Dedicated to understanding presence and how it is communicated through teaching, research, and service.

What does it mean to be present with another person? How can we use words and visuals to engage an audience? How does communication technology facilitate and constrain our ability to communicate? These are questions that guide Jeanine’s research and teaching as a Professor in the Communication, Culture and Technology Program at Georgetown University. Her research has examined healthcare, education, and business contexts. Jeanine has taught thousands of students, and consulted with Fortune 100 companies and their leaders on effective messaging and developing presence.

Teaching

Over the past twenty years, Jeanine has taught courses in the graduate programs of the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program and the McDonough School of Business

Research

Communication technology provides the disruptive element that offers a window into the way we process and practice interaction both interpersonally and organizationally.  Jeanine's research explores multicommunicating, telemedicine, and distance education.

Executive Education

Jeanine has worked with thousands of executives within the public and private sectors including the US Senate, Pentagon, Rolls Royce, Avon, Sprint, Texas-Instruments, World Bank, AARP, American Public Transportation Association, and US Chamber of Commerce.

Jeanine is a Professor

at Georgetown University

Teaching In the

Communication, Culture & Technology Program

and the McDonough School of Business

The Communication, Culture, and Technology Program is an interdisciplinary graduate program dedicated to identifying, researching, and understanding complex problems associated with today's mediated environment.  My specific focus is exploring how organizations and individuals interact in these new spaces.

Courses I teach include:

Communication Theory and Frameworks

Students examine and learn over 40 theories that help explain how we process, produce, and understand messages. 

Qualitative Methods

Students explore interviewing, focus groups, content analysis, rhetorical analysis, and participant observation to understand complex problems. 

Communication Technologies & Organizations

Organizations are constituted through conversations.  Communication technologies have transformed how we address internal and external stakeholders.  In this class we explore blogs, social media platforms, wikis, intranets, and individual communication technologies and how they relate to interaction, decision making, group formation, crisis situations, and strategy.

Digital Presence & Strategic Persuasion

Students create outward facing electronic portfolios based on reflection and development of narratives focused towards the need of identified external audiences.

Introduction to Communication, Culture, and Technology:  CCTP 505

New CCT students explore interdisciplinary problem solving and methods.

Within the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, my courses explore persuasion, conflict resolution, and the impact of new media on organizational and interpersonal communication. When leading executive programs, I try to provide concrete skills and strategies for delivering information and messages as well as specific tools for managing difficult conversations. The following courses describe areas that my students and I explore together:

Leadership Communication

Influence has never been more challenging.  We are bombarded by messages.   Executives must be able to develop a clear message that is relevant and audience focused.  This development requires the ability to listen, understand your audience, craft a message, and deliver it through a channel that will resonate.  During this course we will explore listening to understand, conflict styles, persuasion strategies, and argument development for use via interpersonal, group, and written channels.  This class will help you make the most of your opportunities to frame and communicate your message to a range of audiences that include contexts that are supportive, difficult, or indifferent.

Navigating Difficult Conversations

Effective dialogue is one of the single most important activities of leaders today.  Whether you are confronting a team member who is not keeping commitments, critiquing a colleague’s work, disagreeing with a spouse about financial decisions, or telling someone no, critical conversations are often avoided or handled in clumsy ways.  The elementary and high school context provides many challenges to conversations because of the pace of the day, the intensity of the emotion involved, and the lack of transparency within different audience segments.   This course will provide the theory underpinning these conversations, diagram their structure, and provide specific strategies for approaching them successfully. 

My research explores the use of communication technologies within interpersonal and organizational relationships.  Specifically, I am interested in the ways that communication technologies disrupt our patterns of interaction and provide windows into the way we communicate.  I have studied the use of communication technologies to engage in multiple conversations at any one time, the technology within healthcare settings to support doctor and patient interaction, and emerging uses of new media to engage audiences. 

For a complete list of articles, please see my CV

Social Presence  Attention to our messages seems to be vanishing.  Whether it is in our workplace, our teams, our customers, our families, or our friends, it is increasingly more difficult to break through the digital devices that get in the way of communication.  Additionally, the ubiquity of digital devices means that people are often participating in multiple conversations at once – or multicommunicating.  As a result, your ability to be socially present with an audience requires first an intentional approach to attentional presence.  How do you craft and control your communication taking into consideration other conversations that are going on simultaneously?   Do you ask for the technology to be put away?  Establish ground rules?  What are your tactical choices when facing ubiquitous digital communications?  And what about using them to your advantage—how can you facilitate information sharing in the midst of this over-mediated context?  Jeanine's research provides guidance by exploring four primary communication choices for attentional presence available to communicators.  

Multicommunicating describes the participation in multiple conversations at any one time and is facilitated by the use of new media.

I am interested in the impact of multicommunicating on our presence.

Successful and Unsuccessful Multicommunication Episodes: Engaging in Dialogue or Juggling Messages? We all do it, but sometimes we do it more successfully than others. We’re talking about multicommunicating—or engaging in more than one conversation at a time -- from the perspective of 201 MBA students. We found that they consider a variety of reasons for labeling a particular episode as “unsuccessful,” like making communication errors as a sign they were juggling too many conversations.

Multicommunicating: A Practice Whose Time Has Come? Here, we introduce, define, and distinguish the term multicommunicating to describe the concept of overlapping conversations, an increasingly common occurrence in the technology-enriched workplace. Evolving and advanced technology has given us this ability, and it’s time to formally study it to benefit both the research literature and the use of it in workplace and daily life settings.

The Business Communicator as Presence Allocator: Multi-Communicating, Equivocality, and Status at Work. Here, we introduce the concept of multicommunicating and report two studies that explore its influencing factors. Through the lenses of social presence and media richness, we describe employees as trying to maximize presence. We found that complexity of the message and the status of each partner communicating affected multicommunication.

Real presence: Challenges and opportunities for a wired generation. How can today’s culture of communication devices help inform our understanding of presence with each other -- and with God?

No cellphone? No internet? So much less stress. We wanted to hear what students thought of their own ultra-connected digital lives, and we found that they were reflective, thoughtful, and more self-aware than many people think!

Doctor & Patient Interaction - The way that doctors and patients communicate with each other has a tremendous influence on health outcomes, decision-making, and treatment.  Jeanine studies how residents reflect on their communication with patients using a password protected blog.  This research has provided interesting insights about what matters to doctors and how they make decisions.  

What residents say about communicating with patients:  A preliminary examination of doctor-to-doctor interaction.  This paper explores the implementation of the blog created to allow residents to watch their doctor and patient interactions and talk about them in an asynchronous environment.  Doctors provide support to each other about their interactions and often describe the challenges of health literacy, time pressures, and noncompliance.

Computer Mediated Communication initially described the use of computers to support interaction.  As digital media has expanded past simply the use of computers as devices, this area has also been called mediated communication. I have published many articles in this area. 

The ones that I have found particularly interesting have all been in the healthcare area:

Can messages make a difference? The association between E-mail messages and health outcomes in diabetes patients. This investigation examined the impact of social support messages on patient health outcomes. Using data gathered from healthcare providers’ emails to patients and the amount of emotional and social support they contained, we found that supportive messages correlated significantly with improved health.

Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal social support: Cancer and older adults. One of the ways that cancer patients cope or adapt to their illness is through socially supportive communicative interactions and relationships. We explore the patients’ desired social support, the social support they receive, and the relationship through which they receive it. In addition, we argue that computer-mediated social support can be superior to face-to-face social support.

Developing an optimal match within online communities: An exploration of CMC support communities and traditional support. This study investigates the complementary nature of face-to-face and computer-mediated social support and the development of a context through which hyperpersonal communication can develop within online communities -- here, online cancer support communities. We compared online participants' perceptions of illness support from the list with the support they received from a nonmediated relationship. Respondents participated more within the online community only when they perceived that the depth and support that they received from the online community was high, and when the depth and support they received from the specific person in their life was low.

Computer-based telecommunication among and illness-related community:  Design, delivery, functions, and early use of HIGHnet.  This study was one of the first of its kind, prior to wide adoption of the internet, we studied a group of patients with hemophilia and their use of computer based support system using a dial up modem.  We found that computer mediated communication provided an excellent mechanism for providing support and education to patients.   Training on the technology proved critical to use.

For a complete list of articles, visit my CV

Telemedicine describes the use of communication techology to provide healthcare.  My studies of telemedicine have explored the impact of a mediated environment on doctor patient interaction.  Most of these studies have been exploring videoconferencing technology in synchronous settings addressing chronic and acute conditions. 

My early telemedicine research explored the prison setting.

Telepsychiatry as a case study of presence: Do you know what you are missing? This study explores the use of videoconferencing technology as a means of providing mental health consultations across distances. We found that the telecommunications link compared favorably to face-to-face encounters in assessments by physicians and patients, but there’s still a false sense of presence which keeps some of the relationship at bay.

Research continued to explore chronic care, specifically use with patients with diabetes.

Media attitudes vs. media use: The contribution of context to the communication environment in telemedicine. Here, we used media attitudes and media use research to explore patient and health care practitioner attitudes toward telemedicine interactions via videoconferencing technology.

For a complete list of articles, see my CV

Teaching executives is both challenging and rewarding.  A professor has a relatively short time to win over a class and convince them that the content that she has will immediately help them contribute positively to their bottom line.  The topic of communication particularly requires that applied and tool-based approach.  Executives should leave every one of my classes with specific strategies and tools for approaching the way they communicate at work and at home.  That is my primary goal and my means of assessing myself.

Companies I have had the opportunity to work with include:

AARP, APTA, Abengoa, Alion, American Veterinary College, Areva, Avon, Bayer, Cienna Communications, Community Connections, Clark Construction, Community Wealth Ventures, DC Public Schools, DuPont, Heritage Foundation, International Security Managers Association, NSC Clearinghouse, Marriott, MedStar Health, Microsoft, Mount Washington Hospital, National Association of Broadcasters, National Journal, Nextel, Pace Global Energy, Panasonic, the Pentagon, Rolls Royce, School Nutrition Association, Smithsonian, Sprint, US Chamber of Commerce, US Fish and Wildlife, US Senate, Veterans Association, and the World Bank.

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