Who Reads Catholic Newspapers? Exploring Readership in a Changing Industry

Newspapers published by Roman Catholic dioceses represent a large and unexplored part of the religious publishing industry. This study attempts to shed light on the challenges these publications face by examining the readership of a diocesan newspaper in a large Catholic diocese in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Based on a comprehensive survey of 24,278 Roman Catholic households from 27 parishes throughout the diocese, this study finds a large gap in readership and engagement between older and younger readers, raising important strategic and pastoral questions for the newspaper in the years to come.     

Perceived professional standards and roles of public relations in China: Through the lens of Chinese public relations practitioners

As the first quantitative examination of perceived public relations professional standards in China using an online survey, this study was designed based on the standards of professional standards inventory Cameron, Sallot, & Lariscy (1996) constructed and tested among practitioners in the U.S. The survey results suggest six dimensions of perceived standards of professional performance: (1) role and function in organizational strategic planning, (2) sufficiency in professional training and preparedness, (3) gender and racial equity, (4) situational constraints, (5) licensing and organizational support, and (6) participation in the organizational decision-making team. Four dimensions of public relations roles were also identified by the survey participants: (1) brand promotion facilitator, (2) public information specialist, (3) media relations counsel, and (4) conflict management expert. Primary practice area was found to affect how Chinese practitioners perceive the six clusters of professional standards and the four identified public relations roles. These findings provide insights for both practitioners and researchers on how Chinese public relations practitioners view public relations as a profession and how the profession currently holds its professional standards in China.     

Cultural production and the politics of identity: On the strategic use of ‘multiculturalism’ in two Austrian cities

This article is a résumé of the findings of an empirical study carried out by the ICCR Vienna between July 1993 and July 1994. The study investigated the images of ‘foreigners’ as members of immigrant minorities that emerge out of the interaction between the cultural administration, organizers of cultural events, cultural agents and ‘ethnic minority’ artists, and how these images and the discourse on ‘foreigners’ relates to practices of inclusion and exclusion. Specifically examined were artistic productions and initiatives of the low‐profit and non‐profit sector of theatrical and musical performances in Vienna and Graz. Qualitative interviews with the main actors were supported and enriched through non‐standardized participant observation, action research and a modest social experiment. The article argues that the Austrian variant of the discourse on ‘multiculturalism’ serves as a tool to formulate social order, whereby social inequality is transformed into cultural difference. The emancipatory dimension of culture as a way of life is used to construct homogeneous cultural ( = ’ethnic') collectives. In this construction immigrant artists serve as the representatives of the collective culture of the ‘others’.     

A multi-level cost–benefit approach for regulatory decision support in food safety and quality assurance scenarios

In complex policy decision situations where policy objectives cannot be reached alone through the aggregate actions of individual actors, the classical approaches for measuring the effects of regulatory initiatives such as cost–benefit analysis do not provide the information necessary for decision support. This paper discusses a framework for a multi-level analysis approach that could provide decision support in multi-level policy decision situations.     

Mixtures of Toxic Agents and Attributable Risk Calculations

Calculations of attributable risks have attracted increasing interest recently. However, these efforts have been limited to mostly one agent, radiation, and no interactions with effects of other toxic agents have been taken into account. This paper outlines a generic approach to the calculation of attributable risks for an exposure to several toxic agents and interaction effects associated with them. In this calculation, the partition of interaction terms between the agents responsible is of particular importance. At present, there are no rules on how to assign equitable shares, so one methodology will be proposed and others discussed briefly. For one example of an assignment, the standard errors of the attributable risks are determined in terms of the uncertainties of the input parameters, thus setting the stage for a comparison of the different shares of responsibility.     

THE MASS MEDIA AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE MISSING CHILDREN PROBLEM

This article traces the role of the mass media in the social construction of the "missing children issue' as a social problem. The social construction explanation of social problems offered by Blumer (1971) and Spector and Kitsuse (1977) has been criticized (cf. Best and Horiuchi 1985) for lacking a conception of extra-media influences that can affect audiences beyond the initial viewing situation. Recent work in mass communication indicates that a media logic is adapted by other institutions to amplify television imagery and themes about crime, danger, and child abuse. A case study of the origins and claims and counterclaims about the nature and extent of missing children is combined with an empirical analysis of the impact of various sources of information about the missing children issue in order to demonstrate the process by which a social problem is constructed. The impact of additional information is analyzed by administering a self-report questionnaire to 96 respondents before and after viewing a two-part documentary on the complexities of the issue. The data suggest that mass-mediated imagery and formats forge an interactive informational context for social problems by sustaining what is viewed in one's living room with imagery in bulk mail, milk cartons, and posters. It is further suggested that mass media depictions of problems such as "missing children' carry over into consonant images such as child abuse. This conceptualization is capable of encompassing other accounts of social problems (e.g., "urban legends") within claims-making activity.     

Goals for Statistical Uses of Administrative Records: The Next 10 Years

United States statistical agencies use data from administrative record systems to develop program statistics, to establish statistical data bases, and to enhance and evaluate census and survey data. Such uses of administrative records are likely to increase as efforts to control costs and respondent burden of statistical programs continue. This review article proposes six goals for enhanced statistical uses of administrative records in the next 10 years and describes elements of an activist strategy to achieve them. The discussants, representing three agencies that make important statistical uses of administrative records, give their reactions to the proposed goals and strategy.     

The relationship between explicit and implicit learning processes and probable pathological gambling

This paper reports the findings of a study of explicit and implicit learning and gambling with non-problem (n = 107), sub-clinical problem gamblers (n = 13), and probable pathological gamblers (n = 46). Two probability learning tasks modeled after gambling games and an artificial grammar task were used to explore how people learn patterns. In each of the two probability learning tasks, the outcome of the game was biased during the first part (learning phase) of the task. The results showed that many of the participants in the experimental conditions learned the bias and gradually unlearned the bias during the extinction phase of the study. Probable pathological gamblers showed less retention of the bias during two probability tasks and repeated the same errors during the artificial grammar task suggesting that they emphasize explicit learning strategies rather than implicit learning strategies. The results are consistent with the idea that pathological gamblers are more likely to utilize explicit rules than implicit rules.