scholarly journals Peculiarities of youth volunteering in modern Russia: on the path to making socially important decisions

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Alexandra Gennadyevna Filipova ◽  
Oksana Gennad'evna Zubova
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Main Method ◽  
Volunteer Activity ◽  
Volunteer Organizations

This article reviews volunteering as one of the forms of participation of youth in making socially important decisions. Volunteering forms the culture of engagement in social life that contributes to consolidation of civil initiatives and democratic values. Teenagers and youth can also participate in improvement of their living conditions and defend their interests via volunteer activity. The key research question is associated with seeking the ways by teenagers and youth to express their opinion through volunteering, and consideration of that opinion by the leaders of volunteer organizations. Group discussion served as the main method for obtaining empirical data; total of 5 group discussions with young people aged 16-18 were held. Roger Hart's Ladder of Children's Participation was applied in the course of this research. Alongside determination of the “level” of engagement of young volunteers as a ratio of personal initiatives and decisions of the adults organizers, the author determines the two lines of analysis – transformation of volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic and trends of volunteer activity in ten years from now. Group discussions with young people allowed concluding that volunteering, as any other activity organized by adults, indicates the lack of freedom for young people to show their initiatives and participate in making socially important decisions. Pseudo-participation is especially evident in school volunteering.

scholarly journals MEDIATION IN SCHOOLS IN THE OPINIONS OF TEACHERS AND SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Probacja ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 135-158
Author(s):  
Joanna Rusinkiewicz ◽  
Łukasz Piś
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Secondary School Students ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Research Question ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
School Students ◽  
Living Space ◽  
Teachers And Students

The rapidly expanding living space of young people, filled with various – often new – content, which is the source of all experiences and sensations, gradually blurring the subtle boundaries between what is and what is not socially accepted, generates confl icts and disputes between frustrated teenagers. These often result from a lack of ability to deal with a particular situation and a lack of ability to solve the problem. It is common knowledge that confl icts are an integral part of social life. Ultimately however, they would have probably led to the destruction of societies if it had not been for the tools and procedures developed to solve them. Thanks to the ability to solve confl icts and mitigate their eff ects, it is easier for young people to enter into new social roles. It is also easier for them to function at school, family and peer levels. School as a space of educational interaction between diff erent subjects is a place of particular risk for confl icts and disputes. Therefore, knowledge of school mediation may prove extremely useful in this matter. The purpose of school mediation is to reach an agreement and agree appropriate positions on important issues. In its assumptions, mediation introduces a culture of dialogue and co-responsibility for shaping the school’s image. The aim of the research conducted in March 2020 was to fi nd out the opinion of the two most important groups in each school – teachers and students – about mediation and the mediator. Therefore, an attempt was made to fi nd an answer to the research question: What is the opinion of teachers and secondary school students on the value of mediation in schools?

scholarly journals Generation of Head Movements of a Robot Using Multimodal Features of Peer Participants in Group Discussion Conversation

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Hung-Hsuan Huang ◽  
Seiya Kimura ◽  
Kazuhiro Kuwabara ◽  
Toyoaki Nishida
Keyword(s):  
Communication Skills ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Attentional Focus ◽  
Head Movements ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Multimodal Features ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Behavior Frequency

In recent years, companies have been seeking communication skills from their employees. Increasingly more companies have adopted group discussions during their recruitment process to evaluate the applicants’ communication skills. However, the opportunity to improve communication skills in group discussions is limited because of the lack of partners. To solve this issue as a long-term goal, the aim of this study is to build an autonomous robot that can participate in group discussions, so that its users can repeatedly practice with it. This robot, therefore, has to perform humanlike behaviors with which the users can interact. In this study, the focus was on the generation of two of these behaviors regarding the head of the robot. One is directing its attention to either of the following targets: the other participants or the materials placed on the table. The second is to determine the timings of the robot’s nods. These generation models are considered in three situations: when the robot is speaking, when the robot is listening, and when no participant including the robot is speaking. The research question is: whether these behaviors can be generated end-to-end from and only from the features of peer participants. This work is based on a data corpus containing 2.5 h of the discussion sessions of 10 four-person groups. Multimodal features, including the attention of other participants, voice prosody, head movements, and speech turns extracted from the corpus, were used to train support vector machine models for the generation of the two behaviors. The performances of the generation models of attentional focus were in an F-measure range between 0.4 and 0.6. The nodding model had an accuracy of approximately 0.65. Both experiments were conducted in the setting of leave-one-subject-out cross validation. To measure the perceived naturalness of the generated behaviors, a subject experiment was conducted. In the experiment, the proposed models were compared. They were based on a data-driven method with two baselines: (1) a simple statistical model based on behavior frequency and (2) raw experimental data. The evaluation was based on the observation of video clips, in which one of the subjects was replaced by a robot performing head movements in the above-mentioned three conditions. The experimental results showed that there was no significant difference from original human behaviors in the data corpus and proved the effectiveness of the proposed models.

scholarly journals The Importance of movement and healthy living in young people

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 37-42
Author(s):  
Marius Vaida
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Young People ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Muscle Tone ◽  
Regular Physical Activity ◽  
Sports Activity ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Main Method

The study I have carried out aimed mainly the determination of the level of the motion perception and its benefits, but also the understanding of the manner in which leisure time is spent and the raise of awareness regarding the importance of healthy eating in daily lives. The research was carried out on a sample of 50 young people (boys and girls) aged between 19 and 30. The main method of research used was the investigation, which was based on an anonymous standardized questionnaire with 8 questions. The study shows that the main effect young people have perceived for having a sports activity is the development of physical condition followed by tackling of the excessive weight and also the maintenance of an optimal muscle tone, as well as the education of the positive characteristics of the personality and the extension of the skills and motor skills sphere to an equal but small value. They also confirmed that sports accompanied by friends or colleagues are preferred for leisure time, food also being perceived as very important or important in a majoritarian percentage, meaning that the younger generation is aware of the important role of nutrition in maintaining health. Unfortunately, however, it is clear that there is no regular physical activity in those surveyed, with the results of those who are adherents of regular physical activity slightly below the results of those who do not practice regular forms of activity.

PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO PREVENTION OF EXTREMISM IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
Livak N.S. ◽  
Klimova I.V. ◽  
Lebedikhin V.V.
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Social Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Educational Work ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Student Community ◽  
And Behavior

Modern youth and the student community today play a key role in the development of social and social life. Due to the peculiarities of the university space, the student community is in constant interaction and communication, both in the framework of the educational process and events of various formats, and in social and everyday conditions. In the context of interactions, this social group, which is most at risk of spreading negative ideologies that threaten not only the personal security of everyone, but also peaceful coexistence in the conditions of a multinational society in Russia. In the absence of educational measures as a prevention, an unfavorable environment arises in which it is very easy to influence the thinking of young people, their involvement in nationalist movements, extremist activities, etc. Hence the concept of «youth extremism» appears, which is manifested in the views and behavior of young people based on the manifestation of aggression and non-acceptance of dissenters. The search for new technologies of psychological support that allow to form cultural tolerance, value orientations and prevent the spread of extremist ideologies becomes relevant. The authors consider a set of measures that contribute to the generalization, dissemination, as well as the introduction into the student environment of the best practices of spiritual and moral education, the development of interethnic and interreligious dialogue, and the prevention of negative ideologies. To implement these tasks, it is necessary to form a pool of specialists in the prevention of extremism in the student environment, hold seminars and meetings for vice-rectors of universities on security and educational work, as well as educational seminars for managers of student organizations. This will make it possible to form leadership student associations that broadcast the values of cultural tolerance to the youth environment.

POLARYZACJA GRUPOWA W WARUNKACH DEBATY DELIBERATYWNEJ

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-29
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Wesołowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Group Decision ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Positive Outcomes ◽  
Group Consensus ◽  
Group Polarization ◽  
Normative Requirements

In social psychology the group polarization refers to the tendency for groups to make decisionsthat are more extreme than the initial inclinations of its members. This phenomenon constitutesa potential obstacle to positive outcomes attributed to deliberative debates. A deliberative debateis a particular kind of a group discussion tasked with fi nding group consensus on controversialissues. The idea of deliberation originates from the writings of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, AmyGutmann and Denis Thompson. Deliberative debate imposes numerous normative requirementson the communication, relationships among the disputants and their approach to the issue underdiscussion. These normative requirements make a big difference between deliberative debates andthe situations in which the phenomenon of polarization was observed. Thus, we presume that indeliberative debates conditions the phenomenon of group polarization may be limited.The paper investigates the following questions: would the normative conditions of deliberationlimit the occurrence of polarization in discussing groups? and What infl uence (if any) would thepolarization process have on the quality of group decision? In the light of the empirical data we concluded what follows: (1) In 50% of the analyzed casesof group discussion the phenomenon of group polarization was observed despite the normativeconditions of deliberation. (2) The occurrence of group polarization in some cases coincided withmaking the fi nal decisions which did not alter the initial preferences of the disputants (but did nottotally predestinated the fi nal outcome).

Fostering climate change consensus: The role of intimacy in group discussions

2021 ◽  
pp. 096366252110206
Author(s):  
Lyn M. van Swol ◽  
Emma Frances Bloomfield ◽  
Chen-Ting Chang ◽  
Stephanie Willes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Group Consensus ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Group Attraction ◽  
Climate Change Information ◽  
To Come ◽  
Collective Engagement

This study examined if creating intimacy in a group discussion is more effective toward reaching consensus about climate change than a focus on information. Participants were randomly assigned to either a group that spent the first part of an online discussion engaging in self-disclosure and focusing on shared values (intimacy condition) or discussing information from an article about climate change (information condition). Afterward, all groups were given the same instructions to try to come to group consensus on their opinions about climate change. Participants in the intimacy condition had higher ratings of social cohesion, group attraction, task interdependence, and collective engagement and lower ratings of ostracism than the information condition. Intimacy groups were more likely to reach consensus, with ostracism and the emotional tone of discussion mediating this effect. Participants were more likely to change their opinion to reflect that climate change is real in the intimacy than information condition.

Equal Performance, Different Grade: Women’s Performance in Discussion Perceived Worse Than Men’s

2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722199221
Author(s):  
Angela R. Dorrough ◽  
Monika Leszczyńska ◽  
Sandra Werner ◽  
Lovis Schaeffer ◽  
Anna-Sophie Galley ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Group Discussion ◽  
Selection Procedure ◽  
Similar Degree ◽  
Female Group ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Female Performance ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Hidden Profile ◽  
Perceived Helpfulness

We investigate how men and women are evaluated in group discussions. In five studies ( N = 761) using a variant of a Hidden Profile Task, we find that, when experimentally and/or statistically controlling for actual gender differences in behavior, the female performance in a group discussion is devalued in comparison to male performance. This was observed for fellow group members (Study 1) and outside observers (Studies 2–5), in both primarily student (Studies 1, 4, and 5) and mixed samples (Studies 2 and 3), for different measures of performance (perceived helpfulness of the contribution, for work-related competence), across different discussion formats (preformulated chat messages, open chat), and when controlling for the number of female group members (Study 5). In contrast to our hypothesis, we did not find a moderating effect of selection procedure in that women were devalued to a similar degree in both situations with a women’s quota and without.

scholarly journals A qualitative study to identify critical attributes and attribute-levels for a discrete choice experiment on oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) delivery among young people in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janan J. Dietrich ◽  
Millicent Atujuna ◽  
Gugulethu Tshabalala ◽  
Stefanie Hornschuh ◽  
Mamakiri Mulaudzi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Young People ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Dosing Regimen ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Study Team ◽  
Attribute Levels ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Oral Prep

Abstract Background The uptake and adherence of daily oral PrEP has been poor in high-risk populations in South Africa including young people. We used qualitative research methods to explore user preferences for daily and on-demand oral PrEP use among young South Africans, and to inform the identification of critical attributes and attribute-levels for quantitative analysis of user preferences, i.e. a discrete choice experiment (DCE). Methods Data were collected between September and November 2018 from eight group discussions and 20 in-depth interviews with young people 13 to 24 years in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Using a convenience sampling strategy, participants were stratified by sex and age. Interviewers used a semi-structured interview guide to discuss several attributes (dosing regimen, location, costs, side effects, and protection period) for PrEP access and use. Group discussions and in-depth interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and translated to English. We used framework analysis to explore context-specific attributes and attribute-levels for delivering oral PrEP in South Africa. The adolescent community advisory board, expert and study team opinions were consulted for the final DCE attributes and levels. Results We enrolled 74 participants who were 51% (n = 38/74) male, had a median age of 18.5 [Interquartile range = 16–21.25] years, 91% (n = 67/74) identified as heterosexual and 49% (n = 36/74) had not completed 12th grade education. Using the qualitative data, we identified five candidate attributes including (1) dosing regimen, (2) location to get PrEP, (3) cost, (4) route of administration and (5) frequency. After discussions with experts and the study team, we revised the DCE to include the following five attributes and levels: dosing regime: daily, and on-demand PrEP; location: private pharmacy, public clinic, mobile clinic, ATM); cost: free-of-charge, R50 (~2GBP), R265 (~12GBP); side effects: nausea, headache, rash; and duration of protection: fulltime protection versus when PrEP is used). Conclusions There is limited literature on qualitative research methods describing the step-by-step process of developing a DCE for PrEP in adolescents, especially in resource-constrained countries. We provide the process followed for the DCE technique to understand user preferences for daily and on-demand oral PrEP among young people in South Africa.

Group Discussion in a Blended Environment in Engineering Education

TEM Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 508-516
Author(s):  
Deepti Mishra ◽  
Gonca Gokce Menekse Dalveren ◽  
Frode S. Volden ◽  
Carly Grace Allen
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Education ◽  
Group Process ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Seating Arrangement ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Group Members

Group work is a necessary element of engineering education and group members need information about one another, group process, shared attention and mutual understanding during group discussions. There are several important elements for establishing and maintaining a group discussion such as participant’s role, seating arrangement, verbal and non-verbal cues, eye gaze, gestures etc. The present study investigates these elements for identifying the behavior of group members in a blend of traditional face-to-face discussion along with computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) setting. The results of this study have shown that, speaking duration is the key factor for identifying the leadership in a group and participants mostly used eye gazes for turn taking. Although this study is a mix of face-to-face and CSCW discussion setting, participants mostly behave like faceto- face group discussion. However, unlike the previous studies involving face-to-face discussion, the relation between seating arrangement and amount of attention is not apparent from the data during this study.

Administrative risks challenging the adoption of smart contracts in construction projects

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asli Pelin Gurgun ◽  
Kerim Koc
Keyword(s):  
Construction Projects ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Mitigation Strategies ◽  
Risk Category ◽  
Smart Contracts ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Smart Contract ◽  
Criteria Weights

PurposeAs a remedy to usually voluminous, complicated and not easily readable construction contracts, smart contracts can be considered as an effective and alternative solution. However, the construction industry is merely known as a frontrunner for fast adoption of recent technological advancements. Numerous administrative risks challenge construction companies to implement smart contracts. To highlight this issue, this study aims to assess the administrative risks of smart contract adoption in construction projects.Design/methodology/approachA literature survey is conducted to specify administrative risks of smart contracts followed by a pilot study to ensure that the framework is suitable to the research question. The criteria weights are calculated through the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process method, followed by a sensitivity analysis based on degree of fuzziness, which supports the robustness of the developed hierarchy and stability of the results. Then, a focus group discussion (FGD) is performed to discuss the mitigation strategies for the top-level risks in each risk category.FindingsThe final framework consists of 27 sub-criteria, which are categorized under five main criteria, namely, contractual, cultural, managerial, planning and relational. The findings show that (1) regulation change, (2) lack of a driving force, (3) works not accounted in planning, (4) shortcomings of current legal arrangements and (5) lack of dispute resolution mechanism are the top five risks challenging the adoption of smart contracts in construction projects. Risk mitigation strategies based on FGD show that improvements for the semi-automated smart contract drafting are considered more practicable compared to full automation.Originality/valueThe literature is limited in terms of the adoption of smart contracts, while the topic is receiving more attention recently. To support easy prevalence of smart contracts, this study attempts the most challenging aspects of smart contract adoption.

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