Ben Davies, Christina Lupton, and Johanne Gormsen Schmidt, <em>Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic.</em> Oxford University Press, 2022

The background of this research is because people still have limited knowledge of ethnographic and ethnomethodological research methods in a study. The problems discussed in the writing are: 1. How is the development of ethnographic research and ethnomethodological research? and 2. When did ethnographic research and ethnomethodological research begin? The research method used is the historical method through the stages of heuristics, criticism, interpretation and historiography. Data collection techniques through library research techniques (library research) are carried out through literature studies and several reference sources such as journals, articles, books and others. The aim of the research is to describe the development of ethnographic and ethnomethodological research and to provide understanding and introduction to ethnographic and ethnomethodological research to the government. The research results found that ethnographic research methods were better known by the wider community than ethnomethodological research methods.

The article presents the phenomenon of informal newspapers fanzines published by the Lithuanian youth. Using a digitized collection of 500 fanzines from the 1990s and additional sources representing rock music, punk, science-fiction, and other subcultures, employing certain methods of textual analysis and ethnographic research (questionnaires, targeted interviews with zinesters, publishers, and collectors), the article analyses emergence of fanzines, their prevalence in Lithuania, and motivation for their publishing. The main results of the research show that the most active period of fanzine-publishing in Lithuania was 1990–2004 when a wave of subcultural self-expression among young people was spreading after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence. Fanzines as a phenomenon were characteristic not only of Lithuania’s major cities, but also of its regions. The main motivation to create fanzines signifies young people’s need to disseminate the issues of cultural life important to them yet absent from the official press, to express their creative potential, and to broaden their circle of the like-minded people.

Building resilient societies after COVID-19: the case for investing in maternal, neonatal, and child health

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the socioeconomic factors that influence the public’s reading interest in specific genres of literature, as well as what the public actually reads or listens to in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).Design/methodology/approachA survey of 1,377 households, consisting of 650 and 727 from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, respectively, was conducted in 2012 as part of the country’s first, and to date only, comprehensive Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. A multivariate probit model is applied to analyze factors that influence interest in reading fiction, religion and spirituality and health and fitness. In addition, factors that influence public’s likelihood to read novels, short stories and poems are also assessed.FindingsThe results indicate that ethnicity, gender and education level significantly influence both the interest in reading, and actual reading habits. For example, while Asian and Western expatriate groups show more interest in fiction and health and fitness literature, Emirati are more likely to read poems. A gender difference is identified with females more likely to read.Research limitations/implicationsThe survey focused on regular dwelling units and within a household, family and resident relatives. Hence, it excludes a segment of residents, such as domestic workers and unauthorized migrants.Originality/valueThis is the first study to empirically assess the factors influencing the public’s interest and reading habits across a range of genres of literature in the UAE.

High competition requires new methods, tools, and technologies for implementing marketing efforts. Mind maps represent marketing information in a compact way, which facilitates classification and visualization of the marketing phenomenon under analysis. The method of text analysis can be applied to marketing research because mind maps that represent marketing information are a structured text; such an approach makes it possible to subject mind maps to linguistic processing. This research combined the conventional semantic analysis with comparing mind maps as a method of semantic-graph analysis. Initial marketing data were converted into a structured graph of lexical units, which were them compared pairwise to calculate similarity, taking into account the structural-multiple approach. The methods of semantic text analysis proved applicable to marketing data and effective in extracting additional information from a set of heterogeneous sources or different experts. Text analysis tools demonstrated a good potential for broadening the rage of marketing research methods.

Adding a Correction Factor to the Allocation of Scarce Life-saving Resources in a Pandemic

Global pandemic perspectives: public health, mental health, and lessons for the future

This article presents a detailed description of how I adapted an undergraduate ethnographic research methods course to a fully online format during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on my recent experience designing and teaching a new course titled Ethnographic Research in/of Houston Asia in Fall 2020 at Rice University, I illustrate the virtual learning environment I maintained in this course through ongoing collaboration with members of the Zoroastrian, Sikh, and Chinese Buddhist communities in Houston, Texas. Specifically, this article describes how I incorporated virtual field trips and a web symposium – two activities that I organized with the support of Rice University’s Course Development Grant – into my teaching of ethnography on Zoom. Such online activities, which are by necessity intensively interactive and community-oriented, enabled the course to cultivate a deep level of public engagement that arguably would not have been possible in the pre-COVID-19 period.&nbsp

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions have been a major stressor that has exacerbated mental health worldwide. Qualitative data play a unique role in documenting mental states through both language features and content. Text analysis methods can provide insights into the associations between language use and mental health and reveal relevant themes that emerge organically in open-ended responses.ObjectiveThe aim of this web-based longitudinal study on mental health during the early COVID-19 pandemic was to use text analysis methods to analyze free responses to the question, “Is there anything else you would like to tell us that might be important that we did not ask about?” Our goals were to determine whether individuals who responded to the item differed from nonresponders, to determine whether there were associations between language use and psychological status, and to characterize the content of responses and how responses changed over time.MethodsA total of 3655 individuals enrolled in the study were asked to complete self-reported measures of mental health and COVID-19 pandemic–related questions every 2 weeks for 6 months. Of these 3655 participants, 2497 (68.32%) provided at least 1 free response (9741 total responses). We used various text analysis methods to measure the links between language use and mental health and to characterize response themes over the first year of the pandemic.ResultsResponse likelihood was influenced by demographic factors and health status: those who were male, Asian, Black, or Hispanic were less likely to respond, and the odds of responding increased with age and education as well as with a history of physical health conditions. Although mental health treatment history did not influence the overall likelihood of responding, it was associated with more negative sentiment, negative word use, and higher use of first-person singular pronouns. Responses were dynamically influenced by psychological status such that distress and loneliness were positively associated with an individual’s likelihood to respond at a given time point and were associated with more negativity. Finally, the responses were negative in valence overall and exhibited fluctuations linked with external events. The responses covered a variety of topics, with the most common being mental health and emotion, social or physical distancing, and policy and government.ConclusionsOur results identify trends in language use during the first year of the pandemic and suggest that both the content of responses and overall sentiments are linked to mental health.

Impact the Corona Virus Disease (covid-19) pandemic has reduced the stability of the world economy. One of the most common phenomena is the decline in employee performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to examine employee performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of this study includes 27 articles that discuss employee performance during the COVID-19 pandemic and the phenomena work from home with an observation period of 2020 to 2022. The study was carried out by classifying articles based on research topics (antecedents and consequences), year of publication, methods used in research (analytical and survey), research sample, the field of science, the country where the research was conducted and the researcher tries to classify based on the factors that affect the performance itself. The results show that the antecedent is the most dominating topic, which has a percentage of 89% of the total articles studied. The year 2021 is when the most studies on employee performance during the COVID-19 pandemic are conducted, which is 56%, and the most widely used research method is the survey method, which is 96%. Articles that use a sample of employees at the employee level (employees) are 25 articles, while articles that use a sample of employees at the manager level are only two articles. The grouping based on the field of science that most raised the theme of employee performance during the COVID-19 pandemic was in the area of Economics, which was 70%, then the field of tourism at 15% and medicine at 7%. Then the countries that have an interest in conducting research on employee performance issues during the COVID-19 pandemic are India (26%), Indonesia (19%) and the United States (15%). In addition, the factors affecting employee performance during the covid-19 pandemic mostly come from psychological factors (45%) and factors originating from the organization where the employee works (42%).

Introduction: Cultivating Humanity with Martha Nussbaum

The article was originally intended as a review of A. I. Reytblat’s book Writing Across: Articles on Biographics, Sociology and History of Literature. However, the text turned into a brief overview and even an attempt to “classify” the works which every sociologist focused on textual analysis should read. Such a change of the author’s intention was determined by three factors. The first is the “methodological trauma” of sociologists who constantly clarify the grounds of their empirical work and conceptualizations under the nowadays-exalted interdisciplinarity of sociology. The second factor is the aggravation of this problem in the field of textual analysis which lacks conventional nominations of analytical approaches, not to mention rules and procedures of the “classical” scientific methodology. The third factor responsible for the change in the author’s intention is the need for some minimum competence in the disciplines that influence textual analysis in sociology and, thus, their impact has to be evaluated in terms of their causes, consequences, and limits. The author identifies four types of non-sociological works on different linguistic aspects of social life that can form such a competence: (1) practical guidelines for the linguistic analysis essential for correct content analytical studies; (2) publicist estimates of the role of language in social life and of the transformations of the current Russian language/discourse; (3) philosophical works devoted not as much to the discursive construction of social reality as to the fundamental role of language in its constitution and destruction, and; (4) works on the social life of texts that can conditionally fit into the notion of the “sociology of literature”.

The Name of Hate

Meetings of minds: Dialogue, sympathy, and identification, in reading fiction

Report of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death: bringing death back into life