how psychosocial development affects doctoral students’ relationship and communication with their advisor. Chickering and Reisser’s vectors of psychosocial development were examined in the doctoral context to understand how students preserve communicatively satisfying relationships with their advisor through the use of relationa...

The study employed Social Dominance Theory in a communicative assessment of bullying in secondary education. Participants were 189 college students who completed a survey about their bullying perpetration in secondary school (physical victimization, verbal victimization, social manipulation, and attacks on property) and their current propensity to...

A random-effects meta-analysis (N = 7,113) was conducted examining the relationships between students’ out-of-class communication (OCC) and learning outcomes. The findings revealed positive summary effects for OCC on affective learning (k = 7, N = 1478, r = 0.321, p < 0.001) and perceived cognitive learning (k = 11, N = 5635, r = 0.261, p < 0.001)....

Bullying is a highly destructive communicative behavior. The purpose of this study was to determine if high school victimization experiences from bullying influence college students’ first-semester transition experiences. College students (N = 149) completed a questionnaire during their first month in school measuring their retrospective bullying e...

This study tested the notion that the effect of instructor clarity on learning is conditioned upon students’ motivation. We randomly assigned 128 participants to a video of a clear or an unclear lecture and asked them to report their motivation to deeply process lecture material. Results indicated that even with clear instruction, test scores were...

Coaches, like instructors, must possess and use power effectively. Although power is important for coaching, research on the influence of coaches' power use remains understudied. This study examined 91 current Division I athletes' reports of coach power use and their subsequent communicative evaluations and responses. Results indicated that linear...

Things can go wrong in business transactions, and when this happens it can lead to consumer complaints. Though service recovery is an important part of organizations' ability to satisfy customers, consumers play an important role insofar as the way they communicate with offending companies may influence their outcomes. In this study, 255 participan...

This study examined the relationships between faculty workplace bullying with graduate students’ burnout and organizational citizenship behaviors. Graduate students (N = 272) completed a self-report questionnaire measuring the degree to which faculty bully them at work (i.e., through belittlement, punishment, managerial misconduct, exclusion) along...

The purpose of this study was to examine how college students' intrapersonal communication experiences (i.e., imagined interactions) with disliked instructors contribute to their proclivity to communicate instructional dissent (i.e., expressive, rhetorical, vengeful). Student participants (N = 181) completed a self-report questionnaire measuring th...

This article reports the findings of two meta-analyses that explored the relationship between teacher clarity and student learning. Combined, the results suggest that teacher clarity has a larger effect for student affective learning than for cognitive learning. However, neither the effects for cognitive learning nor affective learning were homogen...

Protection motivation theory (PMT) explains people's adaptive behavior in response to personal threats. In this study, PMT was used to predict rhetorical dissent episodes related to 210 student reports of perceived classroom problems. In line with theoretical predictions, a moderated moderation analysis revealed that students were likely to voice t...

Academia can be a hostile place when faculty members and departments mistreat their graduate students. This study used a survey of 272 graduate students enrolled in a variety of programs and investigated bullying from the graduate student perspective. Our results indicated when graduate students viewed that they had been bullied by professors in th...