Y. Grace Ji

Boston University | BU · College of Communication

This study examines how misinformation-susceptible individuals from historically excluded and marginalized communities engage with science topics (e.g., climate change, vaccines, and health/wellness) and interpret misinformation and corrective intervention strategies. Two focus groups reveal that most participants are highly distrustful of authorit...

This study examined employees’ self-serving and genuine attributions of CEO activism as mediators, focusing on how they explain the process through which CEO’s transparent leadership communication impacts employees’ company advocacy and issue advocacy behaviors. With a survey of U.S. full-time employees, results showed that genuine attribution medi...

With a survey of 600 U.S. employees, this study investigated the effect of transparent leadership communication on employee engagement, from the interpretivist approach, in the context of CEO activism. This study examined employees’ perceived psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness) as mediators. Results showed that transpa...

This study took a personification approach and examined how strategic communication influences the development of startup corporate character and associated outcomes in China. Specifically, it examined the relationships among startups’ symmetrical communication model, startup characters of agreeableness, enterprise, competence, and ruthlessness, cu...

This study investigated nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) emotion-based content strategies on Facebook and publics’ engagement behaviors. More than 52,000 Facebook posts and corresponding comments were collected from the top 100 NPOs in the United States. The emotion-carrying status and valence of the messages were analyzed with computer-assisted sen...

This study examines startups’ social media communication practice in China through the theoretical lens of dialogic communication. Drawing interdisciplinary insights from public relations and computer-mediated communication, this study explored conversational human voice and social presence as antecedents of startups’ dialogic communication with pu...

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Nonprofit public relations Message appeal Functional interactivity Involvement Elaboration Likelihood Model Limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing A B S T R A C T This study aims to answer the question of what makes a nonprofit social media message effective in driving favorable behavioral ou...

This study examines how CEOs’ use of motivating language influences employee relationships within startup organizations. Informed by self-determination theory and social identity theory, the study proposes psychological need satisfaction and organizational identification as mechanisms accounting for the influence of startup leaders’ use of motivati...

Communication, as a discipline that generates a rich body of literature on CSR, has become a critical contributor to CSR knowledge in social science. However, limited research exists to understand how CSR knowledge is constructed and diffused in the discipline. This study thus intends to unpack the knowledge construction process of CSR research in...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) exhibits irrefutable practical and theoretical importance to the field of communication. However, limited efforts have been made by communication scholars to review the progression of knowledge construction and project prospects for theory development in this area. Informed by the social construction of knowled...

As a widely practiced form of corporate social responsibility (CSR), cause-related marketing (CRM) programs have been considered effective in generating reputational, relational, and financial returns for companies. This study examines a new form of CRM: choice-of-cause programs, in which companies empower consumers to determine which social causes...

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...

Nowadays, many wicked problems such as environmental issues require organizations from multiple sectors to form cross-sectoral alliances. Cross-sectoral alliance networks can transfer resources and signal affiliations and value alignment between strategic partners. The communication of cross-sectoral alliances is a form of CSR communication that se...

Drawing from literature regarding public engagement, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), computer-mediated communication research, and emotion psychology, this study examines the effects of companies’ social media communication strategies on public engagement behaviors as indexed by post likes, shares, and comments. Specifically, it investigate...

This entry identifies and delineates the effects of strategic communication, and specifically those brought about by a strategic communication program/campaign. Therefore, communication effects as discussed here are different from the general term “media effects” that is closely related to studies of mass communication. In this entry, strategic com...

This study expands the conceptual framework of dialogic communication on social media by incorporating a social dimension via social presence. Through a content analysis, we explored how dialogic internet principles and social presence strategies were implemented in top social CEOs’ Facebook posts to generate public engagement outcomes. Results sho...

This study explored the under-researched topic of leadership communication in the context of startup companies in China. Specifically, this study examined the role of executive leadership in shaping corporate culture and leadership communication purposes, strategies, and channels in startups. Findings were derived through 25 in-depth interviews wit...

Many companies are now using social media such as Facebook for advertising and marketing purposes. To understand how using social media affects a company's business performance from a digital engagement perspective, this study examines how user comments on company Facebook posts influence company revenue. S&P 500 companies' revenue information in a...

This qualitative study examined relationship cultivation and public relations practices in start-up companies in Mainland China. Findings from 28 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs in China¹ suggest that employees and customers are the most important strategic publics for start-ups, followed by investors, the media, and the government. Symmetri...

This study examined the strategic use of social media for stakeholder engagement in startup companies in China. Guided by the theoretical framework of stakeholder engagement, in-depth interviews were conducted with 28 entrepreneurs in China, and a content analysis was performed with 419 corporate social media posts on Weibo and WeChat. Findings sug...

This study examines the effects of companies' social media communication strategies on users' electronic word-of-mouth behavior through a content analysis. The sample includes more than 15,000 posts from Fortune 500 companies' Facebook accounts in a five-year time frame. Three communication strategies are examined, including appeal, vividness, and...

The majority of studies in public relations continue to examine organization-public relationships from only the organization’s perspective, with few studies focusing on the other side of the communication loop: stakeholders. The current study takes the stakeholders’ perspective to investigate the relationship between active stakeholders’ online beh...