Browsing by Author "Burge, Jamika D."

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    Communication of Emotion in Mediated and Technology-Mediated Contexts: Face-to-Face, Telephone, and Instant Messaging
    Burge, Jamika D. (Virginia Tech, 2007-04-23)
    This dissertation work considers communication between people. I look at coordinating dyads (couples in relationships) and people in working relationships to develop an understanding of how people engage in high-stakes, or emotional communication via various communicative media. The approach for this research is to observe and measure people's behavior during interaction and subsequent reporting of that behavior and associated internal experiences. Qualitative and quantitative methods are employed. Quantitative data are analyzed using a range of statistical analyses, including correlations matrices, ANOVAs, and multivariate statistics. Two controlled laboratory experiments were conducted for this research. These experiments involved couples in relationships. Couples were brought into the lab and argued with each other across one of three technological media: face-to-face, telephone, and instant messaging (IM). In one set of couples' experiments, the couples argued for twenty minutes; in the subsequent couples' experiment, couples were encouraged to take as much time as they needed for their arguments. One of the main results from the first experiment is that couples did, indeed, argue when brought into a laboratory setting. One of the important findings for the second experiment is that time did not affect couples' tendency to reach closure during their arguments. This research is a contribution in that it examines how people engage in highly emotional communication using various technological media. In a society with ever-increasing communication needs that require technology, it becomes necessary to study its communicative affordances. Understanding the context of highly emotional interactions between members of couples gives insight into how technology meets (or fails to meet) these communication needs.
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    Social Integration in Agile User Experience: Building Social Capital in Agile User Experience Software Teams
    Barksdale, Jeremy Totton (Virginia Tech, 2013-08-27)
    As the practice of software engineering matures, project teams are leveraging the expertise of those with a background in other disciplines such as user experience. This multidisciplinary collaboration has implications on how user experience is incorporated into the software they produce. It also has consequences for the interaction within the team. This research aims to address the implications and consequences by explaining and evaluating the impact of socio-cognitive factors and governance forms on agile user experience software teams. The objective is to support multidisciplinary agile user experience software teams in managing their interaction as a means to improving how user experience knowledge is managed. Results from a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) were that: a combination of trust and shared meaning are associated with the impediment of knowledge construction and dissemination; a combination of lead governance, trust, and shared meaning are associated with knowledge dissemination; and a combination of lead governance and shared meaning are associated with the impediment of knowledge use. Review from an expert review of the Team Interaction Framework were that there are benefits to using the framework and ways to ease it use, but also limitations and anticipated challenges to its application. The findings from this research suggest that each theoretical component of the framework is relevant, but it is unclear whether the structural dimension is useful when studying agile user experience teams given environment similarity across teams. The contributions of this research are the Team Interaction Framework as a guide to evaluating the social interaction in agile user experience teams, a method for assessing the social interaction in agile user experience teams via a Team Interaction Assessment, and lightweight practices for improving the social interaction in these teams.