Dr. Zachary Hart, PhD, Professor of Communication at Northern Kentucky University, will be a guest speaker at Redwood Monday, February 10 at 6 p.m.
Hart’s visit to Redwood – Northern Kentucky’s nonprofit, special needs facility – is in conjunction with Northern Kentucky University’s Six@Six Lecture Series, offered by the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement.
The presentation, which is free and open to the public, will describe the results from a focus group study that investigated parents’ information-seeking strategies and sensemaking processes as they navigated complex medical, educational and social systems on behalf of their children.
Parents of children with disabilities often are challenged with making sense of medical, educational and social information related to their child that can be difficult to understand and process in addition to being emotionally overwhelming, highlight Hart’s presentation.
Hart’s Sensemaking among Parents of Children with Disabilities: Improving Understanding, Coping and Decision Making found parents use a wide range of sources and methods to gather information with a heavy reliance on parent networks.
Emotional reactions to information also were found to play an important role and frequently impact decision-making, implications for improving understanding, coping and decision-making by parents of children with disabilities will be discussed.
Hart teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in public relations, communication studies and journalism. His research focuses on the nature and impact of messages communicated to newcomers during organizational socialization.
He earned his PhD in Communication from Michigan State University (2000). Before joining NKU, Hart taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Concordia University-Chicago. He joined the NKU Department of Communication in 2003 and served as department chair from 2010-2011 and 2012-2018.
In 2013, Dr. Hart was honored by the Association of Business Communication with its Outstanding Article of the Year award. The award is given annually to stories published in the Journal of Business Communication that contribute significantly to scholarship, research and/or pedagogy; demonstrate originality of thought and careful investigation; and are well written, lucid and engaging. The article was titled, “Message Content and Sources During Organizational Socialization.”