Keri K Stephens
Biographic Data
| ID | 140499 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Keri K Stephens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Keri K |
| FAMILY NAME | Stephens |
| SIGNATURE | STEPHENS K K |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9526-2331 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Preparing for the Extreme Cold: Linking Motivations, Water Infrastructure, and Communication Practices to Protective Actions
There is limited understanding of the factors that motivate people to take protective action to safeguard water infrastructure during extreme cold weather. Guided by Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and using a survey deployed in a major city in the USA ( N = 343) that is predominately Hispanic (people with origins from Mexico and often Spanish speaking), we found cognitive, demographic, and experiential factors explained 42% of the variance in…
Indoor Human–Mobile Robot Encounters: A Transdisciplinary Study on Perceived Safety
Despite the rise of mobile robot deployments in community settings, the perceived safety of cohabitants remains understudied in many domains. To address this gap, we perform a study to identify elements of indoor human–mobile robot encounters that impact perceived safety. This study evaluates the effects of robot movement behavior and the number of robots nearby on perceived safety of participants. Further, this article investigates how the prese…
Clear or compliant? The tension between regulatory requirements and public comprehension in boil water advisories
Risk communications should provide clear messages to the public so people can take appropriate actions to protect their health and safety. Boil Water Advisories (BWAs), for instance, help safeguard communities from water quality issues. This study evaluates BWA effectiveness by analyzing 85 advisories from four Texas metropolitan areas, collected from press releases and social media platforms (e.g., Facebook). The evaluation focused on two main a…
Communicating safety: The impact of warning signs and messages on reducing risky driving in flood conditions
Vehicle-related flood fatalities are common, and past research has largely focused on psychological, experiential, and sociodemographic factors that contribute to driver safety behavior. Less is known about how flood-related road signs and messages are understood and acted on. This study ( n = 1027) addresses that gap by examining how three factors—past exposure to warning signs, comprehension of those signs, and exposure to flood-related risk me…
Sustainable Blue: A Participatory Spatial Decision Support System for Fishery Management
Improved decision-making capabilities are essential for sustaining fisheries, particularly as fisheries managers must consider the complex interdependencies among fishing efforts, changes in ocean physics and biogeochemistry, and decision-making processes. These considerations are critical for maximizing the long-term benefits of marine resources in a rapidly changing climate. Current decision-support tools for fisheries management often fail to …
One HPV Vaccination Message Does Not Fit All: Differences Between Young Adults Deciding to Be Vaccinated and Parents Deciding for Their Children
Despite decades of research on HPV vaccination, the U.S. has still not achieved optimal vaccination rates. This study investigated two different message strategies (agency assignment and deviance regulation marking) for encouraging HPV vaccination in two different populations: parents considering vaccinating their children and young adults (18-26) considering vaccinating themselves. Using a 2 × 3 × 3 online experiment, this study examined the dif…
Intercultural disaster communication and community resilience: Examining post-hurricane communication in communities with limited English-speaking proficiency
This study theorizes the intercultural communication mechanisms that link disaster information systems and resources with residents who have limited English proficiency (LEP). By surveying 572 victims of Hurricane Florence (2018), Hurricane Beryl, and Hurricane Helene (2024), we employed PLS-SEM to test a path model that consists of community storytelling networks, geo-ethnic media use (English-language and non-English-language media use), percei…
Strengthening individual preparedness for extreme cold weather through enhanced messaging, risk perception, and trust
Using Q-methodology to discover disaster resilience perspectives from local residents
Enhancing power system resilience to extreme weather events: A qualitative assessment of winter storm Uri
In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri left 11 million people in Texas without power, caused widespread water outages, and inflicted billions of dollars in damage. While the severity of this event was primarily caused by electricity generator failures, it was made worse by the decisions of utilities and state regulators before, during, and after the event. This study seeks to (1) evaluate the procedures and decisions made by electric utilities during…
Closing the Climate Gap: Insights from Local Knowledge for Climate Adaptation Planning
Problem, research strategy, and findings Although theory and practice contend that local knowledge improves climate adaptation planning, little research has documented the kinds of information shared by residents. Planners can use this information to assist in the creation of planning processes and tools, as well as investigate how local knowledge contributes—or does not contribute—to planning outcomes. We developed a provisional typology of how …
Rectifying a flood data desert one step at a time: A co-created, engaged scholarship approach
Attention to public problems is increasingly being driven by data. Given that data is used as a communication tool, a lack of data may further exacerbate existing inequities when allocating public resources, especially around infrastructure. Using a co-creation and power-sharing approach to community involvement, this field report describes how a rural community and academic partners worked together to collect photo and video data to create a com…
Community resilience in a cascading disaster: Enacting a hybrid hyperlocal community of practices (HCoPs) through online/offline communication
When multiple types of disasters occur sequentially – a cascading disaster – certain adaptive capacities might become temporarily ineffective or invalid. Advancing an understanding of community resilience in the context of cascading disasters, the current study provides empirical evidence of a hybrid hyperlocal community of practice (HCoP), a novel communicative process facilitated by hybrid organizing, during the 2021 Texas, U.S.A. winter storm.…
Leveraging water utility customer reporting for resilient operations and management
Human-AI Teaming During an Ongoing Disaster: How Scripts Around Training and Feedback Reveal this is a Form of Human-Machine Communication
Humans play an integral role in identifying important information from social media during disasters. While human annotation of social media data to train machine learning models is often viewed as human-computer interaction, this study interrogates the ontological boundary between such interaction and human-machine communication. We conducted multiple interviews with participants who both labeled data to train machine learning models and correct…
Tracking the post-disaster evolution of water infrastructure resilience: A study of the 2021 Texas winter storm
Investigating ways to better communicate flood risk: The tight coupling of perceived flood map usability and accuracy
Flooding is increasing worldwide, and many current maps and models available to help people understand their risk are not designed with risk communication best practices in mind. This study is one of the first to combine comparative U.S. flood modelling approaches with measures of perceived flood map usability and accuracy to begin to understand how maps may be used to communicate flood risk. Using a survey of residents in Texas, U.S. counties af…
Mobile work, mobility, and mobile devices: Responding to a societal shift
Shelter shopping: Where the built environment and social systems meet
Throw me a lifeline: Articulating mobile social network dispersion and the social construction of risk in rescue communication
This research develops a model of mobile social network dispersion in rescue communication, and illustrates how people use a combination of mobile and social media, along with real-time communication, in their decision-making process. Guided by established research on smartphones, social media, and affordances, we used a qualitative approach and conducted field interviews that included photo-elicitation interview (PEI) techniques to examine parti…
Negotiating Mobile Communication in Customer-Facing Work
There appear to be formal and informal rules associated with using mobile devices in view of customers. This chapter examines many types of customer-facing workers including waitstaff, childcare workers, teachers, telephone fundraisers, retail associates, and fast-food staff. Many customer-facing workers have limited reachability during their workday because they’re accessible only during windows of time that correspond to their breaks. Quite oft…
Early Mobile Use
For many people, whose first experiences using mobiles were between 2000 and 2010, it’s hard to imagine a time when friends and loved ones didn’t have mobiles or when people didn’t have access to one another after work hours. This chapter opens in California with a story of Los Angeles traffic; it was terrible, even back in 1990. Some companies wanted to make their mobile staff more productive, so they provided them with car phones—permanently mo…
Byod Policies as a Negotiable Control Lever . . . or Not
Enterprise consumerization describes how technologies purchased by “enterprises” (i.e., organizations or companies) became consumer products. Mobile devices fall into this category because, as they became more affordable, individuals purchased them and brought them to work. As this trend proliferated, organizations had to protect their proprietary data, but their employees were clamoring for access to Wi-Fi. Their response: create bring-your-own-…
Theoretical Notions of Control—A Mobile Tug-of-War
Communication, information, and organizational control are tightly entwined; this chapter explores the theoretical literature that elaborates on these concepts. The early years of car phones and cell phones were a time when people used their devices to reach others. But that changed as smartphones—those with Internet access—started diffusing into organizations and throughout society. Now, people with those same devices could access data and share…
Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication
In this book, the author shows how employees, organizations, and even friends and family are struggling to understand how the expected norms for mobile-communication connectedness function when people are working. Until the early 2000s workplaces provided most of the computers and portable devices that employees used to do their jobs and communicate with others. Now, people bring their own mobile devices to work, use them to circumvent official o…
Reconceptualizing Communication Overload and Building a Theoretical Foundation: Communication Overload
This study reconceptualizes communication overload and builds a theoretical foundation to understand how this phenomenon applies in contemporary life. We build theory by relying on past research and using a Q-method to capture the subjective perspectives of people who experience communication overload. In our refinement of this abstract concept, we identified seven dimensions composing communication overload. The dimensions included: compromising…
The Successive Use of Information and Communication Technologies at Work
Past research on information and communication technology (ICT) use has largely assumed that people use only one ICT per task. Yet completing a task often requires a mix of ICTs used over time. ICT succession theory argues that by examining the modalities—for example, auditory, visual, and textual—found in ICTs today, we can predict how to use follow-up or successive ICTs to complete tasks efficiently and effectively. The six propositions that fo…
Organizational Communication in Emergencies: Using Multiple Channels and Sources to Combat Noise and Capture Attention
This study relies on information theory, social presence, and source credibility to uncover what best helps people grasp the urgency of an emergency. We surveyed a random sample of 1,318 organizational members who received multiple notifications about a large-scale emergency. We found that people who received 3 redundant messages coming through at least 1 synchronous communication source—for example, phone or face-to-face communication—perceived …
Throw me a lifeline: Articulating mobile social network dispersion and the social construction of risk in rescue communication
This research develops a model of mobile social network dispersion in rescue communication, and illustrates how people use a combination of mobile and social media, along with real-time communication, in their decision-making process. Guided by established research on smartphones, social media, and affordances, we used a qualitative approach and conducted field interviews that included photo-elicitation interview (PEI) techniques to examine parti…
Simultaneity, Sequentiality, and Speed: Organizational Messages About Multiple-Task Completion
Journal Article Simultaneity, Sequentiality, and Speed: Organizational Messages about Multiple-Task Completion Get access Keri K. Stephens, Keri K. Stephens 1Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA 1Corresponding author: Keri Stephens; Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jaehee K. Cho, Jaehee K. Cho 2Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina a…
Understanding situated survey refusal: Applying Sensemaking and Sensegiving to Ethnostatistics
This study develops a behind-the-scenes understanding of the people and organizations that are depended upon to provide survey data. A data collection event- in this study, a pilot coverage measurement survey conducted after the United States 2010 Census-provides an ideal environment to gauge respondents' reactions to the survey process. Relying on the conceptual guidance of script formation, these reactions are studied using a focus group and in…
Frontline employees in the health clinic: Impression management multiplexing when performing in-the-round
Using Goffman's dramaturgical perspective of impression management, the present study focuses on the staged performances of frontline employees (FLEs) at a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC). Qualitative analysis reveals how FLEs in health clinics engage in staged communication to perform their jobs and facilitate patient care. Our findings highlight three overarching themes in which FLEs’ communication compounds frontstage and backstage pr…
The rhetoric of organizational stability and creativity: An Analysis of the Term 'Platform
This article analyses the term platform as it surfaced in interview data from Norway and the United States that was collected in a field research project on organizational technology use. Through an inductive analysis of the term’s use in six interviews, a conceptualization of the term reveals it to be rhetorical in nature, expressing the interplay between stability and creativity. In order to explain the rhetorical aspects we describe, the autho…
The Successive Use of Information and Communication Technologies at Work
Past research on information and communication technology (ICT) use has largely assumed that people use only one ICT per task. Yet completing a task often requires a mix of ICTs used over time. ICT succession theory argues that by examining the modalities—for example, auditory, visual, and textual—found in ICTs today, we can predict how to use follow-up or successive ICTs to complete tasks efficiently and effectively. The six propositions that fo…
Organizational Norm Congruency and Interpersonal Familiarity in E-Mail: Examining Messages From Two Different Status Perspectives
Relying on SIDE theory, this 2 × 2 experimental design tested the effects of adherence to organizational norms and interpersonal familiarity in e-mail messages from both superior and subordinate perspectives. Results reveal that using norm-congruent e-mail messages account for over 50% of the variance in both superior and subordinate attitudes toward the message and between 30% and 56% of the variance in perceptions of source credibility. Data fr…
Simultaneity, Sequentiality, and Speed: Organizational Messages About Multiple-Task Completion
Journal Article Simultaneity, Sequentiality, and Speed: Organizational Messages about Multiple-Task Completion Get access Keri K. Stephens, Keri K. Stephens 1Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA 1Corresponding author: Keri Stephens; Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jaehee K. Cho, Jaehee K. Cho 2Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina a…
The rhetoric of organizational stability and creativity: An analysis of the term ‘platform’
This article analyses the term platform as it surfaced in interview data from Norway and the United States that was collected in a field research project on organizational technology use. Through an inductive analysis of the term’s use in six interviews, a conceptualization of the term reveals it to be rhetorical in nature, expressing the interplay between stability and creativity. In order to explain the rhetorical aspects we describe, the autho…
The rhetoric of organizational stability and creativity: An Analysis of the Term 'Platform
This article analyses the term platform as it surfaced in interview data from Norway and the United States that was collected in a field research project on organizational technology use. Through an inductive analysis of the term’s use in six interviews, a conceptualization of the term reveals it to be rhetorical in nature, expressing the interplay between stability and creativity. In order to explain the rhetorical aspects we describe, the autho…
Organizational Communication in Emergencies: Using Multiple Channels and Sources to Combat Noise and Capture Attention
This study relies on information theory, social presence, and source credibility to uncover what best helps people grasp the urgency of an emergency. We surveyed a random sample of 1,318 organizational members who received multiple notifications about a large-scale emergency. We found that people who received 3 redundant messages coming through at least 1 synchronous communication source—for example, phone or face-to-face communication—perceived …
An Experimental Test of Medical Disclosure and Consent Documentation: Assessing Patient Comprehension, Self-Efficacy, and Uncertainty
Effectively conveying risks and hazards in medical disclosure and informed consent documentation is a crucial type of communication. However, existing protocols typically do not meet the needs of patients or practitioners. In the present study, we advance a reconceptualization of obtaining written informed consent by analyzing it as a process of uncertainty management rather than a matter of document readability and recall. Results of this random…
Understanding situated survey refusal: Applying Sensemaking and Sensegiving to Ethnostatistics
This study develops a behind-the-scenes understanding of the people and organizations that are depended upon to provide survey data. A data collection event- in this study, a pilot coverage measurement survey conducted after the United States 2010 Census-provides an ideal environment to gauge respondents' reactions to the survey process. Relying on the conceptual guidance of script formation, these reactions are studied using a focus group and in…
Unintended consequences of a strategically ambiguous organizational policy selectively restricting mobile device use at work
Mobile devices have permeated organizations creating diverse communication opportunities and new organizational challenges. This case study examines one of those challenges: creating a strategically ambiguous mobile device use policy to combat misuse in an organization. We use focus group data collection and a subsequent constant comparative analysis to examine a U.S. company with an organizational policy selectively restricting mobile device acc…
Reconceptualizing Communication Overload and Building a Theoretical Foundation: Communication Overload
This study reconceptualizes communication overload and builds a theoretical foundation to understand how this phenomenon applies in contemporary life. We build theory by relying on past research and using a Q-method to capture the subjective perspectives of people who experience communication overload. In our refinement of this abstract concept, we identified seven dimensions composing communication overload. The dimensions included: compromising…
Negotiating Mobile Communication in Customer-Facing Work
There appear to be formal and informal rules associated with using mobile devices in view of customers. This chapter examines many types of customer-facing workers including waitstaff, childcare workers, teachers, telephone fundraisers, retail associates, and fast-food staff. Many customer-facing workers have limited reachability during their workday because they’re accessible only during windows of time that correspond to their breaks. Quite oft…
Early Mobile Use
For many people, whose first experiences using mobiles were between 2000 and 2010, it’s hard to imagine a time when friends and loved ones didn’t have mobiles or when people didn’t have access to one another after work hours. This chapter opens in California with a story of Los Angeles traffic; it was terrible, even back in 1990. Some companies wanted to make their mobile staff more productive, so they provided them with car phones—permanently mo…
Byod Policies as a Negotiable Control Lever . . . or Not
Enterprise consumerization describes how technologies purchased by “enterprises” (i.e., organizations or companies) became consumer products. Mobile devices fall into this category because, as they became more affordable, individuals purchased them and brought them to work. As this trend proliferated, organizations had to protect their proprietary data, but their employees were clamoring for access to Wi-Fi. Their response: create bring-your-own-…
Theoretical Notions of Control—A Mobile Tug-of-War
Communication, information, and organizational control are tightly entwined; this chapter explores the theoretical literature that elaborates on these concepts. The early years of car phones and cell phones were a time when people used their devices to reach others. But that changed as smartphones—those with Internet access—started diffusing into organizations and throughout society. Now, people with those same devices could access data and share…
Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication
In this book, the author shows how employees, organizations, and even friends and family are struggling to understand how the expected norms for mobile-communication connectedness function when people are working. Until the early 2000s workplaces provided most of the computers and portable devices that employees used to do their jobs and communicate with others. Now, people bring their own mobile devices to work, use them to circumvent official o…
Frontline employees in the health clinic: Impression management multiplexing when performing in-the-round
Using Goffman's dramaturgical perspective of impression management, the present study focuses on the staged performances of frontline employees (FLEs) at a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC). Qualitative analysis reveals how FLEs in health clinics engage in staged communication to perform their jobs and facilitate patient care. Our findings highlight three overarching themes in which FLEs’ communication compounds frontstage and backstage pr…
Throw me a lifeline: Articulating mobile social network dispersion and the social construction of risk in rescue communication
This research develops a model of mobile social network dispersion in rescue communication, and illustrates how people use a combination of mobile and social media, along with real-time communication, in their decision-making process. Guided by established research on smartphones, social media, and affordances, we used a qualitative approach and conducted field interviews that included photo-elicitation interview (PEI) techniques to examine parti…
Shelter shopping: Where the built environment and social systems meet
Mobile work, mobility, and mobile devices: Responding to a societal shift
Human-AI Teaming During an Ongoing Disaster: How Scripts Around Training and Feedback Reveal this is a Form of Human-Machine Communication
Humans play an integral role in identifying important information from social media during disasters. While human annotation of social media data to train machine learning models is often viewed as human-computer interaction, this study interrogates the ontological boundary between such interaction and human-machine communication. We conducted multiple interviews with participants who both labeled data to train machine learning models and correct…
Tracking the post-disaster evolution of water infrastructure resilience: A study of the 2021 Texas winter storm
Investigating ways to better communicate flood risk: The tight coupling of perceived flood map usability and accuracy
Flooding is increasing worldwide, and many current maps and models available to help people understand their risk are not designed with risk communication best practices in mind. This study is one of the first to combine comparative U.S. flood modelling approaches with measures of perceived flood map usability and accuracy to begin to understand how maps may be used to communicate flood risk. Using a survey of residents in Texas, U.S. counties af…
Using Q-methodology to discover disaster resilience perspectives from local residents
Enhancing power system resilience to extreme weather events: A qualitative assessment of winter storm Uri
In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri left 11 million people in Texas without power, caused widespread water outages, and inflicted billions of dollars in damage. While the severity of this event was primarily caused by electricity generator failures, it was made worse by the decisions of utilities and state regulators before, during, and after the event. This study seeks to (1) evaluate the procedures and decisions made by electric utilities during…
Closing the Climate Gap: Insights from Local Knowledge for Climate Adaptation Planning
Problem, research strategy, and findings Although theory and practice contend that local knowledge improves climate adaptation planning, little research has documented the kinds of information shared by residents. Planners can use this information to assist in the creation of planning processes and tools, as well as investigate how local knowledge contributes—or does not contribute—to planning outcomes. We developed a provisional typology of how …
Computer Science (25 works) · Political science (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Disaster Management and Resilience (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Public relations (8 works)