Date
4-7-2026
Department
School of Communication and the Arts
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in Communication (PhD)
Chair
Robert Mott
Keywords
distance education, written feedback, feedback perceptions, feedback importance, feedback expectancy violations, expectancy evolution
Disciplines
Communication
Recommended Citation
Hudson, Josephine, "A Qualitative Study of Expectancy Violations Theory on Instructor Feedback for Online Graduate Students Within United States Universities: How Student Perceptions Form When Their Expectations Are Violated" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 8167.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/8167
Abstract
Distance education has become increasingly commonplace as technology and digital connections have become widespread in everyday life. Like traditional classrooms, feedback in online classrooms is a critical form of communication between professors and students to facilitate learning and foster relationships despite the lack of face-to-face communication that distance education imposes. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how graduate and doctoral students’ experiences with expectancy violations influence their perceptions of feedback through the lens of Expectancy Violations Theory. Graduate and doctoral students who were or had been enrolled in at least two distance education courses participated in this study. Data were collected through 142 surveys and 20 interviews. Data were uploaded and thematically analyzed in MAXQDA, using both open coding and the software’s word search features across both data sets. The results of this study indicate that violation valence directly informs students’ perceptions of the power of feedback as either a weapon to harm confidence and threaten academic persistence or as a defense system to protect students from repeating mistakes and succumbing to a sense of defeat. A new term is introduced to the expectancy violations theory vernacular—expectancy evolution. This study advances Expectancy Violations Theory and feedback research by examining how expectancy violations inform feedback perceptions, the types of expectancy violations, and how expectancies evolve over time. These findings indicate that the power of written feedback and the study of its influence through the lens of Expectancy Violations Theory reaches across curricular and professional lines.
