Consent and the Social Context

1995 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-350
Author(s):  
Priscilla Alderson

A series of eight multidisciplinary conferences on consent to health care and research was held in London during the period 1992 to 1995. The aim was to present a rich and varied account of consent from the perspectives of academics (especially social scientists), practitioners, and people affected by personal experience. This report summarizes some of the main contributions.

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran ◽  
Owen Rambow

Understanding how the social context of an interaction affects our dialog behavior is of great interest to social scientists who study human behavior, as well as to computer scientists who build automatic methods to infer those social contexts. In this paper, we study the interaction of power, gender, and dialog behavior in organizational interactions. In order to perform this study, we first construct the Gender Identified Enron Corpus of emails, in which we semi-automatically assign the gender of around 23,000 individuals who authored around 97,000 email messages in the Enron corpus. This corpus, which is made freely available, is orders of magnitude larger than previously existing gender identified corpora in the email domain. Next, we use this corpus to perform a largescale data-oriented study of the interplay of gender and manifestations of power. We argue that, in addition to one’s own gender, the “gender environment” of an interaction, i.e., the gender makeup of one’s interlocutors, also affects the way power is manifested in dialog. We focus especially on manifestations of power in the dialog structure — both, in a shallow sense that disregards the textual content of messages (e.g., how often do the participants contribute, how often do they get replies etc.), as well as the structure that is expressed within the textual content (e.g., who issues requests and how are they made, whose requests get responses etc.). We find that both gender and gender environment affect the ways power is manifested in dialog, resulting in patterns that reveal the underlying factors. Finally, we show the utility of gender information in the problem of automatically predicting the direction of power between pairs of participants in email interactions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
DaJuan Ferrell ◽  
Celeste Campos-Castillo

BACKGROUND Largely absent from research on how users appraise the credibility of professionals as sources for the information they find on social media is work investigating factors shaping credibility within a specific profession, such as physicians. OBJECTIVE We address debates about how physicians should use social media by comparing how a formal and casual appearance on a profile picture influences their credibility. Using prominence-interpretation theory, we posit an effect of a formal appearance on credibility conditional users’ social context, specifically whether they have a regular health care provider. METHODS For this experiment, we recruited 205 social media users using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. We asked participants if they had a regular health care provider and then randomly assigned them to read one of three Twitter posts that varied only in the profile picture of the physician offering health advice. Next, we tasked participants with assessing the credibility of the physician and their likelihood of engaging with the tweet and the physician on Twitter. We used path analysis to assess whether participants having a regular health care provider impacted how the profile picture affected their ratings of physician’s credibility and their likelihood to engage with the tweet and physician on Twitter. RESULTS We found that the profile picture of a physician posting health advice in either formal or casual attire did not elicit significant differences in credibility, with ratings comparable to having no profile image. Among participants assigned the formal appearance condition, those with a regular provider rated the physician higher on a credibility than those without, which led to stronger intentions to engage with the tweet and physician. CONCLUSIONS The findings add to existing research by showing how the social context of information seeking on social media shapes the credibility of a specific professional. Practical implications for professionals engaging with the public on social media and combating false information include moving past debates about casual versus formal appearances and toward identifying ways to segment audiences.


2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (Suppl. 2) ◽  
pp. 8-14
Author(s):  
John F. Helliwell

The paper explains how subjective well-being can be measured, how the resulting data are being used to document human progress and how health care can be changed to take advantage of what has been learned. The evaluations that people make of their own lives document, and permit the explanation of, life satisfaction levels that differ greatly among countries and communities. Research seeking to explain these happiness differences, and their related differences in mortality and morbidity, exposes the importance of the social context. There is an opportunity and need to change health care from the diagnosis and treatment of illness to the fostering of wellness. The importance of the social context in the successful design and delivery of health and happiness is so great as to support a prescription to turn the “I” into “we,” thereby turning illness into wellness by making the production and maintenance of health and happiness a much more collaborative activity, even in the presence of the increasing complexity of medical science.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-162
Author(s):  
Andreas T. Schmidt

Several Dutch politicians have recently argued that medical voluntary euthanasia laws should be extended to include healthy elderly citizens who suffer from non-medical ‘existential suffering’ (‘life fatigue’ or ‘completed life’). In response, some seek to show that cases of medical euthanasia are morally permissible in ways that completed life euthanasia cases are not. I provide a different, societal perspective. I argue against assessing the permissibility of individual euthanasia cases in separation of their societal context and history. An appropriate justification of euthanasia needs to be embedded in a wider solidaristic response to the causes of suffering. By classifying some suffering as ‘medical’ and some as ‘non-medical’, most societies currently respond to medical conditions in importantly different ways than they do to non-medical suffering. In medical cases, countries like the Netherlands have a health care, health research and public health system to systematically assign responsibilities to address causes of medical suffering. We lack such a system for non-medical suffering among elderly citizens, which makes completed life euthanasia importantly different from euthanasia in medical cases. Because of this moral ‘responsibility gap’, focusing on the permissibility of completed life euthanasia in separation of wider societal duties to attend to possible causes is societally inappropriate. To spell out this objection in more philosophical terms, I introduce the concept of acts that are morally permissible but contextually problematic.


1979 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-362
Author(s):  
Michael R. Bury

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-225
Author(s):  
Inna Veselova

This article is based on study of the tricksters’tricks played by the heroines of the Russian epos known as bylinas. Variants of bylina plots with female protagonists have been contemplated, taking into consideration the concept by Michel de Certeau of two modes of practices – tactic and strategic –and James Scott’s concept of “the weapons of the weak.”The narrator informs the audience first about the modi operandi under various circumstances, and second about the underlying values governing the choice of this or that modus operandi. Systematic studies of variants of bylina plots confirm the fact that the narrators pay a lot of attention to the personality, appearance and agency of epic heroines. The cunning tricks, daring deceptions, bold choices and exceptional physical fortitude of the heroines surprise the singers of the tales. The activities of female characters are analysed in the social context. The story-telling is a method of teaching modes and ways of real-life behavior. The bylinas’ singers are rendering their personal experience and knowledge in fictionalized form.


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