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Working women diagnosed with cancer face difficult decisions about disclosing personal information. A 2017 survey for Cancer and Careers, a non-profit organization assisting cancer patients and survivors with finding and continuing employment, found that women are more likely than men to share their diagnosis with work colleagues, and do so more often to feel supported by co-workers. However, disclosure guidelines for communication about having cancer are difficult to establish, as they may vary widely depending on the individual and the situation. Most research about health self-disclosure has focused on the initial decision to divulge that one has an illness and on the depth of that initial disclosure. The current study was designed to further describe how working women navigate disclosures not only during the initial diagnosis, but throughout treatment and into recovery to gain needed social support. Using the typology of social support and the tenets of Communication Privacy Management Theory, the goal of this study is to share individual narratives of how working women change privacy rules to procure the type of social support needed in each stage of their experience.

This case illustrates the communication processes involved in developing resilience when facing cancer diagnosis and treatment in the workplace. Beyond just the initial decision about whether to share the news of cancer, individuals enact ongoing communication behaviors that may enhance or detract from their ability to build resilience when going through this level of hardship, loss, and trauma. The case describes communication choices made and the dialectics faced by two women during breast cancer treatment in two different workplaces. The five communication processes of Patrice Buzzanell's communication theory of resilience are described in some detail and applied to these cases. The goal is for managers and others in workplace settings to gain a better understanding of ways to communicate that help someone going through a hardship, loss, or trauma build higher resilience and to better understand the communal nature of resilience in organizational settings.

Becoming a caregiver for two elderly parents in a remote rural area with limited internet access while also teaching online increased the author's awareness of students' challenges and interpersonal needs in online educational modalities. She realized how often students' interpersonal needs, as well as teachers' needs, go unmet in the online classroom. Students' messages may be misread when they are reaching out to teachers in attempt to meet their interpersonal needs through the teacher-student relationship. She argues that online teachers would be wise to rely on William Schutz's Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation to inform their interactions with students. Rather than dismissing students' sometimes clumsily sought or expressed needs, responding to their needs as one human being to another creates relationships that retain and strengthen students' resilience. Vulnerability as a teacher and exploration of our shared “humanness” in all roles within higher education leads to a conclusion that calls for more direct interpersonal contact between teachers and students, not less.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO TALK?: THE IMPACT OF MEDIA AND INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION ON KNOWLEDGE ABOUT CANDIDATES AND LIKELIHOOD OF VOTING Donna M. Elkins July 22, 2009 Scholars have long considered the role media play in shaping levels of political knowledge and voting behavior. The specific context of this study is the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. It examines the influence of newspaper reading, television viewing, Internet use and interpersonal communication on levels of candidate issue and background knowledge and likelihood to vote. The results testify to the influence of media in citizens' level of knowledge about presidential candidates. The results also provide a confirmation of the limited impact of Internet campaigning in the 2000 presidential election (Weaver & Drew, 2001) and show increased impact in the 2004 election. In addition, the results confirm the significance of interpersonal discussion to heightening levels of political knowledge (Feldman & Price, 2008; Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1995). Interpersonal communication about the campaign was also a significant factor predicting whether a citizen would vote in both of these presidential election years.