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This study aims to understand the role of technology in relationship maintenance among romantic partners.

It takes a qualitative, inductive approach and collected data from in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who are married or in cohabiting relationships.

This study supports the extension of relationship maintenance typology derived from face-to-face relationship studies to technology-mediated communication, but highlights how technology use transforms the implementation of maintenance behaviors. Technology helps couples coordinate tasks and keep in touch with friends and families. Although technology-mediated communication cannot replace face-to-face interactions in relationship talk and sharing in-depth feelings, it plays an important role in redefining the ways in which couples interact positively, maintain mutual understanding, and secure the future of the relationship. Moreover, this study identifies a new maintenance behavior, communication coordination. These maintenance behaviors reflect a tension between maintaining connectivity and managing the boundary between work and home and between the public and private spheres.

This study builds on previous work on technology use and relationship maintenance, but takes a different qualitative, inductive approach to address the limitations in the survey research dominant in the literature. It helps us understand the advantages and challenges in maintaining relationships in the digital age and also explores the factors that influence the patterns of technology use in relationship maintenance.

Dirk Ahlers studied computer science at the Carl-von-Ossietzky-University Oldenburg, Germany. In 2005, he started working as a research assistant at the OFFIS Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg where he conducted projects in mobility and geospatial retrieval. While working at OFFIS, he also pursued his PhD with a topic in geographic information retrieval. He is currently working at UNITEC, a private university in Tegucigalpa, Honduras where he researches potential for local search for the case of a country with little Web coverage, challenging informal address schemes, and uncertain location data. His research interests are geospatial Web information retrieval, search engines, location-based services, Web technology, mobility, and everything geo. E-mail: dirk@dhere.de

Research on relational maintenance of long-distance or cross-residential romantic relationships is limited. Moreover, relatively little is known about relational maintenance among non-marital intimate partners in later life, many of whom prefer to live-apart-together (LAT) rather than cohabit. This research paper examines how older adults from the United States maintain their romantic relationships across residences. The authors conducted a grounded theory study drawing on interviews collected from 22 older adults in LAT relationships. The data revealed that older LAT partners engage in a process of safeguarding autonomy to maintain their partnerships and relationship satisfaction. Two broad strategies were identified: upholding separateness and reshaping expectations. While safeguarding autonomy was paramount, participants also emphasized the importance of having a flexible mindset about the physical copresence of their relationships. The findings have implications for practice, suggesting that creating an interdependent couple-identity may undermine, or at least have little bearing on, the relationship stability of older LAT couples. Future research is needed to determine how LAT experiences among racially/ethnically or socioeconomically diverse samples might differ.

This study investigated how college students’ pace of life and perceptions of communication technologies shape the choices they make when engaging in mediated communication with their parents.

We conducted 21 interviews to explore how students’ understandings of various communication technologies, the rules and patterns of technology use in their families, and the circumstances surrounding their use of technologies while at college influence the number and type of media they use to communicate with their parents.

We found that perceived busyness and generational differences played a large role in limiting technologies used, with environmental factors, the purpose of communication, and complexity of message also contributing to technology choices.

This study extends media multiplexity theory by investigating media choice and relational tie strength in an intergenerational context.

For work organizations and their members, establishing and maintaining mutually satisfying employment relationships is a fundamental concern. The importance that scholars attach to employment relationships is reflected in research streams that explore the optimal design of strategic human resource management systems, the nature of psychological contract fulfillment and violation, and the factors associated with achieving person-environment fit, among others. Generally missing from theory and research pertaining to employment relationships is the perspective of individuals who reside at the employee-employer interface – managerial leaders. We argue that, for managerial leaders, a pervasive concern involves the tangible and intangible resource requirements of specific employees. We then provide the groundwork for study of the leader’s perspective on employment relationships by proposing a model that identifies how employees come to be perceived as low versus high maintenance and how these perceptions, in turn, influence leader cognition, affect, and behavior.

We analyze how institutional persistence unfolds. Building on an historical analysis of 3,307 bottle labels in the Bordeaux wine community, France, between 1924 and 2005, we find that the persistence of a chateau tradition requires considerable effort at maintenance. Instead of greater compression and taken-for-grantedness, we propose that expansion along multimodal carriers provides a marker of a deepening institutionalization. We underscore the role of community organizations in enabling a wine tradition to persist. The implications of our findings for institutional theory and multimodality research are discussed.

The social integration of students within a campus community is vital in enhancing their college experiences. Researchers have sought to determine how best to promote successful social integration for university students. Traditionally, on-campus orientations and residence hall activities have been used to foster student social integration. However, Facebook and other social networking sites (SNSs) can be used for social integration among students in ways that were never before possible. It is important that student-affairs professionals explore the supportive roles for this that SNSs like Facebook might play, since successful student adjustment within a campus is positively correlated with student retention rates.

College students are already using Facebook to bolster their social networks within the university, but it is worth considering the advantages and disadvantages of promoting the use of SNSs for social integration. Facebook is favored because it offers low levels of self-disclosure in social interactions, it increases the social capital of the university, and it offers students with a unique means of acquiring academic support from both their professors and their peers. Unfortunately, extensive Facebook use can also create a social skills deficit in students, lead students to experience information overload, and cause them to shirk their academic responsibilities.

Facebook is neither a panacea for student engagement nor a signal of the end of meaningful interpersonal connections on campus. Student-affairs professionals should become aware of the ways that students engage with SNSs to leverage opportunities for furthering student integration while remaining aware of the limitations for community building that SNSs present.

Mediated communication can be thought of as a mediated discourse, involving the knowledge of language, symbols, metaphors, and shared meaning. We describe here a funded study where we investigate the effectiveness of text messaging as a learning tool for higher level courses and provide insight into the use of texting as a supplemental, yet critical learning tool in the teaching and learning process. The design, based on the Vygotskian constructivist paradigm, where learning can happen in social and collaborative interactions, assesses three types of communication within student groups, (1) face-to-face (FTF), (2) using only Instant Messenger (IM), and (3) using only cell phone texting. For analyzing the IM and text exchanges we follow the recommendations of Thurlow (2003) using thematic referential coding schemes. Using the concept of Grice (1975), we detect the presence of conversational maxims and implicature and also the presence of adjacency pairs (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, 1974), indicating turn-taking in IM and texting conversations. Results from content and conversational analyses indicate that while there is an innate preference for FTF discussions among participants, participants felt that IM and texting would be useful if used intermittently and as a supplementary learning tool in classrooms to mediate discussions. Participants also felt that IM and texting focused them on tasks and despite any frustrations with the technology they did gain a shared understanding of the subject matter and gained new and conceptual knowledge. The findings from this research can be used to explore the use of an additional dimension of learning in school and university classrooms.