CAZENOVIA — A summary of research illustrating how the popular definition of the term “marriage” has shifted over the last decade has earned Cazenovia College Associate Professor Heather Maloney-Stassen, Ph.D., the 2021 Article of the Year Award from the Eastern Communication Association (ECA).

Maloney-Stassen, director of the College’s Communication Studies program, received the organization’s annual recognition for the most outstanding journal article published during the prior calendar year in the communication journals Communication Quarterly, Communication Research Reports, or Qualitative Research Reports in Communication.

Her article, “Renewing Vows: A Diachronic Analysis of an Ideograph,” was written with Dr. Benjamin R. Bates, of Ohio University’s School of Communications, and published in the 2020 Qualitative Research Reports in Communication journal.

The research summary depicts a transition in how the concept of “marriage” is understood at two different points in time a decade apart.

The first study collected data in 2008 and was published in 2010 at the height of the same-sex marriage debate.

Titled, “Constructing Marriage: Exploring Marriage as an Ideograph,” it appeared in the journal, Qualitative Research Reports in Communication. The second assessment analyzes qualitative data collected 10 years later from the same type of demographic sampling and five years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the right of same-sex couples to marry.

This time, the piece points out a decided shift in how the term “marriage” is regarded. According to the newer article, the research reports that for those surveyed, the term “marriage” has retained “contractual and love characteristics as defining components, although references to the same-sex marriage debate largely disappeared; but there remains an ideological difference in new conflicting themes of marriage as a legal construction and marriage as tradition.”

The ECA award is particularly meaningful, Maloney-Stassen said, because “It puts me in some really good company with excellent scholars and people I really look up to. It is heartening when an article is recognized in that way, because you know people not only read it, but they liked it and it meant something to them.”

She said she believes the article drew recognition because it illustrates not only a striking shift in orientation and attitude toward the concept of marriage, but because it examines attitudes across a 10-year span and by producing succinct, understandable, accessible data. “For us, looking at the shift over time was really important, not just in the topic area but in terms of the methodology used. The idea of studying ideographs as a longitudinal study was new. Others have done it, but they have not looked at their question in terms of comparisons from two different eras that are 10 years apart,” Maloney-Stassen added.

The Eastern Communication Association was initially established in 1910 and continues as the oldest professional communication association in the United States.