Research Statement

Derek R. Lane

Communication when taken in its simple message form involves the domains and agents of message production and message reception—two processes that are closely intertwined and which together help explain the role of the individual in communication. My research interests can be classified in the broad area of message reception and processing. I am predominantly concerned with how human beings come to understand, organize, and use the information contained in face-to-face and mediated messages, the ways information is combined, and how this organization comes to affect attitude and behavior change.

My research program is built around the study of message reception and seeks to identify mechanisms that generate the degree of impact of communication on other’s behavior or cognitive/emotive states. As such, it provides strategic direction for increasing or decreasing the effects of communication—especially in instructional and health contexts.

I earned my Ph.D at the University of Oklahoma in 1996 where, as the focus of my dissertation, I investigated the impact of communication occurring in collaborative learning teams on student cognitive outcomes—the results of which I have disseminated to colleagues at local, regional, national, and international venues over the past six years. It was during graduate school that I also began testing the Elaboration Likelihood Model developed by social psychologists Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, which helps to clarify explanations of how individuals make judgments in communication. One empirical study involving the ELM, Obtaining classroom goals: Revisiting the impact of student involvement and perceived teacher immediacy on affective and cognitive learning, was presented at the International Communication Conference in Chicago and received the Robert J. Kibler Award for Top Paper in the Instructional Development Division. I was unaware of the value that these early studies would have in my role as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky.

Since arriving in the Department of Communication at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 1996 I have continued to focus on message reception as it applies to instructional communication contexts and have conducted several studies with colleagues that include the development of a context-free measure of teacher concerns, preliminary assessment of student perceptions of rules and roles in instructional contexts, and a review and assessment of national educational trends in communication instruction. In addition, after presenting results of my dissertation at a Teaching and Learning colloquia, I was invited to collaborate with Eric Grulke (Chemical Engineering) and Dan Beert (Interior Design) to test the communicative effects of physical environment on engineering team performance in a model setting. The results of our study were published in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2001. I enjoy working with colleagues on research teams—especially when I am responsible for data management and analysis and have a couple of studies published in Communication Education and one in Communication Research Reports. In Fall 2002 another collaborative study was published in the American Communication Journal that focused on music as persuasion (acjournal.org/holdings/vol6/iss1/special/bostrom.htm). In addition, results of our research studies have been presented at regional, national, and international conferences.

It is especially rewarding when publishers such as Waveland Press, Harcourt Brace, Tapestry Press, and Oxford University Press recognize the pedagogical value of our message reception research and publish our instructional materials.

My interest in mediated messages and their effects on message reception also created several opportunities for me to collaborate with colleagues within the College of Communications and Information Studies who share a similar interest in new technologies. For example, working with a colleague in Telecommunications, we developed a new conceptual framework for organizing communication and information technologies. The manuscript is currently under review in one of our discipline’s most prestigious journals, Communication Theory. I also published a study as first author related to a practical and evaluative pedagogy regarding the centrality of communication education in classroom computer-mediated communication in Communication Education in July of 2001 and am looking forward to conducting studies that assess the value and impact of distance education on student learning outcomes. I recently completed a preliminary literature review that was presented at the National Communication Association Conference in New Orleans in November 2002 that I am preparing for submission to the Journal of Applied Communication Research.

My graduate students also seem eager to extend my instructional research agenda focusing on both technology and message reception. Dan Chaney successfully defended his Master’s Thesis on June 22, 2000 that focused on “Improving instructional communication using an active student-centric systems approach: Investigating the relationship between learning styles and technology preferences.” Jayne Violette defended her Doctoral Dissertation, which I am proud to have chaired, on July 22, 2002 which was titled “Immediately clarifying classroom interactions: An examination of teacher immediacy, teacher clarity, teacher gender and student gender on student affective, cognitive, and behavioral learning.”

Perhaps the most exciting opportunities I have been given to extend my research agenda as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky have been as co-principal investigator, co-investigator, and principal evaluator on several federally funded extramural grants which focus primarily on health communication. Faculty in our department (e.g., Lewis Donohew, Phil Palmgreen, Rick Zimmerman, Nancy Harrington) have been incredibly successful in obtaining extramural funding. Currently our research involves individual difference variables (e.g., need for sensation, need for cognition, impulsive decision-making) and is supported by extramural grants provided by several federal funding agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Science Foundation.

I have provided complete descriptions of funded research elsewhere in my dossier but it is useful to summarize how these grants help to extend my research agenda. I am actively involved in a $1.8 million dollar federally funded (NIDA) collaborative health communication research project where I am a co-principal investigator with Drs. Harrington, Donohew, Zimmerman, and Kelly involving the creation and testing of persuasive strategies for effective anti-marijuana messages within the context of theories of information exposure and information processing. This research involves integrating the Activation Model of Information Exposure with the Elaboration Likelihood Model (recall my early research in graduate school). Two manuscripts are currently under review from this project: one with Communication Monographs and the other with Media Psychology.

In the summer of 2001 I was part of a $3.2 million dollar research effort funded by NIMH to modify the CDC endorsed "Reducing the Risk" curriculum where I helped to design and test an interactive safe sex curriculum which is currently being taught in several rural Kentucky high schools. The National Institute of Nursing Research awarded our team $2 million dollars over the next five years—beginning January 2003—to study strategies for improving school learning environments and HIV prevention.

I am also the principal evaluator on a U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant of which Mark Denomme is Project Coordinator that partners modern technology with teacher professional development activities designed to empower teachers with technology capabilities that will enhance student achievement, curriculum integration, and teacher professional development standards in the field of mathematics. This study provides an especially rich source of data for publication.

My research agenda focuses on message reception as it applies to instructional and health contexts. Of particular importance to my research are how information is organized and managed and ultimately how this organization affects knowledge structures and the cognitive system. It should be apparent by my curriculum vitae that I am especially interested in the effects of communication—both face-to-face and mediated—on learning, health, and relational outcomes in training and instructional contexts. My most recent investigations are detailed elsewhere in the dossier but include such studies as “The Influences of Sensation Seeking, Need for Cognition, and Perceived Message Cognition Value (PMCV): Dimensions and Validation of a PMCV Scale,” “Investigating diversity and multicultural borderlands in graduate communication courses: Evaluation of a Preparing Future Communication Faculty curriculum,” and "Moving Beyond Glorified High-Tech Correspondence Schools: Strategies and Instruments to Assess the Value and Impact of Distance Education."

I am eager to extend on previous studies and continue with programmatic research at the University of Kentucky related to how human beings come to understand, organize, and use the information contained in face-to-face and mediated messages, the ways information is combined, and how this organization comes to affect attitude and behavior change. Furthermore, I am absolutely convinced that as we become more successful at explaining (and ultimately, predicting) the impact of messages on behavior change, we will not only produce richer and more productive theory, we will significantly influence instructional and health-related outcomes.