Erika Schneider, visiting assistant teaching professor of public relations, authored/co-authored the paper, “The Amplified Crisis: Assessing Negative Social Amplification and Source of a Crisis Response” with Courtney D. Boman and Heather Akin. The paper was published in the journal Communication Reports.
Extending the situational crisis communication theory, this research evaluates how the consequences of a crisis extend to social media and how using internal and external sources influence crisis response processing. A structural equation model assessed the conceptual link between organizational reputation and the negative amplification of a message on social media using data derived from an online experiment. Findings contextualize crisis communication to suggest source and social amplification could lead to a vanguard of future SCCT research that guides researchers and professionals in optimizing a crisis response.