Papers by Keri K Stephens
Routledge eBooks, Sep 28, 2010
You're viewing a past blog from the Good Systems Grand Challenge team at The University of Te... more You're viewing a past blog from the Good Systems Grand Challenge team at The University of Texas at Austin about free webinars offered to discuss the current and future effects of global crisis.
International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 2021
A U.S.-Japan expert workshop on mobile alert and warning was held online 8–10 September 2021. Fun... more A U.S.-Japan expert workshop on mobile alert and warning was held online 8–10 September 2021. Funded by the Japan Foundation’s Center for Global Partnership (CGP) and responding to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, the workshop compared U.S. and Japanese mobile alert and warning contexts, systems, policies, and messages to investigate possibilities for international harmonization of mobile device-based early warning. The workshop’s sessions revealed two interrelated issues that repeatedly surfaced among workshop participants: culture and policy. The workshop illuminated several possibilities and problems confronting U.S., Japanese, and global stakeholders as they develop, deploy, and seek to improve the effectiveness of mobile alert and warning systems and messages.
Vaccine, Aug 30, 2017
Vaccination reminders must both inform and persuade, and text messages designed for this purpose ... more Vaccination reminders must both inform and persuade, and text messages designed for this purpose must do so in 160 characters or less. We tested a strategy for improving the impact of HPV vaccination text message reminders through strategic wording. In an experiment conducted in community settings, 167 Spanish-speaking Latina mothers reviewed text message reminders that assigned the cause or "agency" for HPV transmission to their daughters or the virus, and assigned protection agency to the mothers or the vaccine. Reminder messages framing transmission as an action of the virus prompted mothers to perceive the threat as more severe than messages describing their daughters as the cause. Assigning transmission agency to the virus also held a persuasive advantage in boosting mothers' intentions to seek vaccination, particularly when the message cast mothers as agents of protection rather than the vaccine.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2015
Objective This study focused on patient portal use and investigated whether aesthetic evaluations... more Objective This study focused on patient portal use and investigated whether aesthetic evaluations of patient portals function are antecedent variables to variables in the Technology Acceptance Model. Methods A cross-sectional survey of current patient portals users ( N = 333) was conducted online. Participants completed the Visual Aesthetics of Website Inventory, along with items measuring perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived usefulness (PU), and behavioral intentions (BIs) to use the patient portal. Results The hypothesized model accounted for 29% of the variance in BIs to use the portal, 46% of the variance in the PU of the portal, and 29% of the variance in the portal’s PEU. Additionally, one dimension of the aesthetic evaluations functions as a predictor in the model – simplicity evaluations had a significant positive effect on PEU. Conclusion This study provides evidence that aesthetic evaluations – specifically regarding simplicity – function as a significant antecedent var...
Nordic Journal of Social Research, 2013
This article analyses the term platform as it surfaced in interview data from Norway and the Unit... more This article analyses the term platform as it surfaced in interview data from Norway and the United States that was collected in a field research project on organizational technology use. Through an inductive analysis of the term's use in six interviews, a conceptualization of the term reveals it to be rhetorical in nature, expressing the interplay between stability and creativity. In order to explain the rhetorical aspects we describe, the authors turn to the rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke's work to aid in conceptualizing the term, specifically his understanding of scene and agency. The authors present the conceptualization to help researchers on two levels. On the micro-level, we offer an analysis of the term platform. On the macro-level, we illustrate how grounded theory can help locate other terms that have unacknowledged salience to researchers, consultants, and interviewees.
Health Communication, 2015
Low health literacy remains an extremely common and problematic issue, given that individuals wit... more Low health literacy remains an extremely common and problematic issue, given that individuals with lower health literacy are more likely to experience health challenges and negative health outcomes. In this study, we use the first three stages of the innovation-decision process found in the theory of diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 2003). We incorporate health literacy into a model explaining how perceived health knowledge, information sharing, attitudes, and behavior are related. Results show that health information sharing explains 33% of the variance in behavioral intentions, indicating that the communicative practice of sharing information can positively impact health outcomes. Further, individuals with high health literacy tend to share less information about heart health than those with lower health literacy. Findings also reveal that perceived heart-health knowledge operates differently than health literacy to predict health outcomes.
Management Communication Quarterly, 2009
Meetings serve an important function in organizational communication. Information and communicati... more Meetings serve an important function in organizational communication. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have infiltrated meetings and allowed a new range of communicative behaviors to emerge. This cross-organizational study relies on key elements in the social influence model to predict variables that influence engagement in electronic meeting multitasking behaviors. The observation of organizational norms and the perceptions of others' thoughts concerning the use of ICTs for multitasking during a meeting explain a considerable amount of variance in how individuals use ICTs to multitask electronically in meetings. Implications for workplace ICT use in meetings and contributions to the social influence model are also discussed.
Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, San Diego, USA, 2003
ntnu.no. Publications. ...
Informing Science and Information Technology Education Joint Conference, June 24-27, Pori, Finland, 2003
ntnu.no. Publications. ...
Informing Science The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2004
This study compares how workers in Norway and the United States use Information and Communication... more This study compares how workers in Norway and the United States use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Our data—72 in-depth interviews of advanced ICT users - were coded, analyzed, and placed into Hofstede's four dimensional framework (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity). We proposed that ICT use comparisons between the two countries are congruent to Hofstede's findings. We find
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society
When natural disasters occur, various organizations and agencies turn to social media to understa... more When natural disasters occur, various organizations and agencies turn to social media to understand who needs help and how they have been affected. The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to evaluate whether hurricane-related tweets have some consistency over time, and second, whether Twitter-derived content is thematically similar to other private social media data. Through a unique method of using Twitter data gathered from six different hurricanes, alongside private data collected from qualitative interviews conducted in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, we hypothesize that there is some level of stability across hurricane-related tweet content over time that could be used for better real-time processing of social media data during natural disasters. We use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to derive topics, and, using Hellinger distance as a metric, find that there is a detectable connection among hurricane topics. By uncovering some persistent thematic areas and topics in disaster-related tweets, we hope these findings can help first responders and government agencies discover urgent content in tweets more quickly and reduce the amount of human intervention needed. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; Social media; Social content sharing • Computing methodologies → Machine learning; Topic modeling
Transformative Practice and Research in Organizational Communication
Organizational Communication scholars have a rich history of encouraging multiple approaches to d... more Organizational Communication scholars have a rich history of encouraging multiple approaches to data collection and analysis. In this chapter, I provide examples from our recent history that illustrate how we have developed our broad perspective on research methods. I also disclose the struggles I had when trying to decide how to represent the trends in published methods found in Management Communication Quarterly between 2000 and 2015. My analysis revealed that approximately two thirds of the papers published in MCQ used a qualitative approach to data collection. Mixed methods were rare, while using multiple methods was more common and has been stable over time. The chapter ends by highlighting pedagogical issues surrounding our field's acceptance of methodological diversity. I argue that as teachers, we must not lose the value of educating the next generation to be methodologically deep in some research approaches. However, we must also encourage methodological curiosity; a mi...
2018 17th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2018
The increasing popularity of multimedia messages shared through public or private social media sp... more The increasing popularity of multimedia messages shared through public or private social media spills into diverse information dissemination contexts. To date, public social media has been explored as a potential alert system during natural disasters, but high levels of noise (i.e. non-relevant content) present challenges in both understanding social experiences of a disaster and in facilitating disaster recovery. This study builds on current research by uniquely using social media data, collected in the field through qualitative interviews, to create a supervised machine learning model. Collected data represents rescuers and rescuees during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey. Preliminary findings indicate a 99% accuracy in classifying data between signal and noise for signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of 1:1, 1:2, 1:4, and 1:8. We also find 99% accuracy in classification between respondent types (volunteer rescuer, official rescuer, and rescuee). We furthermore compare human and machine coded attributes, finding that Google Vision API is a more reliable source of detecting attributes for the training set.
This study examines the impact of using different sequences of information and communication tech... more This study examines the impact of using different sequences of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to deliver repeated messages in the context of an interpersonal influence attempt. Supporting portions of ICT succession theory (Stephens, 2007), the findings suggest that, compared to using the same ICT, using complementary ICTs to deliver a repeated message increases perceptions of information effectiveness and behavioral intentions. A path model was tested to further explore the influence of complementary ICT use. The results suggest that the use of complementary ICTs functions by mitigating perceptions of overload and, in turn, increasing perceived information effectiveness, attitudes, and behavioral intentions.
focuses on maintaining a "human touch" combined with shared platforms, email, and conference call... more focuses on maintaining a "human touch" combined with shared platforms, email, and conference calls as she participates in an unprecedented global reorganization of the IT infrastructure taking place across her parent company WPP. Ignacio Cruz just finished a Google Hangout discussing the implementation of a nonprofit social media platform and one client who missed the meeting sent a GroupMe text asking for a quick recap. Consulting in contemporary organizations requires consultants to use technology as a central part of their client communication strategy. Margaret, Celia, and Ignacio are real people actively engaged in different types of consulting, but what they have in common is the central role that technology plays as they communicate with their clients. In this chapter, we treat consulting as activities that advise and guide organizational members on how to implement and maintain positive change(s) within the organization, thereby improving the effectiveness of the organization or specific individuals therein (March, 1991). Consultants are most commonly thought of as people external to an organization, but there are also people within organizations who function as consultants, especially in large organizations undergoing major change initiatives. Since consulting includes working one-on-one in addition to working with teams, in this chapter we also incorporate examples of how technology is changing coaching practices as well as shifting how consulting occurs. Throughout this chapter, we combine our own consulting experiences with research literature, as well as providing extended examples that include the diverse experiences of Margaret, Celia, and Ignacio. Together, these examples demonstrate the range of technologies used in consulting and coaching today, and they provide a glimpse into the future of consulting.
Prior research has established the feasibility of conducting online interviews and observations, ... more Prior research has established the feasibility of conducting online interviews and observations, yet there is limited guidance in how to interact with participants when conducting fully mediated research with screen-sharing and video. This study, conducted during early phases of COVID-19, included 15 volunteer tweet-annotators working with an emergency response organization. This method contribution uses cues-related and surveillance theories to reveal challenges and best practices when asking research participants to share their screen, be on video, and participate in a multiple-interview study. The findings suggest that researchers conducting online-mediated research should be prepared to provide technical support for the devices and interfaces participants use during the study, find ways to “see” beyond what is on the mediated screen, and consider ethical issues not often discussed. In addition to these findings, an output of this research is two brief training videos useful for ...
Uploads
Papers by Keri K Stephens