No need for the needle. A qualitative analysis of the antivax movement in Romania

Author(s):  
Anca-Elena David ◽  
Costin-Răzvan Enache ◽  
Gabriel Hasmațuchi ◽  
Raluca Stanciu

The antivax movement is now a constant phenomenon with increasing social implications. This study explores how the antivax movement is articulated in Romania on the basis of qualitative analysis applied to interviews. Our pilot study focuses on the opinions of 100 persons who oppose vaccination interviewed between 2017 and 2020. We conducted both face-to-face and online semistructured interviews to trace the factors determining attitudes against vaccination. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first such extended study to target individuals rather than groups or media discourse. We strive to provide a multifaceted view on how the antivax phenomenon is taking shape. Responses varied in style and length, so we needed to systematize the narratives. We filtered the answers using the interpretive net described by Entman (1993), thereby grouping the main narratives into four sections. We then reconstructed the implicit frames used by individuals in interpreting their position. We consider content quality analysis to be a relevant method to reveal the facets and depth of the antivax phenomenon, thereby enabling more complex explanations. We compare the results of this study with rationales stemming from similar investigations conducted around the world and then highlight opinions specific to the Romanian public.

Psihologija ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 32-32
Author(s):  
Laura Digryte ◽  
Nida Zemaitiene ◽  
Irina Baniene ◽  
Valija Sap ◽  
Alicja Juskiene ◽  
...  

Conducting a psychosocial autopsy after a suicide is a well-known method in the world for a deeper understanding of suicide, but it still raises a lot of debates over how this method could be applied better to avoid questionable reliability of the research. This study represents methodological insights from a psychosocial autopsy study of adult suicide. 145 people, who lost a close relative or friend due to a suicide, participated in the study. The results revealed that it is particularly important to complete a pilot study and a test of the protocol in a specific sample. Insights to organize face to face meetings due to the sensitivity of the experience, the ability to observe and respond to the risk of suicide of respondents, and to require researchers with practical experience in suicide prevention and psychological assistance is emphasized. This study is an attempt to give methodological insights for future research of suicide and facilitate significant progress in our understanding of suicide.


Author(s):  
Mathew Bumbalough

This pilot study explores language identity in the field of World Englishes as international students in a multilingual writing classroom encounter a Westerncentric teaching environment while struggling to become a part of the World English speaking community. In this instance, the students were able to bring their cultural and linguistic identities into the classroom in order to make meaning, and joined a community of practice that took into consideration their agency and L1 identities. Based on my initial classroom observations, I identified a pair of students to interview in order to triangulate and confirm my findings. By conducting semistructured interviews, analyzing paper topics, and learning about the participants” backgrounds, I was able to determine that while English was important to each of them in different ways, their identities were what was most important of all. Through an analysis of their interactions and interviews I assert that they are, in a true sense, speakers of World Englishes who are struggling to create their language identities as they bring their cultural and linguistic capital into the classroom to deal with any issues they face. As a result, there were several gaps I noticed between (western) teaching practices and the World Englishes the students speak. While this is a pilot study, I hope to further investigate my findings in a full ethnography that will expand on the issues in this paper.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (20) ◽  
pp. 2602
Author(s):  
Nuria Rosillo ◽  
Nicolas Montes

The COVID-19 pandemic and its social implications generate adverse psychological effects that affect success in education where educational methodologies are not ready to overcome the problem. This article presents the design and evaluation of a gamification activity, the Escape Room, applied to the subjects in Pharmacy and Nursing. The objective of using the Escape Room is to reduce the impact that COVID-19 has on students’ academic performance due to the psychological effects and the change in educational modality with which the vast majority of activities are carried out online. The Escape Room presented in this article is based on the search for a scientist who is fleeing with the COVID-19 vaccine around the world and the students have to find it by passing tests and missions related to mathematics. Due to the COVID measures imposed by the university, where double presentiality was imposed, the proposed Escape Room has the peculiarity of being designed in dual format, that is, allowing students to connect in face-to-face mode, online, or a mixture of both, depending on the maximum capacity of the classroom, the number of positive cases in the group, quarantines, etc. As a result, a great impact is shown on the initial perception of students towards mathematics and a null impact of the COVID-19 effect on the academic performance of students.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-41
Author(s):  
Jacques Lezra

Humanism returns for the New Materialism in ‘nonhuman’ form as matter. New ‘matter’ and new materialism thus fashion the world to human advantage in the gesture of abjecting us. They commit us to the humanism of masochists. They offer an animistic and paradisiacal realm of immediate transactions, human to human, human to and with nonhuman, face to face, world without end. The impulse is tactically and strategically useful. But ‘matter’ will not help us if we fashion it so that it bears in its concept the signature of a human hand in its making. Can we do otherwise? Only by conceiving matter as what absolutizes what is not-one: matter from which no discipline will normally, normatively, produce an object or take its concept; on which heroical abjection will founder; matter non-human in ways the human animal can neither designate, nor ever count.


Author(s):  
Ward Keeler

Looking at Buddhist monasteries as social institutions, this book integrates a thorough description of one such monastery with a wide-ranging study of Burmese social relations, both religious and lay, looking particularly at the matter of gender. Hierarchical assumptions inform all such relations, and higher status implies a person’s greater autonomy. A monk is particularly idealized because he exemplifies the Buddhist ideal of “detachment” and so autonomy. A male head of household represents another masculine ideal, if a somewhat less prestigious one. He enjoys greater autonomy than other members of the household yet remains entangled in the world. Women and trans women are thought to be more invested in attachment than autonomy and are expected to subordinate themselves to men and monks as a result. But everyone must concern themselves with the matter of relative status in all of their interactions. This makes face-to-face encounter fraught. Several chapters detail the ways that individuals try to stave off the risks that interaction necessarily entails. One stratagem is to subordinate oneself to nodes of power, but this runs counter to efforts to demonstrate one’s autonomy. Another is to foster detachment, most dramatically in the practice of meditation.


Author(s):  
Jean-Yves Lacoste ◽  
Oliver O’Donovan

Giving and promise must be thought together. Being-in-the world entails being-with the other, who is both “given” and bearer of a gift promised. But any disclosure may be understood as a gift; it is not anthropomorphic to speak of “self-giving” with a wider reference than person-to-person disclosure. Which implies that no act of giving can exhaust itself in its gift. Present experience never brings closure to self-revealing. Yet giving is crystallized into “the given,” the closure of gift. “The given” is what it is, needing no gift-event to reveal it. But the given, too, is precarious, and can be destabilized when giving brings us face to face with something unfamiliar. Nothing appears without a promise of further appearances, and God himself can never be “given.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5491
Author(s):  
Melissa Robson-Williams ◽  
Bruce Small ◽  
Roger Robson-Williams ◽  
Nick Kirk

The socio-environmental challenges the world faces are ‘swamps’: situations that are messy, complex, and uncertain. The aim of this paper is to help disciplinary scientists navigate these swamps. To achieve this, the paper evaluates an integrative framework designed for researching complex real-world problems, the Integration and Implementation Science (i2S) framework. As a pilot study, we examine seven inter and transdisciplinary agri-environmental case studies against the concepts presented in the i2S framework, and we hypothesise that considering concepts in the i2S framework during the planning and delivery of agri-environmental research will increase the usefulness of the research for next users. We found that for the types of complex, real-world research done in the case studies, increasing attention to the i2S dimensions correlated with increased usefulness for the end users. We conclude that using the i2S framework could provide handrails for researchers, to help them navigate the swamps when engaging with the complexity of socio-environmental problems.


Author(s):  
James W. Gladstone

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on ways that adult children and children-in-law mediate contact between grandmothers and grandchildren, following marriage breakdown and remarriage in the middle generation. A qualitative analysis of face-to-face contact between 110 grandmother-grandchild pairs was conducted. Findings showed that adult children have a more direct influence on visiting, by arranging or obstructing visits between grandmothers and grandchildren. The influence of first or second children-in-law was found to be more indirect. By preventing an estranged spouse from seeing his or her child, custodial children-in-law could also be preventing a grandmother's access to her grandchild, if she depended on her noncustodial child to bring the grandchild to see her when he or she exercised visiting rights. Children-in-law could also act as intermediaries through their absence as well as through their presence. These findings, as well as ways that grandparents can negotiate relationships with adult children and children-in-law, are discussed. Especially noted is the value of monitoring communication exchanges, maintaining friendly relationships with children-in-law and step-grandchildren, and acting as resources to the family.


2021 ◽  
pp. 004723952110347
Author(s):  
Penny Thompson ◽  
Sarinporn Chaivisit

This study used the concept of shared affordance space to explore students’ perceptions of the use of a telepresence robot in a face-to-face classroom. Results from this qualitative pilot study suggest the telepresence robot has the potential to provide enough autonomy and agency for both the remote user and the in-class students to perceive a shared affordance space. Robot users and classmates use human pronouns to describe the robot user and discuss a process of adjusting to its presence. The physical configuration of the classroom can either facilitate or hinder this process. The research provides greater understanding of the experiences of students in a face-to-face classroom that includes remote students attending class using a telepresence robot. It can help educators design and implement these experiences in a way that creates a beneficial classroom experience for both in-class and remote learners.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 2068
Author(s):  
William Villegas-Ch. ◽  
Xavier Palacios-Pacheco ◽  
Milton Roman-Cañizares ◽  
Sergio Luján-Mora

Currently, the 2019 Coronavirus Disease pandemic has caused serious damage to health throughout the world. Its contagious capacity has forced the governments of the world to decree isolation and quarantine to try to control the pandemic. The consequences that it leaves in all sectors of society have been disastrous. However, technological advances have allowed people to continue their different activities to some extent while maintaining isolation. Universities have great penetration in the use of technology, but they have also been severely affected. To give continuity to education, universities have been forced to move to an educational model based on synchronous encounters, but they have maintained the methodology of a face-to-face educational model, what has caused several problems in the learning of students. This work proposes the transition to a hybrid educational model, provided that this transition is supported by data analysis to identify the new needs of students. The knowledge obtained is contrasted with the performance presented by the students in the face-to-face modality and the necessary parameters for the transition to this modality are clearly established. In addition, the guidelines and methodology of online education are considered in order to take advantage of the best of both modalities and guarantee learning.


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