Knowledge Of Citizens Research Articles

CATEGORISATION OF RURAL ACCOMMODATION FACILITIES AND ITS POPULARITY AMONG POLISH CITIZENS

The categorization of rural accommodation facilities has been operating since 1997. Unfortunately, the popularity among farmers in rating their accommodation facilities is very low. The reason of this may be in fact that the average Polish citizen has no awareness of existence of such system. This article discusses the essence of the categorization system of rural accommodation facilities and presents the results of the research on the level of knowledge of Polish citizens about the subject. Through questionnaire research carried out on a sample of 830 respondents can be concluded, that awareness of the existence of the categorization system and knowledge about it is among the Poles very small

Biocultural Homogenization in Urban Settings: Public Knowledge of Birds in City Parks of Santiago, Chile

An understudied consequence of growing urbanization is the rapid and concurrent loss of native biological and cultural diversity. Here, we measured the concordance between avian species richness in public green areas of the city of Santiago, Chile, and the corresponding knowledge of local citizens of this avian diversity. To assess this correspondence, we sampled avian species richness in 10 representative city parks and surveyed the awareness of avian diversity by park visitors as well as their ability to identify bird species. We found no significant relationship between estimated bird diversity from field sampling and their perception by park visitors, suggesting that visitors underestimate avian diversity in city parks because they perceive only a small fraction of the overall diversity, with their awareness especially biased towards the most abundant species. Exotic bird species comprise the majority of the latter group. This result was observed regardless of whether the city park had high or low bird diversity. Public knowledge of birds did not relate to the species richness present at city parks, and was strongly biased towards the most abundant, widely distributed, and primarily exotic species. This result agrees with the biocultural homogenization hypothesis, documenting the role of urban areas in this global process.

More than National Education: Possibilities for Critical Participatory Learning in the Australian Curriculum through Civics and Citizenship

In this paper we examine the extent to which the Australian Curriculum for Civics and Citizenship Education provides opportunities to educate young people to be active, critical citizens, capable of ethical decision-making and democratic participation in their own communities and nations and in the wider world. We ask whether, if the formal curriculum is implemented, will it enable young Australians to be active citizens and participants in the twenty-first century as local and global citizens, whose learning goes beyond national education, to encompass current realities and issues of global interdependency that will impact on their future lives. This conceptual paper examines theories relevant to the development of active, critical and participatory citizenship. It discursively analyses the extent to which the Australian Curriculum offers a framework for the development of participatory citizens, prepared for uncertain futures, in a global world. While the various dimensions of the curriculum do include elements of ‘national education’, there are opportunities to frame the civil, political and social components of citizenship in ways that include local, national and global understandings. However, a review of the curriculum indicates that the knowledge and skills lack participative opportunities for social action. Civics and citizenship knowledge and skills can be developed if all elements of the curriculum are implemented in school classrooms. The achievement of active citizenship, however, also requires students’ participation in whole school programs and contemporary concerns, through authentic actions relevant to their own lives.

What do citizens need to know? An analysis of knowledge in citizenship curricula in the UK and Ireland

Contemporary citizenship education tends to focus on the development of skills through real experiences, which has led to a relative neglect or simplification of knowledge and understanding. This article outlines a framework for analysing citizenship curricula drawing on Young’s notion of ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘knowledge of the powerful’ and on Shulman’s account of subject knowledge, which includes substantive concepts and epistemic criteria. These ideas are used to analyse the citizenship curricula in the four nations of the UK and Ireland to assess the extent to which they provide an adequate account of knowledge and understanding of citizenship. The article concludes that it is important to reconsider the relationship between the genuinely educational aspects of citizenship education (where ‘powerful knowledge’ opens up new and diverse understandings) from the normative aims, which are more akin to a form of socialisation (where ‘knowledge of the powerful’ closes down certain possibilities).

Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship

How do young people living in high-violence contexts express a sense of democratic agency and hope, and/or frustration and hopelessness, for handling various kinds of social and political conflict problems? The management of conflict is a core challenge and purpose of democracy, severely impeded by the isolation and distrust caused by violence. Publicly funded schools can be (but often are not) part of the solution to such challenges (Bickmore, 2014; Davies, 2011). This article is drawn from a larger on-going project probing the (mis)fit between young people’s lived citizenship and conflict experiences, and their school-based opportunities to develop democratic peace-building capacities, in non-affluent local contexts surrounded by violence, in an international comparative perspective. We report on focus group conversations with several small groups of students, ages 10–15, in two Canadian and four Mexican schools in marginalized urban areas. Diverse participating young people tended to have a stronger sense of agency and hope in relation to some kinds of conflicts (such as environmental pollution) compared to others (such as unemployment and insecure work or drug-gang violence). In general, they did not feel that their lived citizenship knowledge was much valued or built upon in school.

Opening Digital Archives and Collections with Emerging Data Analytics Technology: A Research Agenda

In the public sector, the EU legislation requires preservation and opening of increasing amounts of heterogeneous digital information that should be utilized by citizens and businesses. While technologies such as big data analytics (BDA) have emerged, opening of digital archives and collections at a large scale is in its infancy. Opening archives and collections involve also particular requirements for recognizing and managing issues of privacy and digital rights. As well, ensuring the sustainability of the opened materials and economical appraisal of digital materials for preservation require robust digital preservation practices. We need to proceed beyond the state-of-the-art in opening digital archives and collections through the means of emerging big data analytics and validating a novel concept for analytics which then enables delivering of knowledge for citizens and the society. We set out an agenda for using BDA as our strategy for research and enquiry and for demonstrating the benefit of BDA for opening digital archives by civil servants and for citizens. That will – eventually - transform the preservation practices, and delivery and use opportunities of public digital archives. Our research agenda suggests a framework integrating four domains of inquiry, analytics-enhanced appraisal, analytics-prepared preservation, analytics-enhanced opening, and analytics-enhanced use, for utilizing the BDA technologies in the domain of digital archives and collections. The suggested framework and research agenda identifies initially particular BDA technologies to be utilized in each of the four domains, and contributes by highlighting a need for an integrated “public understanding of big data” in the domain of digital preservation.

Do Democracies Provide Better Education? Revisiting the Democracy–Human Capital Link

Summary We investigate whether democracy enhances the skills and knowledge of citizens through improving education quality. This, in turn, could have ramifications for other development outcomes such as economic growth. We offer the first systematic cross-national study on democracy and education quality. Democracy is widely regarded as superior to autocracy in terms of providing access to education, and several studies find that democracy enhances educational enrollment and years of schooling. Yet, we do not know whether democracies provide better education . We argue that democracies should not too readily be expected to outperform autocracies on education quality. First, it is inherently difficult to implement quality-enhancing education reforms, even for well-intentioned (democratic and autocratic) governments with ample resources. Second, education quality is less visible to voters than, e.g., expanding education enrollment, making quality-enhancing policies a less attractive option for office-seeking democratic politicians. We employ a recent dataset comparing international student tests for 128 countries, from 1965 onward. While democracies typically provide “more” education than autocracies, we find no systematic evidence that democracies offer better education. The result is very robust and holds in both cross-section and panel specifications. The null-relationship is not explained simply by democracies providing education access to more (and different types of) children than autocracies, and it appears both in rich and poor and in low- and high-capacity states. We also present relevant nuances: for instance, autocracies display more variation in education quality outcomes than democracies, and we find some evidence that democracy may be associated, more specifically, with better reading skills. In sum, this study provides new insights to the democracy and education literature, where extant studies often report strong links between democracy and various education outcomes not directly related to education quality, and informs literatures linking democracy to development outcomes such as growth via effects on human capital.

Promoting public participation in household waste management: A survey based method and case study in Xiamen city, China

Limited success in 3R (reduce, reuse, recycle) implementation and conflicts in waste treatment plant construction call for active and sustained public participation in Chinese waste management. It is especially important to identify factors which affect citizen participation in waste reduction and recycling where waste policies are poorly implemented. In this paper we report the results of a research-constructed survey conducted in Xiamen, one of eight cities in China which have been operating waste source separation pilot programs since 2000. The results showed that while more than half of respondents were satisfied with local waste management, waste recycling was still inefficient and largely carried out by the informal sector. Satisfaction rates and basic residential house prices were positively correlated, and the satisfaction rate was higher in newly urbanizing areas than in old downtown and urban village areas. A structural equation model was used to identify key factors influencing citizen environmental willingness to participate in waste management, and this indicated that the most important influencing factor was citizen knowledge, followed by social motivation, while institutional factors had the smallest positive effect. Citizens who were better informed and lived in a community/family with more environmentally friendly behaviors have a greater propensity to participate in sustainable waste management. The model is useful for identifying causal relationships and ranking influencing factors in terms of their importance. The results indicate a waste policy hierarchy in Chinese cities, and future waste management should change from the current legislative-centered strategy. The results can be used to inform decision makers find locally effective strategies to improve public participation in waste management in accordance with socioeconomic and cultural conditions in China.

Problematic Behavior of Students with Autism in the Classroom

Referring to this study, its purpose is to identify the level of knowledge of parents, citizens and professionals as well as educators regarding the level of recognition of children with autism. Objectives, aims of the work are: To know the level of engagement these classmates (learners) know and analyze the anxiety of young parents and professionals, how much they work with these children, and in this paper we will analyze the weaknesses in the recognition of working methods with these children and the provision of contemporary methods during the teaching hours. Work analyzes have been done directly with the students in the classroom. Also within the framework of this paper are questionnaires and surveys directly with parents of these children and professionals dealing with this thematic of the problem, analyzed the encyclopedic dictionary research, to know the term autistic. During the study of literature and data processing developed during our research we have concluded that: Knowing autism as a phenomenon, but also as a term that is still widespread, shows that the integration of autistic children into a regular education system is very necessary and needs no education, and their integration into special schools. From the conclusions drawn from this paper, we think that we have to organize many workshops with the children with the parents of these children and with the responsible persons dealing with the education of these children to clarify what is autism and its characteristics, as the paper has concluded that there is a lack of information about these children.

Landslide risk perception in Frosinone (Lazio, Central Italy)

Landslides are recurrent phenomena in Italy, but little is known regarding the public perception of related risk. In order to investigate landslide risk perception of recent phenomena, we decided to perform a qualitative investigation in Frosinone (Lazio, Central Italy) where, during 2013, a relevant landslide (“Viaduct Biondi”) occurred. Survey results highlighted that Frosinone population have been experiencing landslides but do not consider themselves threatened and prepared in occurrence of this type of emergency. This study pointed out that Frosinone municipality and surrounding town populations behave as an inactive actor in land conservation and management, addressing major responsibility to institutions. For this reason, realization of a purposed designed dissemination campaign would be useful in order to improve citizen knowledge and to enhance their participation in landslide risk reduction activities.

Assessment of the Social Electricity Online Platform Tools and their Potential Impact on European Citizens

Through the Social Electricity Online Platform (SEOP) European project, various learning modules, educational content and online eco-feedback platforms have been developed, to raise the awareness and knowledge of citizens about energy, the environment and sustainability. The platform allows European citizens to become educated on energy-saving practices and techniques, including the use of renewable technologies at their home. Moreover, through the Social Electricity application, people may become aware of their electrical energy consumption by means of comparisons with the corresponding electrical consumption of their friends, as well as with the total consumption in the street, neighbourhood, village, city and country where they live, in a collaborative and social environment. In this paper, a pilot study performed in 8 European countries involving more than 300 European citizens is presented, in order to demonstrate the influence of online learning modules and eco-feedback platforms on the everyday lives of people, in terms of rational energy use and energy savings. In this pilot, participants have been divided into two groups: the one uses the four learning modules of the platform and then the Social Electricity application, whereas the latter uses only the application. This paper describes our overall findings after three months, exploring the completeness and educational value of the learning modules, and the potential of Social Electricity as an effective online tool for personal energy management. The results also evaluate the impact, behavioural change and the increase on energy awareness among the two groups, as well as the general effectiveness and acceptance of the platform.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sace.16.3.15803

生殖医療に対する市民の知識・信念・態度 : 不妊治療と出生前診断

生殖医療に対する市民の知識・信念・態度 : 不妊治療と出生前診断

A General Model of Abstention Under Compulsory Voting

Invalid voting and absenteeism are alternative sources of abstention under compulsory voting. Previous research failed to systematically study the mechanisms behind each form of non-voting and the relationships between them. We develop an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to jointly examine invalid voting and absenteeism in Brazil, the world’s largest democracy with mandatory voting. Using Bayesian inferential methods and analyzing both individual and district-level data, we show that less educated and politically knowledgeable citizens are less likely to vote and, when they do, they are typically unable to successfully complete their ballot. Unlike absenteeism, invalid voting also has a political dimension reflecting voters’ disenchantment with elections and democratic performance. Both sources of abstention coexist and, together, undermine electoral participation.

The Politically Engaged Public Library: Admitting and Embracing the Political Nature of Libraries and Their Goals

ABSTRACTThe authors of this article contend that politics is an integral part of public library leadership. Most of the work that public librarians do is designed to build citizenship knowledge and improve some aspect of social justice. Politics is a library imperative because a heavy percentage of institutional funding is tied to public funding, which is a major part of total library financial support. Political considerations, therefore, are a major concern in acquiring and retaining funding that will bring libraries and their constituents to a brighter future.

Promoting open innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring

Motivated by the multiple ‘success stories’ of the open innovation paradigm in the private sector, and also by the increasing complexity of social problems and needs, the public sector has started moving in this direction, attempting to exploit the extensive knowledge of citizens for the development of innovations in public policies and services. As the direct transfer of open innovation methods from the private sector to the public sector is not possible, it is necessary to develop effective ‘citizen-sourcing’ methods, which address the specific needs of the public sector, and then analyze and evaluate them from various political and management sciences' perspectives. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction: i) It evaluates a novel method of monitoring relevant social media (e.g. political blogs, news websites, and also Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts) by government agencies, by retrieving and making advanced processing of their content, and extracting from it external knowledge about specific domains of government activity or public policies of interest, in order to promote and support open innovation; ii) For this purpose it develops a multi-perspective evaluation framework, based on sound theoretical foundations from the political and management sciences, which can be of wide applicability; it includes three evaluation perspectives: a political perspective (based on the ‘wicked’ social problems theory from the political sciences), a crowd-sourcing perspective (based on previous management sciences research on crowd-sourcing) and a diffusion perspective (based on Roger's diffusion of innovation theory from management sciences). The above evaluation provides interesting insights into this novel method of promoting and supporting open innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring, revealing its capabilities and strengths, and at the same time its problems and weaknesses as well, and also ways/interventions for addressing the latter.

La relacion entre el conocimiento politico y la pluralidad electoral en el Estado de Sinaloa, Mexico: el saber politico

The study addresses the relationship between the levels of information and political knowledge of citizens and the electoral plurality in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, particularly the alternations in municipal governments. That means, plurality has to do with the levels of information and political knowledge of citizens and where, at higher levels of information and political knowledge may happen higher levels of plurality and alternation. A survey was conducted and created an index to see if this hypothesis is maintained, showing that indeed, higher rates of information and political knowledge of citizens means higher levels of plurality and alternation.

OPINIE POLAKÓW O WSPÓŁPŁACENIU ZA LECZENIE SZPITALNE ORAZ O DOPŁATACH DO ŚWIADCZEŃ PONADSTANDARDOWYCH

Introduction: Co-payment in the health sector operates in most healthcare systems in European countries. The aim of this study was knowledge of Polish citizens’ opinions concerning healthcare services co­‑payment with respect to selected socio­‍‑demographic factors.Material and methods: The study was conducted using a diagnostic survey of 636 respondents, representing residents of the West Pomeranian region, Poland.Results: The majority of respondents did not accept co­‍‑payment for health services.Conclusions: Material situation and educational background impact on decisions concerning co­‍‑payment for hospital treatment.

Developing a Citizen Perspective of Public Participation: Identity Construction as Citizen Motivation to Participate

Public participation affords public officials the opportunity to tap into diverse citizen knowledge that may help solve complex social problems. In order to best understand how to design effective participation, it is necessary to consider the perspectives of both public administrators and citizens; however, public administration literature has focused less on the citizen perspective. This article narrows the gap in the literature by elaborating a citizen perspective of participation and suggesting that identity plays a role in participation. It adopts a social identity approach in order to theorize how citizen identity constructed through participation is best conceptualized as a social identity, and to demonstrate how this social identity relates to citizen motivation to participate. The authors suggest that linking participation to a social identity approach elaborates a citizen perspective of participation and has value for furthering understanding of citizen-administrator collaboration.

Developing Global Citizens? Possibilities and Problems of Youth-Conference Programming

Youth for Global Engagement (YGE) is a summer program assembling late adolescents from diverse geographic locales to converse and create projects to be carried out upon homecoming. We engaged a mixed-methods study to gain insight about the development of global citizenship knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors among participants over one year. Participants engaged in pre and post-surveys, interviews on-site and we observed learning activities and read participantgenerated objects. Three themes illustrate how participants interpreted global citizenship through the course of the study: (1) development of open-mindedness (2) shift from individualist to cooperative analysis and (3) feelings of isolation and anxiety among South participants. Implications can be drawn for similar youth-programming practices as well as global education efforts generally.

<b>Estado, religião e educação do cidadão

Este artigo objetiva apontar os entraves e os conflitos entre Estado e religião e as perspectivas atuais sobre os desdobramentos dessa relação com a educação do cidadão. Faz uma reflexão e análise da fundação do Estado Moderno, e sua influência na formação das sociedades modernas e contemporâneas, bem como evidencia os impactos dos pressupostos da separação entre religião e Estado para considerar que a educação do cidadão passa pelo esclarecimento, e que esse esclarecimento democrático e republicano dos cidadãos passa pelas “[...] regras de uma educação pública” (Diderot, 2000, p. 268), pois o Estado deve ser o responsável pela educação, em diálogo constante com os diversos setores da sociedade, de tal forma que ‘o objeto do ensino e a extensão das lições devem proporcionar-se à pluralidade’. A ideia central é a de que pode existir um espaço para as questões religiosas dentro do Estado laico, mas elas devem ser orientadas pela razão que esclarece o cidadão e seja expressão da subjetividade e da liberdade humana. Nas relações entre o Estado, a religião e a educação do cidadão, cabe refletir sobre a desigualdade social e o impacto da religião na manutenção ou transformação de estruturas sociais injustas.