Everyday Life Experiences Research Articles

New Perceptions and Identities in Media Narratives

Communication has existed since the beginning of mankind. Over the years, its practices have evolved, becoming more and more sophisticated but its principal motive has remained the same; to effectively spread messages. As one of the arms of communication, mass media has evolved to become a dominant force for the dissemination of information. The implication of this is that not only have our modes of communication evolved, but the ways in which we view each other in the global community has also altered our phenomenological experience of everyday life. Marshall McLuhan describes this as the ‘global village’ where traditional barriers of time and space have been broken and bridged. The inevitable march of human civilization towards technology has brought about the information age where the reliance on mass media is more a rule than an option. We no longer live with mass media, but we live within its confines. This in turn affects the way that we process information including cultural stimuli and the entire architecture of human thought. The ubiquity of mass media has created an environment where mass media not only dictates norms but also reflects human behavior creating a new reality that is not only framed, but also made immediate by it. This means that as we become more and more entrenched in the realities created by mass media, we begin to become blasé of the ways it shapes and dictates our lives.

Cultivating Self-Transcendence Through Meditation Practice: A Test of the Role of Meta-Awareness, (Dis)identification and Non-Reactivity.

In this paper, we present a study comprising two distinct stages to examine the extent to which metacognitive processes of decentering facilitate the emergence of self-transcendence experiences in everyday life (i.e., the frequency of self-transcendent emotions, flow proneness, and adopting an interconnected identity). In the course of conducting this research, the first stage (N = 374) focused on assessing the structure and validity of the French version of the Metacognitive Processes of Decentering Scale (MPoD-t). Building on this, the second stage (N = 294) examined the potential relationship between meditative practices and psychological decentering processes (i.e., meta-awareness, (dis)identification with internal experiences, and (non)reactivity to thought content) and explored whether these mechanisms explain the association between meditative practices and the experience of self-transcendent states. Overall, the results demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties of the French version of the MPoD and provided enhanced insights into the distinct mediating roles played by various decentering components in the manifestation of self-transcendence experiences in daily life. Indeed, the findings revealed that the relationship between practice and the occurrence of self-transcendent emotions or flow was mediated by the meta-awareness component, while the association between practice and the development of an interconnected identity was explained by the (dis)identification with internal experiences component. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Analysis of Misconceptions on the Factors that Affect the Reaction Rate

This study aimed to analyze the misconceptions in the chemical concept of the factors that affect reaction rates through a qualitative descriptive method. The misconceptions experienced by students were examined through analyzing journals, books, and field experiences. Furthermore, research was carried out to obtain misconceptions that were often experienced by students and the sources of those misconceptions. There were 30 misconceptions about the factors that affect the reaction rate based on the literature. Based on the results of the study, there were three misconceptions experienced by 20 students from the total number of 21 students. The misconception that most students experienced was that when the concentration of reactants increases, a reaction will take longer because there will be much more particles to collide. In addition, the rate of the same reactions was compared at different temperatures, and then the reaction with the highest temperature was defined as the rate of reaction. The next misconception was that the temperature increase in an exothermic reaction can increase the forward rate and decrease the reverse rate because the equilibrium shifts to the right. Misconceptions were caused by information from the internet, teachers teaching in schools, textbooks used by students and the everyday life experiences of students. Keywords: misconception, chemical concept, literature

Canaan Hymns: Toward a decolonizing missiology of the Chinese church movement

This article provides a narrative of how the collection Canaan Hymns is embedded in the context of the life and struggles of ecclesial life within the Chinese church movement, embodied in their pneumatologically-led creation, and empowered by the theology of laity and women. It argues that the ecclesiological mode of the grassroots together with the affective style of worship and reflections form the two key characteristics of a decolonizing missiology, offering an epistemology of “knowing with” in relation to missio Dei. This is followed by further examining the mission impulse, nationalistic fever and transnational currents. Contesting the ideology of atheism, a decolonizing missiology of the Chinese church movement offers a bottom-up construction in that the lived embodied experiences of everyday life in Christ within a cultural soil take priority as sources of a theology of mission.

Informal carers’ experiences in everyday life and the use of digital assistive technology for time management in persons with dementia or mild cognitive impairment

BackgroundDigital assistive technology (DAT) may support time management in people with dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but research on DAT for time management is limited. We aimed to explore how everyday could be supported by DAT for time management in persons with dementia or MCI from informal carers’ perspectives. This study focused on a DAT device for time management called MEMOplanner (MMP).MethodUsing a mixed-methods design, we utilized the Time-Proxy© questionnaire and a study-specific interview guide to investigate the perspectives of informal carers (n = 8) regarding the use of MMP by individuals with dementia or MCI.ResultThe MMP was helpful in keeping track of time and activity. It helped to maintain an active lifestyle and facilitated communication. However, the MMP did not reduce the need for assistance from the informal carers, and it took time to learn the different functions of the device. Further research into employing a more extensive array of DAT for time management or other areas to assist individuals with dementia will yield valuable insights into enhancing and sustaining a higher quality of life despite cognitive decline.

Invisibility and (Dis)Integration: Examining the Meaning of Migrant Inclusion in Everyday Lived Experience in Rural Areas

The settlement of migrants in rural areas that are facing population decline has gained increased attention in recent years as an economic, social, and political issue, as well as an opportunity for development for local communities. Studies have primarily focused on investigating whether and how migrants are integrated and included within these areas. This article adopts a fresh perspective by examining how the meaning of “integration” and “inclusion” is given shape by residents and migrant workers themselves. Our research centres on a small rural town in Sardinia, where individuals from Romania and West Africa have relocated to fill job positions traditionally held by Italians. Based on participant observation and in‐depth interviews, we examine the everyday experiences of residents and migrants to develop an understanding of the lived realities of integration and inclusion. In doing so, the article calls into question the perceived value of these processes for the very individuals that are supposed to benefit from them.

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The Classification of the Proverbs and Sayings Reflecting Distinctive Features of National Character of the English People Summary The article deals with the classification of the proverbs and sayings reflecting distinctive features of national character of the English people. The proverbs are fixed statements in which simple and popular words are used to reflect the deep truth, and are generalization of experience in everyday life. The proverb is a crystallization of human wisdom, embodied in the language, is declared “a national mirror” or “a lively finding of the language”. The contents of proverbs comprise all aspects of public life. In definite sense, as an important component the proverbs have become an encyclopedia for people to understand their life and regulate their behaviour. They reflect the culture, customs and traditions of people. Key words: The English People, National Character, Distinctive Features, Proverbs, Sayings, Classification

Nothing Changed, Nothing Gained? Emotional Responses towards European Integration in the Memoirs of Polish Farmers

Accession to the European Union (EU) aroused diverse emotions in public debate among citizens, but the everyday experience of being an EU member is much more difficult to narrate than by relating to two contrasting views for and against European integration. The situation becomes more complicated if we analyse the emotional responses of Polish farmers, for whom joining the EU has been one more change in the last two centuries: the fall of feudalism, the agricultural reform after the Second World War, and the post-1989 political transformation. We aim to analyse personal narratives while observing how feelings about the EU have become embedded in everyday life experience narratives and how they are expressed and managed in a socio-cultural context. The presence of contradictory views was expected, as was the appearance of a combination of emotions and indifference, and, finally, the use of emotions as resistance. Based on the analysis of 55 memoirs from 1918 to 2018, we have determined the possible types of the integration experience; firstly, Poland’s accession to the EU meant change and was associated mainly with positive emotions, secondly, with negative emotions, thirdly, it meant change, and was associated with ambiguous emotions; and lastly, it did not mean a change. We noted not only the contrasting positions e.g. hope and fear but also the mixture of emotions and various paths of resistance that included demonstrating the inadequacy of the master narrative to personal experience or neutralising it but also filling the intermediary space between two opposite views and finding a way out from this opposition to the higher level of division and thus narrating non-change. It is the sense of personal dignity and permanence that negates the perception of accession as a change.

Understanding heritage language learning of early elementary children from Chinese immigrant backgrounds through children’s drawings

ABSTRACT The study explores how children from Chinese immigrant families create drawings in a community-based Chinese heritage language classroom. The theoretical perspectives on artifactual literacies were utilized to support the inquiry. Primary data sources included the children’s drawings. Video recordings of class conversations served as secondary data sources. Findings show that the children drew upon visual and linguistic modes to design and make their drawings to represent their understanding based on their heritage language learning. Findings also highlight the children’s bilingual identities and present that the children used the heritage language to connect to their everyday life experiences. The findings informed instructional recommendations for Chinese heritage language teachers. Suggestions included incorporating artifactual literacies into class activities for Chinese heritage language learning and calling attention to providing more educational resources and opportunities to support children from immigrant families.

Tensions in digital welfare states: Three perspectives on care and control

Proponents of digital transformation in welfare provision argue that digital technologies can take over tedious tasks and free resources to provide better care for those in need. Digital technologies, however, are often developed in line with a logic of control and dispositions around surveillance and efficiency which challenge careful engagements. In this conceptual article, we explore emerging tensions in digital welfare arrangements and propose an analytical framework to illuminate interrelations between care and control in values, infrastructures, and work related to the provision of welfare services. Illustrating the application of this framework with three empirical vignettes, we discuss how digital welfare technologies shape relations between state care and control. Considering theories of care in relation to the digital welfare state, we give a nuanced perspective on the contingencies of the digital transformation and add to the literature concerned with social justice by attending to everyday lived experiences in-between control and care.

“Being Open About Struggle”: Youth Practices and Perspectives on Resilience

Youth create resilience in a landscape of interpersonal, environmental, and political factors by navigating personal and community stressors. The goal of this study was to explore how youth conceptualize resilience and overcome stressors within their everyday life experiences. Using a national text message survey, 894 youth (ages 14–24 years) were asked five open-ended questions about their life experiences relating to stressors and their abilities to express resilience. Four themes were identified through qualitative, thematic analysis: (1) relationships are key to resilience; (2) perspective is everything; (3) resources can help build and maintain resilience; and (4) resilience is difficult to practice when you feel out of control. The timing of this study during the COVID-19 pandemic offers a focused insight into the meaning-making of resilience among youth that highlights structural and interpersonal characteristics. These definitions of resilience can inform future research and resource provision for youth.

Feminist Conversations with Buber

Abstract This article conceptualises feminist conversations with Buberian dialogic philosophy while theorising intersubjectively intersectional dialogues with Carole Bell Ford's book, The Girls, drawing on stories of Jewish women in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The narrative extracts analysed grapple with some of the women's challenges of coming of age within migrant enclaves in the post-war period and these are deconstructed through a feminist and intersectional dialogic lens. In gendering Buber, the article also embraces the temporal and spatial configurations of dialogic migrancy in how it offers transversal, diachronic and synchronic contributions through the women's experiences of everyday life. The article also reflects on methodological innovations in how the combined approaches can offer deeper, more reflexive and nuanced understandings of intersubjective experiences concerning complex emotions, sensitive themes and challenging topics.

Faith and Works … Or Works and Faith? A Performative Faith in Samoan Churches

Christianity is the main religion in the Pacific Islands, and what is unique about Christianity in the Pacific is that religion cannot be separated from everyday life experiences. This is because the worship and veneration of a divine source is the foundation of Pacific cultures and worldviews. In the Samoan context, faith in the Christian God is not only a rational activity but a concrete, practical experience embracing the physical and emotional manifestation of one’s faith in God. This essay is a contextual theology paper examining the significance of applying authentic expressions of the gospel from a Samoan cultural worldview while acknowledging Christian traditions passed down by Western missionaries of the 19th century. Faith in God, without good works, is impossible in the Samoan context. This is because service to God and one another is imperative to social cohesion and prosperity. The physical manifestation of one’s faith through active, committed service to the church ministry is a sign of good faith, evident through excessive monetary offerings, responsibility for fulfilling specific roles in the ministry and a commitment to all church programs. The Samoan cultural nuance of community and service helps form an authentic expression of Samoan Christian identity.

Children’s Voices on the COVID-19 Pandemic as Presented in Swedish Junior and Daily Newspapers

This study focuses on children’s voices as they were presented in Swedish newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the ways in which journalists featured children’s experiences of everyday life during a time of crisis. A descriptive, thematic text analysis of 83 articles resulted in four prominent themes: children’s voices as a mouthpiece for or against school closure, children as cocreators of a new normal daily life, children as responsible and caring citizens, and COVID-19 as a magnifying glass for existing vulnerabilities in everyday life. The selection and representation of children’s viewpoints was adult led and limited, and the study thus calls for further research on media constructions of children/childhood and related consequences.

Prediction of suicidal ideation among preadolescent children with machine learning models: A longitudinal study

BackgroundMachine learning (ML) has been widely used to predict suicidal ideation (SI) in adolescents and adults. Nevertheless, studies of accurate and efficient models of SI prediction with preadolescent children are still needed because SI is surprisingly prevalent during the transition into adolescence. This study aimed to explore the potential of ML models to predict SI among preadolescent children. MethodsA total of 4691 Chinese children (54.89 % boys, Mage = 10.92 at baseline) and their parents completed relevant measures at baseline and the children provided 6-month follow-up data for SI. The current study compared four ML models: Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), to predict SI and to identify variables with predictive value based on the best-performing model among Chinese preadolescent children. ResultsThe RF model achieved the highest discriminant performance with an AUC of 0.92, accuracy of 0.93 (balanced accuracy = 0.88). The factors of internalizing problems, externalizing problems, neuroticism, childhood maltreatment, and subjective well-being in school demonstrated the highest values in predicting SI. ConclusionThe findings of this study suggested that ML models based on the observation and assessment of children's general characteristics and experiences in everyday life can serve as convenient screening and evaluation tools for suicide risk assessment among Chinese preadolescent children. The findings also provide insights for early intervention.

For whom is mind wandering stressful: The moderating role of dispositional emotionality and personality in predicting emotional experiences in everyday life

This study tested whether dispositional emotionality and personality traits moderated the emotion a person experienced when engaging in mind wandering. Participants (n = 264) completed measures of dispositional emotionality and personality. Then on two separate days they completed a 24-hour ecological momentary assessment protocol, responding every 30 min during wake times if they were mind wandering, and how angry, sad, anxious, and happy they felt, for a total of 8,530 assessments. Using multilevel models, we found the following when mind wandering versus not: trait anger predicted more anger, depressive symptomatology more sadness, openness to experience less sadness, neuroticism more anger, and conscientiousness less happiness. Results indicate a synchrony between emotions experienced while mind wandering to one’s dispositional emotionality and personality.

Banks as the new family: the transition from informal to formal borrowing in Turkey

This paper focuses on the impact of social reproduction patterns on borrowing experiences in everyday life, linking two lines of research within feminist and critical International Political Economy (IPE) literature of the everyday, one on social reproduction and debt, and the other on financial subjectivities. Drawing on interviews with women from indebted households in Istanbul, Turkey, it specifically explores how this impact is reflected in the meanings attached to borrowing and the perceptions of what it entails to be a debtor, thereby generating gendered implications. This article reveals that borrowing from family and friends, once seen as an expression of trust and solidarity, is now associated with financial dependence and humiliation, while borrowing from banks is perceived as a means to achieve self-reliance and self-responsibility. However, these meanings contradict women’s self-identifications as debtors, which are framed in moral terms surrounding the structural necessity of incurring credit-debt for social reproduction. This paper contributes to political economy scholarship by addressing how the everyday lives of the indebted are linked to the broader global financial system, mediated by the specific conditions of a Global South context (Turkey) characterized by subordinate financialization, the political use of credit expansion, and a neoliberal/conservative gender regime.

Teaching Physics in the Kitchen: Bridging Science Education and Everyday Life

Physics is a fundamental branch of science that studies the fundamental principles governing the behaviour of matter and energy. Traditionally, physics has been taught in classrooms using theoretical concepts and mathematical equations. However, connecting these abstract concepts to everyday life experiences can significantly enhance students' understanding and interest in the subject. This paper explores the educational potential of teaching physics in the kitchen, where various phenomena and processes can be observed and analysed. By leveraging common kitchen appliances, cooking techniques, and ingredients, students can explore concepts such as thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and more. This paper discusses the benefits of teaching physics in the kitchen, provides examples of practical experiments and demonstrations, and highlights the impact of this approach on student engagement and learning outcomes.

“My wife made me”: motivations for body and beauty work among older Korean and Chinese migrant adults in Australia

This article examines how older Korean and Chinese migrants living in Perth, Australia, engage in various beauty, grooming and fitness practices to negotiate “successful ageing” in transnational contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 30 men and women aged between 60 and 89, we examine what social meanings are attached to these practices, and how the transnational context of living in Australia has influenced the participants’ perceptions of ageing and presentation of self in later life. Migration in later life is often considered in relation to the ‘host’ countries values and social practices, which can make it difficult for individuals to settle and feel a sense of belonging especially in later life. In this article, we will illustrate how gender, class, and cultural dispositions intersect and link with possibilities for defining and redefining successful ageing in migrant contexts. This study illustrates how successful ageing emerges as a malleable concept that draws on ideas of an ideal ageing body from the cultural values of the ‘home’ country, rather than the ‘host’ country. The findings illustrate how in everyday lived experience, the transnational habitus does not always necessarily result in a ‘divided habitus’ where the values of the ‘home’ country and that of the ‘host’ country are in conflict – even when the migration experience is relatively recent. Quite the contrary, the way the participants utilise everyday beauty, fitness and grooming practices to maintain a future-focused self in the context of ‘home’ country’s age-appropriate body ideals to perform signifiers of ‘successful migrant living’ point to the positive aspects that appearance management can have on an individual in later life, particularly in migrant contexts.

Effects of racial discrimination on stress, negative emotions, and alcohol craving: A registered report of a virtual reality experiment.

Racial discrimination experiences contribute to health disparities and can influence individuals' health. Yet, pathways by which discrimination-related experiences affect alcohol craving remain understudied using experimental designs. Additionally, limited research has examined possible differential effects of "major" discrimination and microaggression experiences in everyday life on alcohol craving. This between-groups experiment examined causal effects of everyday racial discrimination on stress, negative emotions, and alcohol craving. We also tested indirect pathways by which discrimination-related experiences were linked to alcohol craving via stress and negative emotions. People of color and Indigenous peoples participated in the study (N = 184; Mage = 23.90; 47.8% women; 48.9% community adults). Participants were randomized to one of four experimental conditions, in which they experienced in virtual environments either "major" discrimination, microinsult, microinvalidation, or daily hassles unrelated to race/racism. Participants' levels of stress, negative emotions, and alcohol craving were assessed immediately before and after experimental simulations. Compared to daily hassles unrelated to race/racism, simulated racial discrimination elicited greater stress and negative emotions. Daily hassles caused greater alcohol craving among those who endorsed higher levels of coping motives for drinking. We observed minimal differences in stress and negative emotions across the three racial discrimination conditions, and found no evidence supporting indirect links between racial discrimination and alcohol craving via stress and negative emotions. Everyday racial discrimination-regardless of intensity level-is more stressful than daily hassles unrelated to race/racism. Future research should examine cumulative effects of racial discrimination, and understanding individual difference factors that moderate its immediate and delayed effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).