Sarah Geegan

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at University of Kentucky

It is well established that—among individuals who hold an attitude toward a topic—inoculation messages can help promote resistance to counterattitudinal attacks. Yet, the utility of inoculation theory for communication campaigns may ultimately depend upon the effects inoculation messages have on individuals who are initially opposed or neutral rega...

Although it may be tempting to assume that people’s attitudes toward the First Amendment are resolute, extant research and the findings of this investigation suggest the opposite: that Americans’ First Amendment attitudes are quite susceptible to persuasion. This investigation applied inoculation theory as an avenue through which attitudes toward t...

Combining communication research methods and theories of persuasion with traditional marketing tactics, social marketers strive to influence behaviors through a systematic planning process to deliver positive benefits to a target audience. This chapter provides an overview and definition of social marketing before reviewing different contextual app...

Although fatal shootings on U.S. college campuses are statistically rare, students are routinely confronted with information suggesting that shootings are rampant and unavoidable. Pre-crisis interventions should address the threat of deceptive claims and restore beliefs that universities are capable of protecting students from violence. This experi...

For a developing country, such as North Macedonia, the prospect of young, educated people leaving their place of residence (i.e., emigration) can have significant negative effects. Understanding the problem of brain drain and its antecedents is critical to developing strategic solutions. A qualitative analysis of several focus group interviews was...

Although inoculation theory was originally developed as a prophylactic strategy to protect favorable attitudes from challenges, scholars have begun to demonstrate the potential for therapeutic inoculation aimed at audiences with unfavorable and neutral attitudes. The current investigation builds on our previous work showing that inoculation message...

This investigation assessed the mechanisms that contribute to post-attack attitudinal persistence. A three-phase experiment was designed to uncover why inoculation works even after it has been challenged by a counterattitudinal attack. The results of this study show that threat, both motivational and apprehensive, not only persists after the attack...

Big data and social media are evolving rapidly, so the predictable horizon is shrinking. The future of big data for the communication discipline will hinge on the success of developing interdisciplinary collaborations. This chapter seeks to examine the potential for big data in the form of social media to inform applied communication contexts, prim...

Scholars from the neurosciences, cognitive psychology, and communication disciplines have devoted a significant amount of attention to the role of image processing in individuals. They have examined the influence of visuals from conflict and crises on viewers’ emotional responses. Much of the research into the visual content and structure in news f...

This chapter provides background on the informal justice movement in United States. It explains grounded practical theory and design theory, the communication frameworks that are used to analyze the informal justice practices. The chapter analyses the philosophical commitments of each practice, describes its interactional design, and illustrates ce...

Crises and disasters usually occur at the most inopportune time. A major misstep in crisis and crisis management in public and private establishments is to emphasize crisis response at the expense of crisis preparedness/planning. Crisis preparedness and crisis management involve issues management, which is the process of identifying challenging pro...

The aim of the design thinking is to use a set of developmental, iterative steps through which the unmet needs and desires of users are understood, such that new, usable, and useful solutions can be created for challenges or problems that exist in the world. This chapter describes the design thinking focusing on two critical aspects of the process:...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are everywhere in contemporary work. Communication scholars encourage researchers to study more than how communication occurs through ICTs. This chapter focuses on topics most relevant for the future of applied communication research in a work context. It also focuses on two applied issues surroundi...

This chapter reviews the academic research related to influencers and explores industry attempts to both identify and take advantage of influencers. It presents a small sample of the innovations developing in market research that have strong implications for the ability to identify real influencers. The organization influencermarketinghub.com track...

Practitioners and scholars have long recognized that treacherous uncertainties bedevil medical care and that communication is intimately related to these challenges. This chapter explains how many uncertainties have been overcome, but many others have arisen. It talks about the illness screening and treatment, effort to distinguish between disease...

End of life (EOL) healthcare decision making is often associated with poor outcomes related to clinicians’ and family members’ ability to respect patients’ wishes and the burden this decision making and care can place on primary caregivers. This chapter proposes that negative outcomes associated with poor EOL conversations can be explained by commu...

This chapter presents a study that extends the research on best practices in risk and crisis communication by synthesizing the contributions from research thus far and assessing the applicability of the best practices framework in a multi‐case analysis. It summarizes the research on best practices in risk and crisis communication over the past deca...

This chapter presents an overview of narrative theory in order to provide the overarching theoretical and methodological lens for the investigation. It describes the background and scope of the Rawabi project. On the most basic instrumental level, Rawabi is a private sector urban development project undertaken for the purposes of facilitating the b...

This chapter examines the need for democratic decision making, the inherent problems of involving diverse stakeholders, and the role of inquiry and discourse in democratic decision making. The K20 Center delivers support and growth opportunities for stakeholders to improve schools and student learning. The K20 Center projects provide evidence that...

This chapter discusses narratives and narrativity in terms of five perspectives, which plays an important role in social life and human communication. First, it discusses narratives and stories as concepts and their traditional role in instructional communication. A second perspective relates to the nature of scientific knowledge and curricula as n...

We are awash in information but are losing our ability to separate fact, fiction, and opinion. The spread of misinformation online has been named one of the top ten challenges facing the world today. This review describes the impacts of fake news, the psychological, social, ideological, and institutional factors that make people susceptible to bein...

Volunteering plays a significant role in augmenting the work of a wide range of civil society organizations involved in international development and cultural exchanges, educational initiatives, healthcare delivery, environmental preservation, as well as disaster rescue and recovery. They address human rights abuses, promoting peace, and a myriad o...

E‐health is a relatively young but rapidly growing area of health communication inquiry that examines the development, implementation, and application of a broad range of evolving health information technologies (HITs) in modern society. HITs have been designed to track, analyze,and disseminate relevant health information, deliver healthcare servic...

What makes applied research important is that it goes beyond simple experiments or case study approaches and triangulates qualitative and quantitative approaches to data acquisition, evaluation, and interpretation. Applied communication research has also tried to integrate qualitative and quantitative data to better understand expected normative be...

This chapter introduces a model of engaged scholarship inspired by narrative theory and practice. It offers a layered account of how to enact the model in diverse contexts. Layered accounts by design juxtapose analytic writing with first‐person narrative accounts and creative expressions of experience. The chapter focuses on multiyear projects with...

Psychological reactance theory (PRT) provides a framework for understanding what not to do when seeking to motivate, influence, and persuade people. As a theory of resistance, PRT can be used to explain and predict a range of cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes associated with frustrating or affirming the human need for autonomy and self‐...

Media buyers are finding alternate ways, such as social endorsement, brand persona creation, and sponsored content, to reach and form deeper relationships with their consumer base. Product placements have demonstrated significant growth in the United States, with industry ventures nearly tripling since 2012. This chapter addresses various aspects o...

Communication inquiry has developed as an exciting and rapidly growing area of social scientific, critical, and humanistic research examining the powerful influences of human and mediated communication in society. The complexity of achieving desired communication goals, such as influencing entrenched problematic behaviors (e.g., challenges influenc...

This chapter presents the theoretical grounding of a peer educator/support intervention for addressing life transitions in aging for kaumatua. It discusses implications and future directions of blending Indigenous and communication theory for applied communication, particularly around health issues. The chapter also discusses Indigenous theory from...

This chapter evaluates the effectiveness of modern health communication and public health endeavors by asking how well those efforts address three issues, foregrounding: collective or macro measures of health attitudes, behavior, and experience; measures of health inequality or inequity; and global or cross‐national comparisons and perspectives. It...

Policy communication research involves numerous policy topics, ranging from health to education to the environment and many more domains. This chapter discusses the theories and methodologies that have been productive for connecting scholarship to practice. It also discusses three issues central to engaging multiplicity in policy communication: pow...

Serious games function by leveraging entertainment (hedonic processing) characteristics with cognitive and emotional engagement for specific outcomes. By focusing on persuasion, formation and change of attitudes, increased/enhanced awareness, and overt behavioral changes, serious games serve as activators of information processing. This chapter dis...

Good theories may provide practitioners with tools to guide and shape their strategies. Consequently, the better these theory‐based strategies perform in single and multiple contexts, the more practically useful the theories become. A good example of a theory with such practical utility is the theory of inoculation. Labeled as the “grandparent theo...

Social support groups provide both a space for knowledge management and a means to connect with others by developing face‐to‐face and online communities. This chapter argues that the body of scholarship regarding communities of practice (CoPs) can be used as a framework to explain how communication functions in support groups. It examines how commu...

Intergenerational contact occurs when the interactants live through different historical periods and may thus be operating with different communicative assumptions, skills, needs, and experiences This chapter begins with a review on health information sharing. It focuses on intergenerational health information sharing between midlife adults and the...

This chapter provides a generational overview of sexual harassment research and proposes an agenda for research on bystander intervention. Given that sexual harassment is saturated with emotions, it is surprising that sexual harassment is often viewed through a rational lens when it comes to bystander intervention. Research has made it clear that s...

This chapter explores the role that American‐collegian fraternity films (“frat films”) have played in selling fraternity life to adolescent college‐bound males. This research question is made especially intriguing by the institution's growth on American campuses, even as fraternities have been under attack from myriad external forces and have faced...

This chapter explores the best available theories for ethical communication and the best methods of applied ethical analyses. The general and accepted theoretical traditions help advance our understanding and relevance in applied communication. They are virtue ethics, utilitarian ethics, and deontological ethics. The chapter reviews these theories...

Scholarship related to the discourse of renewal has developed from early literature, which almost exclusively consisted of case studies, to the current landscape, which is becoming more diverse and robust each year. This chapter explores the range of applications of the theory over the past two decades, with particular attention paid to the growth...

This chapter is about environmental communication research in the hotel and travel industry. Since the early 1990s, hotels all over the world have been facing the same challenges. One of the most important of these challenges is the idea of sustainability. How can hotels live up to the expectations of their guests and at the same time implement lon...

This chapter explores two dominant theories used in crisis communication research by strategic communication scholars: image repair and situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). A comparison of SCCT and image repair is provided, along with a review of the literature which provides practitioners guidance on what strategies work best to repair...

This chapter explores the efficacy of using educational games to help high school students develop life skills, such as financial literacy. Mind Your Own Budget is one such game that immerses players in a digital environment and uses real‐life scenarios to teach responsible financial behavior. In a study that compared students who explored financia...

This chapter describes and systematically analyzes the changing beliefs, practices, and challenges of a middle‐level English language arts teacher's journey from a traditional classroom environment, to a personalized, learner‐centered environment rich with active engagement, student motivation, and relevance. The researchers described the competenc...

A growing body of research demonstrates that Vested Interest Theory (VIT) is a valuable framework for understanding audience messaging needs and can serve as a foundation for designing effective campaign messages. This chapter begins with an overview of VIT and its components, discusses recent developments in the theory's structure and application,...

Since the introduction of the school district superintendent position in the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century, multiple social, economic, political, and technological changes have profoundly affected the nature of public schooling and redefined superintendents' work. In order to appreciate the nature of superintendents' wor...

This chapter explores how new fathers living in the United States communicatively negotiate the tensions surrounding their decision to take paternity leave, which often runs counter to dominant American cultural norms. More specifically, we examine data collected through in‐depth interviews with 18 new fathers who chose to take paternity leave thro...

This chapter explains that improved clinical trial communication will result in better informed patients who demonstrate greater willingness to participate in a system that is intended to produce significant advances in medical treatment. It centers on the factors where communication scholars and practitioners can best apply their energy and insigh...

This chapter offers a state‐of‐the‐art summary of advances in human deception detection theory and research, and provides diverse examples of human‐to‐human deception. With regard to deception detection, findings regarding prevalence and motives have a number of important implications. Research on deception motives clearly documents that lying is n...

In general, data visualization, especially advanced data visualization, has been viewed by practitioners from various disciplines as a powerful tool with the capacity to highlight the most important elements or key issues to improve understanding of the provided information. This chapter reviews the research on traditional static data visualization...

This chapter analyzes the shifting informational needs of hurricane warnings based on the social amplification of risk. It observes that the relatively slow evolution of hurricane warning messages makes them vulnerable to amplification. Specifically, the chapter describes how the milling process, inherent in the interpretation of risk warnings, can...

Over the past 40 years, media coverage of risks has evolved in ways perhaps no one imagined. Remember the days when newspapers, magazines, radio and television were the primary sources of news? Remember when the Internet changed all of that in the early 2000s and led to the rise of online news and social media, making a potential journalist out of...

This chapter examines provider–patient interaction—both its changing nature and the impact of media and technology on that interaction. It begins with an overview of media ecology, discusses the major models of provider–patient interaction, and then offers both methodological and theoretical suggestions for future research on how media impacts this...

Existential anxiety is a primary and powerful force driving human behavior. Terror management theory (TMT), an overarching framework for understanding the role existential anxiety plays in human motivation, can be used to explain and predict many of the cognitive, affective, and conative aspects of human action. This chapter begins with a general o...

The growth of the internet, social media, mobile applications, and a variety of other technologies has transformed the media landscape over the past two decades. New technologies may replace some traditional media channels in terms of health, but they are typically integrated into other forms of daily communication. This chapter explores many of th...

Emotions can be powerful motivators of human behavior, and as such, emotional appeals have been a subject of longstanding interest for applied communication scholars. This chapter focuses on the effects of anger, fear, and guilt. Despite the fact that anger, fear, and guilt are all considered as negative emotions, employing these emotions to motiva...

This chapter highlights applied communication research in which evocative, critical, and performance autoethnography have been featured. It provides a selective summary of autoethnographic literature applicable to applied communication research. The chapter presents the exemplars in which autoethnography has been applied to the study of microaggres...

This study explored the potential of inoculation messages to protect the pro-destination attitudes of potential tourists. As this study argues, much research has focused on the promotion of destination images, sustainable tourism, and more recently the impact of Tourism 2.0 (i.e., hyper connected, multidimensional consumer knowledge sharing across...

This investigation explored the potential for enhancing the potency of inoculation's strategy by examining the relationships among the certainty of the attack, threat, and resistance. Using different moderately involving issues for each, three experimental studies were conducted involving a total of 275 participants. In contrast with some previous...