LGBTQ Persons’ Use of Online Spaces to Navigate Conception, Pregnancy, and Pregnancy Loss: An Intersectional Approach

Navigating conception, pregnancy, and loss is challenging for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, who experience stigma due to LGBTQ identity, other identities (e.g., loss), and intersections thereof. We conducted interviews with 17 LGBTQ people with recent pregnancy loss experiences. Taking LGBTQ identity and loss as a starting point, we used an intracategorical intersectional lens to uncover the benefits and challenges of LGBTQ-specific and non-LGBTQ-specific pregnancy and loss-related online spaces. Participants used LGBTQ-specific online spaces to enact individual, interpersonal, and collective resilience. However, those with multiple marginalized identities (e.g., people of color and non-partnered individuals), faced barriers in finding support within LGBTQ-specific spaces compared to those holding privileged identities (e.g., White and married). Non-LGBTQ spaces were beneficial for some informational needs, but not community and emotional needs due to pervasive heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and a perceived need to educate. We conceptualize experiences of exclusion as symbolic annihilation and intersectional invisibility, and discuss clinical implications and design directions.

Essential Workers COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy, Misinformation and Informational Needs in the Republic of North Macedonia.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis that as of December 2021 has resulted in the death of over 5.2 million people. Despite the unprecedented development and distribution of vaccines, hesitancy to take the vaccine remains a wide-spread public health challenge, especially in Eastern European countries. In this study we focus on a sample of essential workers in North Macedonia to: 1) Describe rates of vaccine acceptance, risk perception and sources of COVID-19 information, 2) Explore predictors of vaccine hesitancy and 3) Describe informational needs of hesitant and non-hesitant essential workers. Methods: Descriptive statistics were used to present frequencies of vaccine acceptance. Logistic regression was used to explore predictors of vaccine acceptance based on sociodemographic characteristics, hesitancy to take other vaccines in the past, previous diagnosis of COVID-19, and individual risk perception of COVID-19. Chi square analysis was used to compare informational needs differences between hesitant and non-hesitant individuals across socio-demographic groups. Results: From a sample of 1003 individuals, 439 (44%) reported that they were very likely to get the vaccine, the rest reported some level of hesitancy. Older age, Albanian ethnicity, post-secondary school education, previous diagnosis of COVID-19, previous vaccine acceptance of other vaccines, and increased risk perception of COVID-19 infection were all found to be negatively associated with vaccine hesitancy. In particular hesitant individuals, compared to the non-hesitant, wanted to have more information and reassurance that all main international agencies (i.e. FDA, WHO, EMA) were all in accordance in recommending the vaccine and that they would be free to choose if getting the vaccine or not without consequences (p<0.01).

Parent-Child Sex Communication Prompts, Approaches, Reactions, and Functions According to Gay, Bisexual, and Queer Sons

Minimal research on parent-child sex communication between parents and gay, bisexual, and queer (GBQ) adolescent sons prevents the formulation of interventions that would buffer or brake this youth population’s risks for HIV/STI. We sought to describe the perspectives of GBQ adolescent males on this process and the potential ways they think parents can address their sons’ informational needs, including countering youth access of sexually explicit media. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with GBQ male youth aged 15–20 years. Thematic and content analysis revealed four central themes: prompts and triggers, parents’ approaches, sons’ reactions, and the functions assigned to sex communication. Parents can be sources of reliable sexual health information and may be leveraged for future HIV/STI risk reduction work.

COVID-19 Vaccine Early Skepticism, Misinformation and Informational Needs among Essential Workers in the USA

This study presents the results of a survey of 1591 hesitant U.S. essential workers, conducted over Pollfish in December 2020 when they were the only group eligible for the vaccine, aiming to describe their concerns regarding COVID-19 vaccine safety, effectiveness and distribution policies. We computed frequencies using the SAS software for each answer, using chi-squared statistics and Cochran–Armitage trend tests to determine how informational needs differ by age, gender, level of education, race, source of COVID-19 information and levels of vaccine acceptance. The results of this study show that freedom of choice, equal access to the vaccine and being able to live a life with no restrictions once vaccinated were important concerns since the early days of the distribution campaign, with 53% (836/1591), 42% (669/1591) and 35% (559/1591) of hesitant respondents, respectively, indicating they would be more likely to receive the COVID-19 vaccine if they felt these issues were satisfactorily addressed. Early risk communication and immunization campaign strategies should address not only the reported efficacy and safety of new vaccines, but, as equally important, the population’s perceptions and beliefs regarding personal choice, effectiveness and adverse consequences.

Eye Tracking in Driver Attention Research—How Gaze Data Interpretations Influence What We Learn

Eye tracking (ET) has been used extensively in driver attention research. Amongst other findings, ET data have increased our knowledge about what drivers look at in different traffic environments and how they distribute their glances when interacting with non-driving related tasks. Eye tracking is also the go-to method when determining driver distraction via glance target classification. At the same time, eye trackers are limited in the sense that they can only objectively measure the gaze direction. To learn more about why drivers look where they do, what information they acquire foveally and peripherally, how the road environment and traffic situation affect their behavior, and how their own expertise influences their actions, it is necessary to go beyond counting the targets that the driver foveates. In this perspective paper, we suggest a glance analysis approach that classifies glances based on their purpose. The main idea is to consider not only the intention behind each glance, but to also account for what is relevant in the surrounding scene, regardless of whether the driver has looked there or not. In essence, the old approaches, unaware as they are of the larger context or motivation behind eye movements, have taken us as far as they can. We propose this more integrative approach to gain a better understanding of the complexity of drivers' informational needs and how they satisfy them in the moment.

Managing information flow through prosody in it-clefts

This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.