PartyIntents: a portal survey to assess gay and bisexual men's risk behaviors at weekend parties

PartyIntents examines whether portal survey methods could be used to anonymously survey gay and bisexual men about HIV-risk behaviors before and after a weekend party-oriented vacation. The study recruited 97% of eligible men and of these 489 participants 47% completed the follow-up assessment. Approximately one half of the men intended to use illegal drugs over the weekend, and almost 20% thought that they might have anal intercourse and not use a condom. The methodology can be applied and provides useful information about HIV risk at these events, though refinements may be needed to increase the follow-up rates.     

Self-tracking as communication

Self-tracking has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and public opinion makers owing to its potential for improving life conditions through preemptive action on health, and as a tool of user empowerment vis-à-vis health-care professionals and private and public institutions. Nevertheless, the ‘stuff’ that is typically tracked – exercise and diet being the dominant tracking activities – refers to cultural and social practices that, for the individual user, are utterly mundane and reside in an experiential realm of everyday life. Self-tracking has to be understood in relation to behavior that is predominantly about getting things done in ways that are possible, suitable and meaningful for the individual. To account for this, we propose to conceptualize self-tracking as a communicative phenomenon along three dimensions: communication with the system, the self and social networks of peers. We develop the theoretical framework, drawing upon empirical findings from a qualitative study on how self-tracking is practiced and experienced in the context of exercise by different categories of empirical users. We demonstrate that the meanings of self-tracking practices are, at once, shaped by the motivation of an individual user who is situated in a broader web of everyday activities, and stimulated and augmented by communicative features provided by the technology.     

Pop Music and the Search for the Numinous: Exploring the Emergence of the “Secular Hymn” in Post-Modern Culture

A growing body of research suggests that traditional religious institutions are failing to meet the spiritual needs of their adherents, who are now abandoning traditional worship and turning to pop music to fill the void. This article defines and explores the phenomenon of the “secular hymn.” While nonreligious in nature or intent, the secular hymn is a pop song that allows the listener to experience the numinous by creating an affective state that parallels a spiritual or religious state of mind. This article outlines the phenomenon of the secular hymn in pop culture, defines its characteristics, and evaluates several pop songs against these criteria. While some secular hymns may be used in some church settings, the overall trend may exemplify the continuing erosion of traditional religion and the use of explicitly religious music in both public and private settings.     

Feelings About Fracking: Using the Affect Heuristic to Understand Opposition to Coal Seam Gas Production

The rapid expansion of coal seam gas (CSG) extraction across Australia has polarized public opinion about the risks, benefits, and the future of the industry. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment to assess the impact of CSG messaging on opposition to the CSG industry. Residents of a major Australian city (N = 549), aged between 21 and 87 years, were randomly assigned to view one of three brief video messages (pro‐CSG, anti‐CSG, or a neutral control) sourced from the Internet. They then completed measures assessing CSG affective associations, perceived risks and benefits of CSG, and degree of opposition to the CSG industry. A subsample of 317 participants also completed the measures of affect, risks, benefits, and opposition two weeks following the initial message presentation. Message type significantly predicted message effects in a pattern consistent with the affect heuristic model, although overall, the message effects were modest in magnitude. Respondents who viewed the anti‐CSG video (relative to the control) reported more negative affective responses to CSG, perceived higher risks, fewer benefits, and greater opposition to the CSG industry. Those who viewed the pro‐CSG video (relative to the control) reported stronger positive affective responses to CSG, perceived more CSG benefits and fewer risks, and expressed less opposition to the industry. The effects persisted over a two‐week interval for the anti‐CSG message, but not for the pro‐CSG message. Our findings suggest that people's risk perceptions and views about the acceptability of CSG are malleable by messaging that targets affective pathways.     

Gender differences in poverty among single people in Denmark

This study — based on data from the Danish Welfare Survey of 1986, covering 461 single women and 319 single men — showns that single women have a potential higher risk than single men of becoming poor even when the sexes are categorized by household status, age and relationship to the labour market. These results suggest that the most important reason for higher risk of poverty among women than among single men is not — as often supposed — whether women are single, with or without children, but that gender as such discriminates as to poverty via the different ways men and women are linked to the labour market, This would apparently confirm that which, indirectly, was indicated by previous research on poverty.     

Authorship and publication practices: evaluation of the effect of responsible conduct of research instruction to postdoctoral trainees

We have studied postdoctoral trainees funded by NIH F32 fellowship awards in order to test the effectiveness of responsible conduct of research (RCR) education in the areas of authorship and publication practices. We used a 3-wave telephone and on-line survey design, conducted over a period of two years, in order to test for individual change before and after completing RCR education. Overall the responses of the subjects suggested a clear awareness of standards and practices in publication. However, our results failed to suggest that RCR education in this group significantly increased the level of ethically appropriate behavioral responses measured in the study. Similarly we saw no significant effect on increasing awareness of or attention to ethical guidelines about authorship and publication practices. Our interpretation of these null findings was influenced by the significant publication experience of our cohort of subjects. We forward possible explanations for these null findings in this context. Most importantly, we do not suggest that our results argue against continued instruction in RCR education. Instead, we believe our data reinforce the importance of careful articulation of course goals and objectives with attention to the background and experience of the student audience when developing RCR curricula.     

Cultivating a Research Tool Kit for Social Work Doctoral Education

ABSTRACT

Social work doctoral education can prepare students to become research scholars whose work has impact by providing and promoting the development of an appropriately sophisticated and diverse research methods tool kit. Students can cultivate their tool kits through course work, mentored research experience, and specialized workshops. The tool kit is best grounded in guided reading of methodological texts—that is, reading methodological texts while conferring with advanced peers, faculty, and research supervisors—which provides essential teaching and experiences to enhance understanding and use. This article lays out a rationale for guided reading and provides an example of primer text and recommended readings to support guided reading for one set of related research methods: randomized experimentation and finite mixture modeling.     

Gibt es „interkulturelles Coaching“?

The definition of intercultural coaching depends as well on expectations and objectives of the clients as on underlying concepts of culture. To detect the required competencies of the coach we differentiate between coaching as intercultural learning, coaching in inter- and multicultural contexts and transcultural coaching. Taken these perspectives in mind, culture is and cultures are immanent dimensions in all coaching processes. Hence, in a globalized world of hybrid cultures and individuals the coach needs to use culture(s) as reflexive resource for any kind of coaching process and session.