Professor and dean emeritus R. Murray Thomas and alumna Marie Iding publish 'Explaining Conversations: A Developmental Social Exchange Theory'

R. Murray Thomas, professor and dean emeritus of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, along with Dr. Marie Iding, Professor of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a Gevirtz School alumna, have published Explaining Conversations: A Developmental Social Exchange Theory (Jason Aronson Inc., 2011).

Explaining Conversations: A Developmental Social Exchange Theory describes the pattern by which social exchange skills develop throughout life, focusing on conversational skills. The book is filled with examples of social exchanges – chats, debates, arguments and negotiations, both within a culture and cross-culturally. Underlying meanings of conversations are analyzed in terms of people’s needs and strategies for fulfilling them, cultural influences, expectations, and metacognitive or thought patterns. The book delineates the typical pattern of social exchange development throughout the first two decades of life, and a chapter provides guidance for teachers and parents fostering children’s and adolescents’ social exchange skills.

Dr. R. Murray Thomas is emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he also directed a program on international education. He began his career as a teacher for Kamehameha Schools and Mid-Pacific Institute in the 1940s, when he also served as crime reporter for The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and wrote press releases for UHM’s School of Tropical Agriculture. He then earned his doctorate from Stanford University. His professional publications exceed 400, including 57 books for which he served as author, coauthor, or editor. He has taught and conducted cultural research in American Samoa, Indonesia, and the United States.

Dr. Marie Iding has served on the faculty of the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa since 1991, when she was awarded her doctorate in education from UCSB. She also earned a MA degree in education from UCSB in 1989, and her BA from Loyola Marymount University. She has served as Guest Researcher in Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway in 2005 and as Visiting Professor at the Computational Social Science Laboratory in the Center for Applied Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark in 2011. Iding has written a number of articles regarding learning with multimedia and on-line learning, and has taught and conducted research in the Pacific region including Hawaii, American Samoa, and Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia.