“You can get clarity that other students may feel the same way you do”: exploring students’ decision-making around and motivations for engaging in evaluative talk about instructors

Author(s)

Maria Hannah, Ohio University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-30-2022

Journal Title

Communication Education

Volume Number

72

Issue Number

3

First Page

237

Last Page

256

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2022.2149829

Version

Post-print: the version of the article having undergone peer review but prior to being published

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC License

Disciplines

Communication

Abstract

This multimethod study was conducted to explore students’ decision-making to approach or avoid interactions with peers about instructors and investigate motivations for instructional dissent. Participants (N = 124 college students) responded to measures of instructional dissent behavior and motivations for social gossip, then responded to an open-ended question about the risks and benefits of talking about instructors with other students. Quantitative results indicated that expressive and vengeful dissent were related to the following motives for gossiping about instructors: information gathering and validation, group protection, negative influence and social enjoyment. Regression analyses revealed negative influence and group protection account for unique variance in expressive dissent while social enjoyment and negative influence account for unique variance in vengeful dissent. Qualitative results suggest students’ decision-making to engage in interactions with other students about instructors is informed by concerns for self and others and reflect social motivations for gossip. The implications of these findings on instructor and student communication are discussed.

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Communication Education on November 30, 2022, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2022.2149829

Digital USD Citation

Hannah, Maria, "“You can get clarity that other students may feel the same way you do”: exploring students’ decision-making around and motivations for engaging in evaluative talk about instructors" (2022). Communication: Faculty Scholarship. 21.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/commstudies_facpub/21