Higher Education Leaders’ Perspectives about Communication Challenges During Crises
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The problem was that while impact and problems of crisis communication have been identified in the literature, little is known about the perspectives of leaders in higher education when facing communication issues in times of crisis. Guided by crisis communication theory and leadership theory, the purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore higher education leadership team members’ perspectives of communication challenges in times of crisis. Four research questions guided the study on the perspectives of higher education leadership team members about (a) how their own leadership and communication changed during a crisis, (b) how internal communications evolved during a crisis, (c) how external communications evolved during a crisis, and (d) the communication challenges experienced during a crisis. Fifteen members of varying leadership teams at a major university in Canada were recruited through purposive sampling to participate in semistructured interviews. All participants were involved in managing or contributing to the decision-making or response to a higher education crisis while in their leadership positions. Data were analyzed using content and inductive analysis, followed by structural coding. Results highlighted the need to define a crisis, along with the need for communication planning, training, and preparation. Results also emphasized the need to acknowledge mini crises amid a larger crisis, and the evolving leadership traits that emerge. Universities and similar organizations may use the insights from this study to drive positive social change by adopting new strategies, processes, technologies, and policies that benefit both internal and external stakeholders of the university community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".