Recent Research Findings

AI adoption in the workplace

Ever wonder how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the workplace, and how employees feel about it? We have just published a study in Communication Research that dives into this very question!

We found that factors like how well AI fits with existing work (compatibility), how beneficial it is (relative advantages), and how observable it is made people more positive about it.

Interestingly, different groups of employees reacted differently. For example, those who were already positive about AI were influenced more by the opportunity to try it out, while those who were negative were more affected by how noticeable AI's effects were and by perceived threats to job security.

For businesses, this means that understanding employees' attitudes and concerns about AI can make a big difference in how smoothly it's adopted.

Xu, S., Kee, K. F., Li, W., Yamamoto, M., & Riggs, R. E. (2023). Examining the Diffusion of Innovations from a Dynamic, Differential-Effects Perspective: A Longitudinal Study on AI Adoption Among Employees. Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502231191832

Listen to the podcast of this paper: Generated by Google NotebookLM

leveraging Machine Learning to Analyze Diversity in big data

Collaboration shines brighter with diversity. We’re thrilled to share our latest study published in the Journal of Communication! Leveraging machine learning to categorize race by authors’ last names and Shannon’s index to measure diversity, we analyzed racial diversity in co-authorship across 76,217 publications from 73 communication journals, spanning 1990 to 2023.

Key findings:

  • Collaboration diversity is positively associated with citation counts, and this effect grows stronger over time.

  • Non-White lead authors collaborate more diversely. However, White authors have seen a faster increase in collaboration diversity over the years.

  • Despite publishing in top journals at similar rates, non-White lead authors receive significantly fewer citations compared to their White counterparts.

Xu, S., Jitkajornwanich, K., David, P., Park, H., Zhao, Y., Adu, J., & Chumthong, T. (2024). A longitudinal examination of collaboration diversity among communication scholars: 1990–2023. Journal of Communication, jqae037. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae037

Listen to the podcast of this paper: Generated by Google NotebookLM