Key Concepts in Community Studies

Cardiovascular disease constitutes a burden of epidemic proportion,1 and understanding its determinants is essential to designing effective interventions. Doing so requires the ability to track disease burden at the population level. In the United States, without national registries, community surveillance is the method of choice.2 Community surveillance studies are mostly retrospective by design, rely on diagnostic codes for case finding, and require a defined population in which events can be consistently and reliably captured and validated with standardized approaches. Applied to cardiovascular disease, community surveillance measures its burden in communities by tracking the incidence of events, their severity, and their mortality, thereby enabling the appraisal of the components of cardiovascular diseases in a given population.2 Because of the aforementioned methodological requirements, few surveillance studies exist in the United States. They include the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study,3 the Minnesota Heart Survey,4 the Olmsted County Study,5 and the Worcester Heart Attack Study.6 The data from these studies indicate that, although deaths from coronary disease have declined, the incidence of myocardial infarction in the United States has remained mostly stable. Thus, the decline in mortality can be envisioned as reflecting an improvement in survival, which may be mediated by a declining severity of myocardial infarction. Article p 503 The article by Myerson et al7 in this issue of Circulation specifically addresses this important and understudied issue in ARIC between 1987 and 2002. They examined a large, multiracial population and relied on several indicators, including the composite Predicting Risk of Death in Cardiac Disease Tool (PREDICT) score to conclude that the severity of infarction declined over time. Indeed, the proportion of infarctions with major ECG abnormalities, ST-segment elevation, and Q waves decreased, as did biomarker values and the proportion of persons presenting with shock. …

The purpose of this study is to reveal the general view of akhī community and futuwwah studies using the bibliometric analysis method. Many studies on akhī community and futuwwah have been published in the literature. These studies focused on the concepts of akhī community and futuwwah in social, economic, and religious settings. A comprehensive bibliometric mapping analysis study of akhī community and futuwwah studies has not been found. This study is thought to be distinct from other studies in the literature in this regard. Furthermore, because of the bibliometric analysis, it can be stated that this research will be useful to researchers working on akhī community and futuwwah. The study was designed with the quantitative research method. Searches on Web of Science were conducted in accordance with the study's purpose, and 22 studies were identified. The data in the study were analysed based on the authors' collaboration, the use of common key concepts, and the common citation analysis. Based on the findings of the network of author collaboration, two different conclusions were reached: the subject is out of date, and a sufficient network of relations could not be established in the literature. The most recent research key concepts date from 2010. Based on the findings of the common citation network, it was determined that the cited authors were all directly involved in the fields of akhī community and futuwwah. Because the purpose of this study was to determine the international visibility of the akhī community and futuwwah studies, it was limited to the Web of Science database. Ulakbim Tr Dizin or Dergipark searches can be used to determine its visibility at the national level. The situation of the concepts akhī community and futuwwah at the national level can be revealed based on the data obtained. However, in this study, these concepts are discussed independently of any subject. Bibliometric analysis can also be used to uncover the connections between these concepts and more specific fields. Keywords: Akhī Community, Akhī, Futuwwah, Akhi Evran, Bibliometric Analysis, VOSviewer.

Plant ecology originated during the late nineteenth century in Germany and Scandinavia. Early plant ecologists pursued two broad areas of research: synecology, the study of plant communities and autecology, the study of the adaptation of species to their environments. Plant ecology developed rapidly in Britain and the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century, before animal ecology and other specialties emerged. The study of plant communities, particularly plant succession, became the central focus of ecological research during the first half of the twentieth century. After Second World War, the status of plant ecology as a distinctive area of research declined as new fields such as population ecology and ecosystem ecology gained prominence. However, plant ecologists continued to make substantial contributions to these newer areas of research.Key Concepts:Early plant ecologists studied plant communities and the adaptation of species to the physical and biological environments.Laboratory physiology provided an important intellectual model for the early development of plant ecology.Plant ecology was the first ecological specialty to emerge, and plant ecologists were largely responsible for establishing the discipline of ecology.The process of plant succession was an important focus of research for American ecologists during the first half of the twentieth century.Population genetics and evolutionary theory of the Modern Synthesis strongly influenced the development of population ecology after Second World War.Population biology combined methods and ideas from population ecology, population genetics and evolutionary theory to study both plant and animal populations.Ecosystem ecology emphasised the important energy‐capturing role of plants as the photosynthetic producers in terrestrial ecosystems.Long‐term research carried out by large teams of scientists became a major feature of ecosystem ecology.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on communities and their impact on cultural production and consumption of literary and media texts. Focusing on case of Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries paranormal romantic saga and its TV adaptation, True Blood, it focuses on circulation of Sookie Stackhouse's novels from a gendered genre and a gendered community of romance readers to a wide audience. It also considers concept of community as a main topic of literary proposal that can be understood in meta-fictional terms: Sookie, main character, embodies a prototype of young, uneducated and working class woman that matches romance reader prototype. Thus, Sookie's identity negotiations within different-even antagonistic-communities that come together in novels can be read as an acute and ironical reflection about minoritised identity of original community of saga: female romance novel readers. The fact that True Blood erases this aspect, that it reveals gendered genre of original text, is also meaningful.Although literary theory and cultural imaginaries have often promoted idea of reading as a lonely and isolated activity, importance of communities as a key concept in our relationship with all kinds of texts has been pointed out insistently. However, critical studies on subject have held opposing views about impact of communities on reading experience: community has often been understood as a boundary that limits agency of readers since interpretive communities are made up of those who share strategies (Fish 14); in consequence there are no individual readings in a strict sense because all of them depend on a common background.Other studies, however, have insisted on agency of readers when decoding a text and even on their ability to create readings opposed to those determined hegemonic community, that is, oppositional readings (Hall 116). Starting from complexity of encoding and decoding processes- acutely pointed out Hall-involved in reading of a text, whatever its nature is, idea of an community that does not limit agency of interpreters has been extensively studied in media studies (Lindloff) and cultural studies (Morley). Also, as Radway points out in her study of communities, our interaction with texts includes a wide variety of operations including the desire to read a certain kind of material, interpretation of that and uses to which both interpretation and act of constructing it are put. According to author, then, communities which exist by virtue of a common social position and demographic behavior, unconsciously share certain assumptions about reading as well as preferences for reading material (54), and these preferences depend to a large extent on uses of texts and their context of reception which assigns a specific cultural value to those texts and reading practices.Moreover, we cannot understand concept of community as an homogeneous set of readers; on contrary, heterogeneity and atomization have become its main features. As Garcia Canclini (196) points out, in contemporary global context members of an community organized around a certain cultural object have only one thing in common: taste for this cultural object. In fact, this configuration of community redefines-according to author-the sense of belonging and identity, which is no longer based in ethnicity, class or nation but on consumption of symbolic goods and establishment of mobile reading pacts.By introducing these nuances into concept of community, it becomes more flexible, both in regard to agency of its participants when negotiating cultural sense of texts around which they are grouped as to number of community spaces a reader can occupy. …

In an attempt to address the title, this article will follow two lines of inquiry. It firstly will trace the development of several key concepts in Translation Studies and ethnography and show how these concepts have shifted in terms of interpretation and scope over time depending on the broader contexts in which they were used. In each case, the concepts were derived from observation of and reflection on translation. The paper will also point to theorization in anthropology (perhaps in contrast to philology) and how it stems directly from ethnographic observation and study in which translation plays an important role. In doing so, the paper will argue that these local insights have considerable staying power and theoretical reach, precisely because they are grounded in the lived experience that sustains them, which perhaps will make them adaptable in other places and situations far beyond their ‘origin’ or the place where the seed of insight germinated. This is considered important in relation to the theme of the special issue, namely community interpreting and translation in the Africancontext, as many concepts emerge from studies of communities and their cultural contexts. Secondly, the paper draws on and discusses ethnographic data of translational practices in a social housing scheme to shed new light on intralingual translation as conceptualized by Jakobson (1959) and set out in a model byKorning Zethsen (2009). The data also illustrates how the various elements of intralingual translation belong in a broader economy of exchanges in the housing scheme.

Bob Sigmond's assertion that community coordination is a key missing ingredient in achieving more effective health systems at the local level is worth our full attention. He brings to this issue a wealth of relevant experience in the financing and delivery of health services and as a pioneer in health planning at the community level. Having had a modest exposure to community initiatives through, most recently, a program in Calhoun County, Michigan, I support Sigmond's basic point, although with a few elaborations that I will mention later. Coordination Is on the Move Despite pervasive changes in health systems across the country, from my perspective, the public in general and, specifically, buyers and providers of care in many communities are frustrated with fragmentation of care, rising costs, uneven access, shortages of primary care, inadequate information, and a lack of consumer input or feedback. Whereas there are few successes to point to, many communities are beginning to address these and other issues through community studies and the development of overarching coordination programs. Over 2,000 persons attended a meeting last year in Anaheim to discuss Healthier Communities(1). Greater coordination was a key topic; the pot is beginning to boil, fired by a mixture of social and economic pressures. The theme of coordination is being addressed among national associations as well. Recently, the American Hospital Association, with the Hospital Research and Educational Trust (HRET), has published a vision entitled, Community Care Networks (1994), which called for collaborative networks of hospitals, physicians, other health providers, and social agencies to work in a coordinated fashion for a fixed annual payment--with their success being measured not only by overall costs but by impact on health status. In October 1994, HRET received a $6 million grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to monitor and guide local community initiatives and to coordinate a concept of community benefit standards. It is important to note that the AHA guidelines supplementing the vision stress such key concepts as: childhood immunization, mammograms, and other preventive efforts; the need to promote primary care and improve environmental conditions; and the need to control costs through an attack on root causes--for example, teenage pregnancy, lack of prenatal care, alcoholism, substance abuse, preventable accidents, and poor nutrition. Communities are being urged not only to coordinate health programs but to broaden their definition of health as well. What has prompted establishment of such guidelines among AHA leaders remains speculative, but one suspects that the realization has grown that a broader definition of health that includes new local initiatives is the most effective route to value, and for some, only on such a path can hospitals and allied health institutions lay legitimate claim to being accountable and thus deserving of special tax status. Employers and health plans are also beginning to look at performance indicators from an increasingly broad-based community perspective. The guidelines of the Health Employers Data Information Set (HEDIS) seek to apply preventive and patient satisfaction-oriented performance criteria when comparing health plans. Health plans themselves are becoming increasingly focused on these issues as they seek accreditation through the National Committee on Quality Assurance. The Jury Is Still Out, but the Reasons for Coordination Are Compelling It is true that we have little evidence yet regarding how local initiatives that are built on a concept of coordination have succeeded in improving access, reducing fragmentation, improving quality of care, or moderating cost increases. We appear embarked on a new cycle of social medicine, but the jury is still out. On the other hand, before opting one way or another, we should remind ourselves that a significant amount of medicine is practiced without outcome validation, and some of it seems to do some good. …

Some perceive poorer quality of information (i.e., information-poor) than others (i.e., information-rich) depending on diverse physical and social barriers. The unevenness of information experience is referred to as information gap. It is core to figure out the features that create such differences for researchers to understand the uneven experiences. The aim of our method is to help designers address the gap features: components of information gap such as clothes fabric or size in online-shopping. While few studies in HCI community attempted to identify the gap features, existing studies are often limited to exploration of gaps. We suggest Hurdle Relay, a method not only to identify the gap features but also to further understand how and why these gap features create different experiences. Hurdle Relay has two key concepts: role-switching of information-rich, and iterative comparison through a relay. We conducted a study on a movie captioning project for hearing-impaired as the case information gap is experienced. The study result showed that the researchers can use Hurdle Relay method to compare the features appearing/disappearing through a relay and understand the subjective gap features. We conclude by discussing the implications of our method for HCI designers.KeywordsInformation gapIterationParticipatory method

This book is a case study of history and culture in the Taiwanese town of Ta-ch'i and the group of rural villages that constitute its standard marketing community. However, its scope exceeds that of most community studies. The author attempts to construct a holistic view of Chinese culture from an analysis of the relationship between history and ritual in a particular locality. The author argues that social institutions and collective representations are dialectically connected in the process of social and cultural reproduction. He describes this dialectical process through an analysis of the key cultural concept of ling, the magical power attributed to ghosts, gods, and ancestors. In analyzing the symbolic logic of ling, he asserts that it can be fully understood only as a product of the reproduction of social institutions and as a manifestation of a native historical consciousness. Structuralist and Marxist insights are combined to explain how ling is best understood as both a cultural logic of symbolic relations and a material logic of social relations. The book is in three parts. Part I is a social and economic history that outlines what one might call an objectivist or positivist view of Ta-ch'i's history, describing events as they were, regardless of the perceptions of local participants. This material is a background to the synchronic sociological analysis of local territorial cults that constitutes Part II. In Part III, the author unsettles the objectivist assumptions of Part I by showing how the idiom of ling underlies Taiwanese constructions of history and identity and how the cultural construction of history dialectically reproduces society and creates history. The book is illustrated with 8 pages of photographs, 17 line drawings, and 9 maps.

Empirical studies in Muslim communities on organ donation and blood transfusion show that Muslim counsellors play an important role in the decision process. Despite the emerging importance of online English Sunni fatwas, these fatwas on organ donation and blood transfusion have hardly been studied, thus creating a gap in our knowledge of contemporary Islamic views on the subject. We analysed 70 English Sunni e-fatwas and subjected them to an in-depth text analysis in order to reveal the key concepts in the Islamic ethical framework regarding organ donation and blood transfusion. All 70 fatwas allow for organ donation and blood transfusion. Autotransplantation is no problem at all if done for medical reasons. Allotransplantation, both from a living and a dead donor, appears to be possible though only in quite restricted ways. Xenotransplantation is less often mentioned but can be allowed in case of necessity. Transplantation in general is seen as an ongoing form of charity. Nearly half of the fatwas allowing blood transfusion do so without mentioning any restriction or problem whatsoever. The other half of the fatwas on transfusion contain the same conditional approval as found in the arguments pro organ transplantation. Our findings are very much in line with the international literature on the subject. We found two new elements: debates on the definition of the moment of death are hardly mentioned in the English Sunni fatwas and organ donation and blood transfusion are presented as an ongoing form of charity.

Senior centers across the nation continue to serve as important access and focal points for older adults to voice their desires, get basic needs met, and to engage in opportunities that support many of the key concepts of Age-Friendliness (i.e. social participation, respect and social inclusion, civic engagement, transportation, and community supports and health services). Senior centers are the front line of aging services and thus in a position to implement programs and raise public awareness about age-friendly initiatives. The purpose of this presentation is to present and discuss the involvement of senior centers or other senior service agencies, as well as to characterize the mobilization of a community after joining the movement. We will present 5 case studies of age-friendly communities who are in the implementation phase of their initiative, to illustrate the challenges, opportunities, and outcomes associated with placing a senior center at the forefront of the movement. Based on the results of this work, we will present a typology of age-friendly community initiatives as a mechanism for supporting other communities make this transition. We conclude with a discussion of how age-friendly communities are part of the paradigm shift of aging in community and the ways in which this work intersects with other health policy initiatives with which cities and towns engage.

The study of microbial communities has undergone significant advancements, starting from the initial use of 16S rRNA sequencing to the adoption of shotgun metagenomics. However, a new era has emerged with the advent of long-read sequencing (LRS), which offers substantial improvements over its predecessor, short-read sequencing (SRS). LRS produces reads that are several kilobases long, enabling researchers to obtain more complete and contiguous genomic information, characterize structural variations, and study epigenetic modifications. The current leaders in LRS technologies are Pacific Biotechnologies (PacBio) and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), each offering a distinct set of advantages. This review covers the workflow of long-read metagenomics sequencing, including sample preparation (sample collection, sample extraction, and library preparation), sequencing, processing (quality control, assembly, and binning), and analysis (taxonomic annotation and functional annotation). Each section provides a concise outline of the key concept of the methodology, presenting the original concept as well as how it is challenged or modified in the context of LRS. Additionally, the section introduces a range of tools that are compatible with LRS and can be utilized to execute the LRS process. This review aims to present the workflow of metagenomics, highlight the transformative impact of LRS, and provide researchers with a selection of tools suitable for this task.

Food Blogging and Food-related Media Convergence

Sense of community and social life are two key concepts related to social cohesion, which have been the subject of extensive studies in several disciplines including sociology, psychology and built environment. Social life studies have been mostly conducted in the built environment discipline focusing on city centres; while sense of community studies were mostly the target of sociologists and psychologists focusing on neighbourhoods. As a result, the role of the built environment on the sense of community and social life of neighbourhoods is considered as a missing gap in the literature. This paper, through defining the concepts of social life and sense of community, aims to develop a conceptual framework for further implementation in future research. Accurate implication and interpretation of the concepts show that neighbourhoods can include the sense of community in the residential environment and the social life in the commercial environment. This is because residential environments are where residents’ requirements can be met through their commitment to the community and commercial environments are the fulcrum of interaction and communication.

In this chapter, we describe our overall research design and key methodological considerations. First, we discuss how classic community studies and subsequent works on social and contextual influence inspire our work. In thinking about how social spaces matter, we describe how we conceptualize neighborhoods, and how we operationalize distance to mirror people’s everyday experience of their residential space. Second, we introduce the three observational research sites: a sample of voting precincts from Franklin County, Ohio, and the cities of Upper Arlington, Ohio, and Broomfield, Colorado. Third, we describe the observational studies carried out between 2008 and 2014 across these sites and introduce key concepts from spatial analysis that maximize the usefulness of these data. Fourth, we describe the surveys fielded in these sites following the 2008 and 2012 elections and describe the techniques used to elicit information about individual survey respondents and their communities.

We are entering into a new phase in EU corporate governance. More than ever, our action plan must be focused and based on a solid assessment of actual needs of market players and investors. 1 As Ch...