Subject Discourse Research Articles

Film in Health Campaigns and Reduction in Incidence of COVID-19 in Nigeria: A Thematic Discourse Analysis

The main thrust of this study was to explore the efficacy of films in instigating behavioral change in campaigns against COVID-19 in Nigeria. Specifically, the study sought to establish the critical role that films play in promoting the key messages of COVID-19 health campaigns and to explicate the approach in which the films used in anti-COVID-19 health campaigns contribute to behavioral change among the population with a view to reducing further incidence of COVID-19. Cultivation Theory and Health Belief Model provided the theoretical underpinning to this study. To achieve the set objectives, the study adopted a qualitative research design where thematic (content) analysis and critical discourse analysis were deployed to review and discuss the prevalent COVID-19 preventive and containment themes, appeals, and strategies embedded in the films used in anti-COVID-19 campaigns. The study focused on three categories of films: anti-COVID-19 documentary films; short feature films; and animated films for kids endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO), Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), and the Nigeria Ministry of Health under the aegis of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19. Each of these categories was reviewed, encompassing a total of nine films —three from each category. A thematic analytical review of some of the films deployed in the COVID-19 health campaigns revealed that the films were loaded with health-related themes, appeals, and strategies that, when considered holistically, aimed at influencing or changing people’s behavior with a view to containing and reducing the risk for further incidence of the disease.

The discourse of right-wing radicals in online communities (using the example of the VK social network)

The object of the study are discourses that are broadcast by supporters of right-wing radical ideology in the relevant communities in the largest Russian social network VKontakte. The study of the discourse of right-wing radicals is an urgent topic of scientific and practical research in modern socio-political conditions. The study of the discourses of right-wing radicals helps to better understand the value-ideological attitudes of representatives of this group of political extremists and to reveal the rhetorical techniques and practices that they exploit in the process of mobilizing supporters. The analysis of the discourses of right-wing radicals in social media is especially relevant, since in the conditions of a digital society, the Internet is becoming the leading source of information for a significant part of the population. Four thematic types of discourses are identified – racist, anti-Soviet, anti-Semitic and social-populist discourses. Racist discourse is characteristic of the communities of the "new" and "alternative" right, while supporters of the "old", imperial right actively exploit the theme of anti-Soviet discourse. Anti-Semitic and social-populist discourses are rather poorly represented in the communities selected for the study. With the help of PolyAnalist software, six clusters of terms have been identified based on the occurrence in texts in right-wing radical communities: news, value, anti-migrant, historical, socio-economic. The analysis of the frequency of mentioning words in negative tonality and positive tonality in the posts of right-wing communities is carried out. There are two major objects to which the negative discourse is directed: the modern political regime in the Russian Federation and the Soviet period.

The use of projected autonomy in antenatal shared decision-making for periviable neonates: a qualitative study

BackgroundIn this study, we assessed the communication strategies used by neonatologists in antenatal consultations which may influence decision-making when determining whether to provide resuscitation or comfort measures only in the care of periviable neonates.MethodsThis study employed a qualitative study design using inductive thematic discourse analysis of ‘naturally occurring data’ in the form of antenatal conversations around resuscitation decisions at the grey zone of viability. The study occurred between February 2017 and June 2018 on a labor and delivery unit within a large Midwestern tertiary care hospital. Participants included 25 mothers who were admitted to the study hospital with anticipated delivery in the grey zone of viability and practicing neonatologists or neonatology fellows who partnered in antenatal consultation. We used a two-stage inductive analytic process to focus on how neonatologists’ discourses constructed SDM in antenatal consultations. First, we used a thematic discourse analysis to interpret the recurring patterns of meaning within the transcribed antenatal consultations, and second, we theorized the subsequent effects of these discourses on shaping the context of SDM in antenatal encounters.ResultsIn this qualitative study, that included discourse analysis of real-time audio conversations in 25 antenatal consults, neonatologists used language that creates projected autonomy through (i) descriptions of fetal physiology (ii) development of the fetus’s presence, and (iii) fetal role in decision-making.ConclusionDiscourse analysis of real-time audio conversations in antenatal consultations was revelatory of how various discursive patterns brought the fetus into decision-making, thus changing who is considered the key actor in SDM.

Decoding consumer-centric transition to electric mobility based on sentiment, semantic and statistical analysis

Climate change, carbon emissions, and energy resource depletion have become major concerns worldwide. The transportation sector is a primary target in various political and environmental agendas to tackle them. This calls for switching to sustainable transportation, and one of the important steps towards it is vehicle electrification. Understanding public attitudes towards electric vehicles (EVs) is the key to escalating vehicle electrification. By doing so, governments and enterprises can take the necessary action to persuade people to adopt electric mobility. Unlike past studies, which measured public attitudes using user acceptance data at a minuscule level, this paper adopts a macroscopic approach to this problem by mining public opinions from Twitter. Since Twitter provides access to its public tweet database, decoding the opinions of a vast population for extensive periods has become computationally tractable in recent years. The collected tweets have been used to examine the temporal and geographical dimensions of public perception using Natural Language Processing techniques. The substantial shifts in public sentiment have been identified, and the underlying incidents and topics were interpreted. In the pre-pandemic phase, most of the study nations saw an improvement in public sentiment towards EVs in the time period just before the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be attributed to the world-wide race to zero emissions to meet the Paris Agreement's carbon reduction targets. The public optimism further improved during the pandemic period. After the pandemic, the positivity towards EVs has declined in majority of the nations. The interpreted topics of discourse at the sentiment changepoints can be categorised into the following broad themes: (i) users and potential customers discourse, (ii) engineering and technology, (iii) politics, (iv) environment, (v) business and marketing, and (vi) miscellaneous. Most of the topics of discussion were centred around electric automotive firms, signifying the importance of the role of electric vehicle enterprises in electric vehicle adoption. The outcomes of this study can aid policymakers and electric automotive firms in comprehending the evolution of public perception towards electric mobility and thereby adopt and accelerate the human-centric transitions to carbon-neutral transport options.

The Talented Tenth Meets the Twenty-First Century: Young, Gifted and Diverse in the Post-Affirmative Action Era

Abstract In the wake of the Supreme Court's dismantling of affirmative action policies in higher education in its SFFA v. Harvard ruling, this review essay offers a detailed explication of the relevant themes Camille Z. Charles, Rory Kramer, Douglas Massey, and Kimberly C. Torres analyze in “Young, Gifted, and Diverse: Origins of the New Black Elite.” Taking DuBois's conceptualization of the “Talented Tenth” as their starting point, the authors present a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to examine the experiences and aspirations of Black students who matriculated to elite colleges over a decades-long period. This analysis expands Charles et al.'s intersecting themes of social mobility, colorism, and model minority discourses, situating them within a broader discursive field that includes the relevant historical and contemporary sociopolitical contexts as reflected in the Court's majority and dissenting opinions.

Public Perceptions About Monkeypox on Twitter: Thematic Analysis

Background Social media has emerged as an important source of information generated by large segments of the population, which can be particularly valuable during infectious disease outbreaks. The recent outbreak of monkeypox led to an increase in discussions about the topic on social media, thus presenting the opportunity to conduct studies based on the generated data. Objective By analyzing posts from Twitter (subsequently rebranded X), we aimed to identify the topics of public discourse as well as knowledge and opinions about the monkeypox virus during the 2022 outbreak. Methods We collected data from Twitter focusing on English-language posts containing key phrases like “monkeypox,” “mpoxvirus,” and “monkey pox,” as well as their hashtag equivalents from August to October 2022. We preprocessed the data using natural language processing to remove duplicates and filter out noise. We then selected a random sample from the collected posts. Three annotators reviewed a sample of the posts and created a guideline for coding based on discussion. Finally, the annotators analyzed, coded, and manually categorized them first into topics and then into coarse-grained themes. Disagreements were resolved via discussion among all authors. Results A total of 128,615 posts were collected over a 3-month period, and 200 tweets were selected and included for manual analyses. The following 8 themes were generated from the Twitter posts: monkeypox doubts, media, monkeypox transmission, effect of monkeypox, knowledge of monkeypox, politics, monkeypox vaccine, and general comments. The most common themes from our study were monkeypox doubts and media, each accounting for 22% (44/200) of the posts. The posts represented a mix of useful information reflecting emerging knowledge on the topic as well as misinformation. Conclusions Social networks, such as Twitter, are useful sources of information in the early stages of outbreaks. Close to real-time identification and analyses of misinformation may help authorities take the necessary steps in a timely manner.

Situational model of bullying in business communication

The subject of the study is speech activity affecting the participants of bullying situations in the context of business communications; linguistic means of implementing business bullying strategies and tactics when creating a negative media image of companies and persons in the context of information attacks; media linguistic characteristics of texts related to bullying phenomena in business communication (structure, vocabulary, style, etc.); extralinguistic factors influencing the manifestation and perception of bullying in the business environment, including socio-cultural, psychological and economic aspects. The object of the study is destructive verbal content with signs of business bullying placed in open communication channels, including its media and linguistic manifestations. Within the framework of this work, the emphasis is placed on the specifics of the media linguistic analysis of business communication texts in the context of bullying, as well as on external factors that can influence this process. Special attention is paid to the structure of subject-object relations in the practice of information aggression directed against business. The methodology has developed under the influence of modern media linguistics, when an activity-procedural, praxeological approach to the analysis of the media text is implemented. The thematic discourse of business bullying is distinguished by the length of time, complex interactions, and multicomponent structure of the linguistic architecture of media communication, so the basic method was the praxeological transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary integration of research methods, procedures and techniques – formed the basis of the work. The relevance of the research is due to the combination of the rapidly changing digital landscape, the social responsibility of business and the need for effective strategies to prevent or respond to bullying cases in business communication. The scientific novelty lies in the identification of linguistic signs of business bullying and the construction of communication models of business bullying. The results obtained can be used both in academic research and in the practical activities of the business community. The author proposes to build communication situational models of bullying in the context of business communication on the basis of subject-object relations, which allow to determine patterns of information aggression, analyze components, specify the role of participants, isolate manipulative practices, build business risk strategies, formulate strategies to combat and overcome the consequences of business bullying.

UNVEILING THE POETIC LANGUAGE OF STUDENT DISCOURSE ON INSTAGRAM

This study aims to investigate the poetic function of language used by students on Instagram pertaining to the discourse topics expressed by the students. These researchers adopted a qualitative approach as the research design. This study was conducted by collecting data towards students from schools in Denpasar, Bali, about students' Instagram captions as its document data for analysis. Based on observation, documentation, and interviews with all participants, it can be concluded that Roman Jakobson's poetics function of language, which was demonstrated in the students' Instagram captions, is a viable initiative to discover students’ topics of interest; the students tend to choose topics such as life, love (blossom, broken heart, or loneliness), nature (nature itself or related to humans), personality, wordplay, precious moment,self-confidence, and friendship. These captions are the result of the students' ideology, which include the ideology of wisdom, humor, confession, and hope.

The impact and the challenges of implementing a faculty development program on health professions education in a Brazilian Medical School: a case study with mixed methods

PurposeFaculty development in health professions education is still challenging in developing countries like Brazil. Work overload and the lack of financial support hinder faculty members' participation. Ribeirão Preto Medical School founded its Center for Faculty Development in 2016. Since then, an essential skills module (ESMo) on health professions education (HPE) has been offered regularly to faculty members and preceptors of seven undergraduate programs. This case study aims to evaluate the impact of this Essential Skills Module on the educational practices of participants two years after attending the module and the challenges faced during the process.MethodThe study used a mixed-method approach with a description of the demographic and professional profile data of the ESMo participants. Immediate post-ESMo perceptions (satisfaction and learning) of the participants were determined with structured instruments. Two years later, a semi-structured interview was conducted and recorded to determine the long-term effects (application of learning and behavior changing as an educator). NVIVO® software was used to store and systematize the thematic discourse analysis with a socio-constructivist theoretical framework interpretation.ResultsOne hundred forty-six participants were included: 86 (59%) tenured faculty members, 49 (33,5%) clinical preceptors, and 11 (7,5%) invited teachers. Most were female (66%), and 56% had teaching experience shorter than ten years. 52 (69%) out of 75 eligible participants were interviewed. The immediate reaction to participating in the module was quite positive and 80% have already implemented an educational intervention in their daily activities. Discourses thematic analysis showed five emerging themes appearing in different frequencies: Changes in teaching activities (98%); Lack of previous pedagogical training (92.3%); Commitment and enthusiasm towards teaching (46.15%); Overlapping functions inside the institution (34.6%) and Challenges for student assessment (23%).ConclusionThis first in-depth evaluation of the long-term effects of a faculty development intervention in a Brazilian Health Profession Education school showed that participation positively changed participants' teaching & learning practices. These interventions consistently fostered a community of practice and valued faculty development processes in local and national scenarios.

Producing food utopia(s) at the UN Food Systems Summit: A thematic discourse analysis of Australia’s Summit Dialogues

Australia’s National Food Systems Summit Dialogues, held as part of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), are examined here as a case study exploring the production of utopian narratives within food systems governance. A large body of literature has critiqued the UNFSS on the basis of democratic governance and corporate capture, and some authors have also linked these critiques to the processes of knowledge production at the Summit. However, little research has examined these processes at a micro level, exploring the discursive means by which narratives about the food system are produced in multistakeholder governance contexts. Recognising the UNFSS as a site of struggle and contestation between various ‘utopian’ visions for the future food system, this article asks: What kind of food utopias were produced at the Dialogues, and how? Thematic discourse analysis of the Dialogues – focusing particularly on elements of critique, experimentation, and process – reveal two distinct food utopias, based on technologically-mediated sustainability and multistakeholder participation respectively. This analysis reveals the ways in which ‘utopian’ narratives about food and agriculture are discursively constructed according to ideological assumptions – and, as in this case, may end up reproducing the status quo food system rather than offering the possibility of transformative change.

Construction, Perception and Strategies of Health Risk: The Interview of HPV Vaccination among Chinese Young Women

Risk has emerged as a dominant cultural aspect of modern society as well as a central theme in contemporary discourses. This study focuses on “health risk” through the interview of HPV vaccination’s meaning among young Chinese women for two purposes. First, explores the social construction and transmission of HPV risk through the discussion of discursive strategies. There are three main ways to learn about the vaccine: first, introduction by people they know, second, media publicity, and third, school education.A second purpose is to place the risk perception and women's vaccination decisions in the context of the social milieu in which they occur. According to the results of narrative analysis, interviewees can be divided into two main groups according to the extent to which their actions are influenced by external information: formalists and self-awareness. The latter group shows a higher level of reflexivity than the former group in making the HPV vaccination decision. The group with self-awareness also demonstrates a strong sense of self-body management. Despite individual’s reflexivity level varies, it is clear that risk calculation conscious is prevalent when pursuing HPV vaccine. On the one hand, risk calculation reflects human self-reflexivity and reason, as defined by neoliberalism; on the other hand, it also reflects that future hazards are influencing current activities, the future, is central to risk awareness. At this moment, people are taking proactive action to prevent, mitigate or prevent the challenges and disasters of tomorrow and the day after.

РАСИЗМ И ДИСКУРС (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ ЗАРУБЕЖНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЕЙ)

The article examines the manifestation of racist views and beliefs in various discursive practices. Words, texts and speech can play a key role in the formation of the modern racism. The study provides a brief overview of the concepts of “race” and “racism” adopted in Western science, describes the main approaches to the discursive analysis of racism. The focus is on discursive aspects of racism in Germany and New Zealand. Terms “prejudice” as a negative attitude towards a social group and “stereotype” as expression of a belief about a group or a representative of a group are explored. Strategies for rationalizing prejudices about minorities are listed; themes of racist discourse are described. The semantics of racist discourse manifested in the social, cultural, political, information, business and everyday spheres of life is examined. The authors summarize the broad meaning of the term racism applied in the Western science. The conclusion is made about the unifying and divisive functions of racist discourse and its differentiation into levels: “domestic racism”, “elitist racism”.

The Circular Economy Transition in Australia: Nuanced Circular Intermediary Accounts of Mainstream Green Growth Claims

Australia has recently declared its commitment to a Circular Economy. Policy and initiatives to date have focused on recycling and waste management and research to date has highlighted the need for more ambitious policy, clearer definitions, collaboration, and consensus on goals. There are also calls from some government and non-business sectors for more inclusive, circular models, including Doughnut Economics. In the context of a competing mainstream Circular Economy and inclusive circular society discourses, circular intermediary organizations and their representatives are key to achieving change. Compared to the green growth business narrative of policy and industry media, intermediary representatives are aware of the diversity of challenges and solutions for Australia. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty representatives of circular intermediaries in Australia and thematic discourse analysis, this study finds Circular Economy, circular society, and de-growth discourses informing themes about government, business, growth, consumers, society, and policy present and future. Arguing for a more nuanced view of the discursive and practice-based complexities of the circular transition, the study concludes with recommendations for a more holistic policy and practice beyond the current circularity for circularity’s sake.

A bibliometric journey into research trends in curriculum field: Analysis of two journals

The field of curriculum is characterized by its porous and evolving boundaries, which are influenced by ongoing shifts in sociological, technological, scientific, and political domains. Given this dynamic context, the field necessitates continuous advancements to address these evolving trends. Consequently, its scope and prevailing research foci are subject to change, thereby shaping curricular adaptations. The primary objective of this study is to delineate the contemporary scope of curriculum studies by examining prevailing topics of discourse. Research articles published in two selected journals—Curriculum Inquiry and Journal of Curriculum Studies—were analyzed to achieve this. These journals were chosen for their alignment with the study's objective and were employed as primary data sources. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on data harvested from these publications, utilizing descriptive statistics through the Web of Science (WoS) system as an initial analytical step. Subsequently, VOSviewer software was employed for advanced bibliometric analyses. The study's findings offer both visual and descriptive insights into how the thematic focus within curriculum studies has shifted over time. Notably, recent discussions within the field underscore the exigency for democratic curriculum reforms. Moreover, the issues addressed by the selected journals closely align with current societal challenges.

The Gender of Retirement in a Double-Ageing Country: Perspectives and Experiences of Retired Women and Men in Portugal.

This article aimed to explore the perspectives and experiences of women and men at the stage in their lives following professional retirement, enriching the present and future of a continuously ageing Portuguese society. In order to better capture the diversity and complexity of each individual's experiences, a qualitative methodology was used. Semi-structured individual interviews were carried out with sixteen retired people, eight women and eight men, aged between 59 and 88 years old. A thematic analysis allowed us to identify five themes in the interviewees' discourses. We concluded that gender may be a source of heterogeneity at this stage of life, suggesting that these findings should be analysed in the scope of a life course perspective, and highlighting the impact that the different trajectories of women and men have, as well as the historical and social context in which they take place.

Will She Win? Gendered Media Coverage of the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Primaries

In the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary campaigns, six women, the most in history, announced their candidacy for the presidency. Using computational topic modeling and network analysis of 84,000 newspaper articles (2.2 million paragraphs), we analyze how gender and electability was discussed during the Primaries. Results reveal that male candidates, and especially Joe Biden, were frequently compared with the incumbent, Donald Trump, while coverage of female candidates focused directly on social policy. Trump’s attack on Biden during the impeachment process produced a lasting effect by promoting discourse topics traditionally dominated by men. This crowded out the topics emphasized by women, such as health care and education. Women candidates’ press coverage was also more reactionary than men’s. Although explicit reference to gender as a discourse topic has decreased, which suggests growing gender parity within the political process, gendered policy salience emerges transitively in comparison with the incumbent. Transitive policy salience emerges as a key explanatory variable that articulates the indirect path media coverage can lead to the marginalization of women candidates.

A corpus-based discourse analysis of China’s national image constructed by environmental news in The New York Times

The persuasive function of topoi—the conclusion rules connecting the arguments and claims—in national image construction through news discourse has been relatively under-researched. This article presents findings from a corpus-based discourse analysis of 21 China-related environmental news stories in The New York Times to address this gap. The corpus analysis of frequency was utilized to find out recurrent and characteristic topics in the news discourse, while the concordance analysis revealed the discourse prosody in the news stories. Topoi in the reported speech was scrutinized to uncover the persuasive intentions in the coverage and the press’s opinion of China’s pro-environmental actions. The findings demonstrate that China is constructed as a country pursuing economic growth at the expense of the environment and a country that is good at showing resolution of governance but with poor governance capacity. The paper suggests that China should spread environmental-related information more transparently using a vigorous international discourse system and diversify means of communication to offer the world more ways to see China’s pro-environmental actions.

Ecotourism Potential: A Bibliometric Review

Ecotourism potential is a fundamental research effort needed to promote sustainable regional tourism development, and scholars have paid greater attention to it in recent years, which has led to an increase in the publication of literature on this important and widely recognized topic. However, there is still no clear picture of the development direction of research on ecotourism potential. To address this issue, this study attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing research state in this field. This paper presents a more detailed review of ecotourism potential, a bibliometric analysis of 949 articles selected from 1,027 publications retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database, and a systematic descriptive and network analysis of the bibliometric data using the Biblioshiny tool. Here are some interesting findings: (1) research on the ecotourism potential in the academy started in 1992, with a rapid growth in the number of publications after 2013, with an overall interdisciplinary character and the emergence of a research community represented by Milcu, Balmford, Gallagher, and others; (2) ecotourism, conservation, tourism, management, and biodiversity are high-frequency keywords in this field, revealing the main research directions; (3) the development and evolution of research focus are mainly on three aspects: wildlife and biodiversity conservation, nature-based tourism and environmental values, and the modes and contributions of community participation. Future research should focus on the scientific references of ecotourism potential for promoting regional sustainable development. This paper sheds some light on the comprehensive bibliometric studies on ecotourism potential and improves our understanding of the evolution of this academic discourse theme over the last three decades.

Constructing childhood depression: a qualitative study with international experts in child psychiatry

After decades of controversy, the concept of childhood depression now seems to be part of standard medical knowledge. Yet the form and content of this nosological entity, like many psychiatric diseases, is continuously shaped by the scientific, clinical, and political communities involved in child psychiatry. In this qualitative study, we explored how the concept of childhood depression is constructed in early twenty-first century child psychiatry. We conducted a series of 18 interviews with practising child psychiatrists, international experts in the field, and interpreted them with thematic analysis informed by discourse analysis. We identified five overarching discourse themes across interviews, relating to the definition of depression, the diagnostic process, the causes of this condition, the therapeutic strategy, and the scientific role of child psychiatry. Most participants agreed that childhood depression was a mental disorder where irritability prevailed, heavily influenced by psychosocial factors, and for which psychotherapy was the ideal treatment. However, subtle points of dissent also surfaced: whether depression is primarily a mood state or psychological suffering, whether categories or dimensions are more suitable to make the diagnosis, and whether there is a genetic predisposition were some of the most controversial topics. Theoretical considerations regarding childhood depression may have significant scientific, moral, and socio-political implications beyond child psychiatry and should be addressed appropriately.

The use of discourse markers across pragmatic performance levels and task types

Discourse markers establish relationships between topics in discourse and serve a range of pragmatic functions, such as mitigating dispreferred actions and maintaining the continuity of spoken interaction. This study examines the use of diverse discourse markers (e.g. but, and, actually, you know, well, yeah, okay) in second language (L2) task-based pragmatic performance with the following research questions: What are distinct pragmatic functions of discourse markers in task-based pragmatic performance? How does the use of discourse markers differ at pragmatic performance levels and task types? The data came from 102 L2 English test-takers’ pragmatic performances on monologic and interactive role-play pragmatic assessment tasks, scored by trained raters using analytical rating criteria. Sequential mixed methods were employed to answer the research questions. First, the sequential positions and pragmatic functions of discourse markers in task-based performances were analysed using conversation analysis, which formed the basis of a coding scheme and coder training. Second, the coded data were analysed using the CLAN program for quantitative analyses to answer the second research question. The findings revealed that the frequencies and quantitative power of the discourse markers in predicting the pragmatic performance levels were distinct across the task types that differed in terms of pragmatic demands and interactivity. For example, the use of discourse markers which function as transitioners of actions and acknowledgement tokens was more distinguishable for more interactive tasks with less formal pragmatic functions. The findings confirm that the pattern of discourse markers was associated with the pragmatic functions and interactional demands required in the tasks. Implications of the findings in understanding the role of discourse markers in task-based pragmatic teaching and assessment are discussed.