Engaging Theories in Interpersonal Communication (Baxter, Braithwaite, 2008)

Engaging Theories in Interpersonal Communication (Baxter, Braithwaite, 2008)

Engaging Theories in Interpersonal Communication: Multiple Perspectives highlights theories used to guide interpersonal communication research, featuring chapters written by leading scholars of interpersonal communication. Presenting both classic and cutting-edge issues, the book organizes theories into three clusters-theories that are individually-centered; theories that are focused on discourse and interaction processes; and theories that examine how communication functions in personal relationships.

Key Features:

Presents chapters written by the scholars who developed the theories or who use the theories extensively in their own research

Begins with an overview chapter written by the editors that lays out their perspective on theory and the current landscape of theory in interpersonal communication

Offers a parallel organizational structure in all chapters to ease comparison across theories

Includes overviews provided by the editors to help readers integrate and digest the multiple theories covered in the volume

Intended Audience:
Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in such courses Applied Communication, Communication Theory, Communication Research, Interpersonal Communication, Personal Relationships, and Relational Communication in the fields of speech and human communication, family studies, and social psychology.

p.53 Constructivism views humans as agents who interpret experiences and act on the basis of these interpretations. People are active sense-makers who construe the world through varied interpretive schemes. Some of these... come from individual experience... In constructivism, the primary cognitive structures through which we interpret events are termed (following Kelly, 1955) "personal constructs".

p.54 Our actions are shaped by interpretations generated through our cognitive schemes... People's actions are strategic because they are planned and executed with the intention of achieving a goal (or goals). Many of the goals that guide our actions may be implicit. We may have little awareness of our pursuit of them (Kellerman, 1992; Motley, 1990).

p.78 The way in which information is processed is called "computational thinking" (Zagacki et al.)... Honeycutt and Cantrill discussed how scripts are a type of automatic pilot providing guidelines on how to act when one encounters new situations. Scripts are activated mindlessly and created through [imagined interactions] as people envision contingency plans for actions.

p.85 Future research in Imagined Interaction Theory is limitless. [JLJ - Imagine that.]