Communication Prof. Maguire & PhD student Daria Heinemann-LaFave receive journal article award...

The Western States Communication Association (WSCA) bestowed its 2014 B. Aubrey Fisher Award upon the article "'To Be So Connected, Yet Not At All': Relational Presence, Absence and Maintenance in the Context of a Wartime Deployment" by Dr. Katheryn C. Maguire, Daria Heinemann-LaFave and Dr. Erin Sahlstein. One of WSCA's most significant honors, the award recognizes a peer-reviewed article in each volume of WSCA's Western Journal of Communication that makes the most significant contribution to communication scholarship. It will be presented during WSCA's 2014 annual meeting, February 17, at the Hilton Anaheim.

To Be So Connected, Yet Not At All was published in Western Journal of Communication's v77 n3 special issue Dynamics of Relational Maintenance, 04 April, 2013. From the article's abstract: "We explore the relationship maintenance strategies that 50 Army wives experienced during a wartime deployment. Our data suggest military wives use a variety of maintenance strategies to keep their marriages at a desired level throughout a deployment process, some of which occur prior to deployment whereas other strategies happen after the reunion. We also identified four maintenance paradoxes that occurred when certain maintenance strategies appeared to be associated with unintended consequences. We examine the maintenance strategies and paradoxes through the frames of social presence theory and ambiguous loss to better understand the maintenance of military marriages during wartime in regard to different levels of physical and psychological presence. Taken together, this study suggests Army wives utilize a variety of relationship maintenance strategies, but the difficult circumstances of a wartime deployment may influence the enactment of the strategies and their potential outcomes at both an individual and relational level."

Katheryn Maguire is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University where Daria Heinemann-LaFave is a doctoral student. Erin Sahlstein is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.