Too Hard to Shout Over the Loudest Frame: Effects of Competing Frames in the Context of the Crystallized Media Coverage on Offshore Outsourcing

This study investigates the effects of competing frames in newspaper coverage of offshore outsourcing, an issue that is characterized by a predominantly negative, unemployment-focused media framing. The findings of a randomized, controlled experiment (N = 152) demonstrate that conventional framing effects do hold for this issue and for this media context by moving recipients’ attitudes in the direction consistent with the valence of the frame. However, they also show the backfire effect of the positively valenced frame among recipients with greater interest in political and economic news, who become less supportive of outsourcing if they read a story framing outsourcing from a consumer-oriented perspective. Our results contribute to the ongoing debate about the limits of framing effects on forming opinion about contentious policy issues and demonstrate the challenges for nondominant perspectives to make their way to news-savvy audiences even when the nature of the issue in question necessitates considering them.     

Social network effects on academic achievement

How peer groups contribute to educational outcomes has long interested researchers. However, the possibility that peer groups dominated by either low- or high-achieving youth can have substantively different effects on achievement has been largely ignored. In this paper, we show that while being embedded in a high-achieving network of friends is not associated with increased own achievement, being embedded in a low-achieving network is associated with decreased own achievement. In additional analyses, we present evidence that these associations are at least in part due to influence, as opposed to only selection effects or shared environment. We also examine whether the structure of the network in which a student is embedded might affect their educational achievement. We show that achieving at higher levels positively predicts how centrally located a student is in their network, but being more centrally located does not predict concurrent achievement. This finding suggests that the behavior of individuals is affecting the formation of network structure and not the reverse.     

Of Monsters and Men: Horror Film in Belarus,Ukraine, and Russia

Abstract

This article looks at recent horror films from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia through the notion of “cultural translation.” It argues that these films both mimic Hollywood horror tropes and subvert genre formula via engagement of local history and memory. Horror films, therefore, represent both the cinematic and cultural concerns of their times, reflecting the changing globalized realities of cinema as a medium, and the social and political dilemmas their viewers face beyond the movie theatre. The results are hybrid texts that engage the viewer in the polyphony of intertextual, global, and local connections.     

CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF LEISURE AMONG THE JEWS OF WESTERN BELARUS AT THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY

The article examines the adverse conditions in which the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) started its war relief work in German‐occupied Lithuania in 1915. As Lithuania's fate was still uncertain, the JDC had to overcome almost insurmountable diplomatic, political and practical problems in the initial stages of its activity. The article highlights how the JDC was able to adopt a consistent policy, always subscribing to a non‐political approach and adapting its tasks to the immediate and most pressing need of the countries aided, while having to deal with significant political challenges that deeply affected its freedom of movement, such as the impossibility of acting without the State Department's approval and of ignoring the reality of the German military administration.