Israeli Online Research Articles

“An out gay man in the parliament”: New aspects in the study of LGBTQ politicians’ media coverage

This study identifies how three prominent Israeli online newspapers frame gay Members of Knesset (Israeli parliament) and cabinet ministers. 2019 was chosen since the number of gay MKs reached a historic milestone of representation. The study employed a mixed-methods design, combining descriptive statistics, based on a quantitative content analysis, with a thematic qualitative analysis. 1015 retrieved news items constituted the initial database. They were divided into two categories: “Gay relevant” (items explicitly referring to, or mentioning the politician’s sexual orientation); or “Gay irrelevant” (all other items), to thematically focus on the Gay relevant items ( N = 159). Six themes were then identified: Novelty; LGBTQ Political Representation; Private Sphere; Homophobia; Community Recognition and Rights; and Incongruity. Findings revealed that elite newspaper coverage is similar to popular ones; cabinet ministers’ framing is more neutral compared to junior MKs; and liberal MKs are framed differently than conservative ones.

Israeli media coverage of international male and female politicians: Gender and ethnopolitical aspects

AbstractIn 2015, the Israeli newspaperYedioth Ahronothbegan a campaign against Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallström, who is considered a prominent critic of Israeli policy in Palestine. The campaign included various aspects of media bias on both the gender and the ethnopolitical levels and thus raised the question of a possible relationship between these two types of biases. Studies in relation to political communication and gender have traditionally focused on the media coverage of domestic male and female politicians. The present study attempts to examine the gender media coverage of prominent international political actors. It performs a mixed content analysis of 529 news items from three Israeli online newspapers, reports, and articles, which cover world-renowned public figures (among them, Wallström). Each news item is coded into three gender-coverage frames. Additionally, a critical reading of the journalistic texts is conducted. The findings reveal that the combination of the two types of biases, the gender and the political, escalates the media sensation and stereotyping.

Trajectories and Associations Between Maternal Depressive Symptoms, Household Chaos and Children's Adjustment through the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Four-Wave Longitudinal Study.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health measures have adversely affected the lives of people worldwide, raising concern over the pandemic's mental health consequences. Guided by a systemic model of family functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic (Prime et al., 2020), the current study aimed to examine how caregiver well-being (i.e., maternal depressive symptoms) and family organization (i.e., household chaos) are related to longitudinal trajectories of children's emotional and behavioral problems. Data were collected at four time points during and after home lockdown periods. Mothers of children (N = 230; 55% male) between the ages of two to five years were asked to complete questionnaires via an Israeli online research platform. Results indicated that emotional and behavioral problems, household chaos, and maternal depressive symptoms were the highest during the first lockdown assessment and dropped in the post-lockdown periods. Multilevel models further revealed that at the between-participants level, maternal depressive symptoms and household chaos positively predicted children's emotional and behavioral problems. At the within-participants level, household chaos fluctuations positively predicted fluctuations in child behavioral but not emotional problems. Our findings suggest that lockdowns have adverse effects on both maternal and child mental health. Screening for depressive symptoms among mothers of young children and maintaining household structure are important targets for future interventions to assist parents in navigating the multiple challenges brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10802-022-00954-w.

Social Media as a Tool to Educate Plastic Surgeons on Patients' Concerns Before and After Cosmetic Breast Surgeries.

The rapid evolution of the social media platform has had a major effect on the field of medicine. To identify patterns, trends and patients' concerns before and after aesthetic surgeries involving breast implants, by analyzing social media posts. We examined comments posted on popular Israeli online public forums between January 2019 and May 2021, regarding: breast augmentation, mastopexy-augmentation and breast implant removal. During the study period, 561 comments were posted on the three forums investigated: 165 pre-operative and 396 post-operative. In the pre-operative period, the main interests were implant size, type and location, as discussed in 69 posts (42%). During the first two months post-operative, questions reflected concerns regarding post-operative instructions, wound management and asymmetry: 76 (43%), 59 (34%) and 27 (16%), respectively. These topics continued to be in focus up to one year post-operative. Beyond the first post-operative year, patients' main interests were breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (25 posts, 28%), capsule formation (23 posts, 26%) and systemic effects (23 posts, 26%). Social media harnessing to identify patterns, trends and patient concerns pre- and post-aesthetic breast surgeries is a novel approach. Misinformation was common, particularly in comments posted more than one year post-operative. Four topics that especially concerned patients in the immediate and late post-operative period were asymmetric results, breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma, capsule removal and systemic effects. We advise surgeon and plastic surgeon societies to issue position papers on controversial subjects, to counter the dissemination of potentially misleading information. This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266.

Expressions of science literacy in online public discussions of animal experimentation

ABSTRACT Recent conceptualizations of science literacy, a key aim of contemporary science education, suggest defining it as a function of actual uses of science in daily life. We characterize expressions of science literacy in online authentic public discourse, using content analysis of a year’s worth of widely-read Israeli online news site coverage of animal experimentation and its reader comments, we explore how expressions of science literacy interact with coverage. The national Israeli science-curricula were used as an analytical framework, including scientific knowledge, nature of science (NOS), and inquiry skills. The findings indicate that over half of the scientific concepts used by the commentators are at the high school or academic level, in which science is elective. There were strong correlations (r = 0.96) between the level of overall science concepts used in the articles and reader comments. Comments supporting animal experimentation employed more and higher level of scientific concepts. Contrasting positions were supported by different types of NOS content: opponents of animal experimentation referred more to the social aspects of NOS, echoing differences in worldviews and lack of trust in scientists. We suggest that enabling informed public engagement with science requires explicit integration of investigative and social aspects of the nature of science.

Cross-lingual Unified Medical Language System entity linking in online health communities.

ObjectiveIn Hebrew online health communities, participants commonly write medical terms that appear as transliterated forms of a source term in English. Such transliterations introduce high variability in text and challenge text-analytics methods. To reduce their variability, medical terms must be normalized, such as linking them to Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts. We present a method to identify both transliterated and translated Hebrew medical terms and link them with UMLS entities.Materials and MethodsWe investigate the effect of linking terms in Camoni, a popular Israeli online health community in Hebrew. Our method, MDTEL (Medical Deep Transliteration Entity Linking), includes (1) an attention-based recurrent neural network encoder-decoder to transliterate words and mapping UMLS from English to Hebrew, (2) an unsupervised method for creating a transliteration dataset in any language without manually labeled data, and (3) an efficient way to identify and link medical entities in the Hebrew corpus to UMLS concepts, by producing a high-recall list of candidate medical terms in the corpus, and then filtering the candidates to relevant medical terms.ResultsWe carry out experiments on 3 disease-specific communities: diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and depression. MDTEL tagging and normalizing on Camoni posts achieved 99% accuracy, 92% recall, and 87% precision. When tagging and normalizing terms in queries from the Camoni search logs, UMLS-normalized queries improved search results in 46% of the cases.ConclusionsCross-lingual UMLS entity linking from Hebrew is possible and improves search performance across communities. Annotated datasets, annotation guidelines, and code are made available online (https://github.com/yonatanbitton/mdtel).

Individuals with back and neck pain on medical forums: What do they mention? What do they fear?

The use of online medical forums is on the rise globally. Data scraping is a method of extracting website content using an automated computer program. We scraped users' questions regarding back and neck pain (BNP) from popular Israeli online medical forums. We aimed to identify the sort of questions being asked about BNP, and to analyse explicit themes that characterize their questions. Six leading Israeli BNP forums were identified. In phase 1, Python scripts scraped 12,418 questions into a data set. In phase 2 - five themes were identified: Surgery (n=2,957); health care professions (n=2,361); Sports (n=2,304); drugs (n=1,419) and interpretation of imaging (n=845). Phase 3 - included the categorization of explicit fear-related words by the authors. Phase 4 - analysis of explicit fear-related themes yielded 402 questions. Gender was identified for 394 users, and age was identified for 181 users. A total of 248 users (61.6%) were women and 146 men (36.3%). Mean age 36.3±16.15 for women and 35.5±16.1 for men. The most commonly expressed fears were related to: invasive procedures, 30.9% (131 questions); fear of serious condition or misdiagnosis, 17.0% (72 questions); General concerns, 13.7% (58 questions); fear of worsening or relapse, 12.3% (52 questions); adverse effects of oral drugs or radiation, 10.8% (46 questions) and concerns related to lifestyle, 9.7% (41 questions). Web scraping is a feasible strategy with which to explore medical forums and the above-mentioned themes, all of which are of potential clinical significance. Using automated algorithms, a total of 12,369 questions from online back and neck medical forums were scraped and analysed. Secondary analysis categorized fear-related themes that were mentioned by users. Identifying and addressing patients' fear has potential to improve communication and therapeutic outcome. For example, questions regarding surgery were typically asked after the option was mentioned by a physician. This insight should encourage physicians to devote extra time explaining the possible implications of surgery, should they consider it as an option.

Narrative struggles in online arenas: the Facebook feminist sex wars on the Israeli sex industry

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyze the role of the Israeli online arena in attempts to challenge attitudes toward sex work and the sex industry. By exploring the short history of the “feminist sex wars” that are being conducted on public feminist Facebook pages, I ask whether online activism can really avoid being drawn into the realm of conventional offline politics. The article argues that while the various Facebook pages aimed to alter the landscape of political and public discourse around sex work and the sex industry, they were in fact sucked into the vortex of the existing public discourse surrounding sex work in Israel, forcing them to choose sides in the dialectic sex wars. I conclude that they nonetheless succeeded in establishing a “narrative of influence” which should be analyzed beyond the disappointment of specific policy outcomes. Online activism thus becomes a key platform for both the construction and contestation between different narratives within the sex industry.

Copy, Edit, Paste

Recent research on the news coverage of war and conflict has argued that journalists maintain more professional independence and are more critical of the government and military than in the past. At the same time, critiques that during wartime journalists rally around the flag and serve as mouthpieces for nationalist propaganda persist. Given these opposing views, we examine the ways in which three Israeli online newspapers covered the 2014 Gaza War and compare this coverage to posts on the Israel Defense Forces’ official social media pages. Through close discursive analysis of legitimation and referential strategies, the use of reported speech, transitivity, voice, and modality, we demonstrate both the great ideological similarities between news discourse and military public relations, and the ways in which journalists transform the authoritative, formal voice characteristic of official texts into the more personalized, emotional voice of media discourse. We discuss our findings as reflective of the complementary influence of journalists’ ideological presuppositions, professional rituals, and commercial constraints.

“Losers” and “Winners”: Framing of online self-disclosure in online news media

ABSTRACTThe intensification of online disclosure of personal information, coupled with the ability to link personal information to those who disclose it, poses important questions regarding the benefits and risks associated with sharing of personal data. This article examines the manifestation of these concerns in news media. Guided by framing theory, it seeks to ascertain the prevailing frames for personal information sharing and to determine whether such framing facilitates debate on issues related to self-disclosure. Articles published in top Israeli online newspapers were analyzed (n = 609). Findings show that the individual user, the state, and corporations are framed as key actors that shape online self-disclosure practices and their outcomes. Furthermore, the individual user, while portrayed as chief actor, is seen as the weakest player.

Friend or Foe? Perceptions of Qatar in the Israeli Online General and Sports Press

The current paper is looking into the way in which Qatar’s investment in sport, both directly and indirectly, is being perceived by the Israeli press. In order to accomplish the task set above, a content analysis of Qatar’s media coverage in the Israeli online press was conducted. Our analysis includes 1199 articles appearing in the mainstream online Israeli press and the findings point out to an interesting trend; there are significant differences between sport related stories, which present a political context and those who do not deal with politics which are significantly more supportive of Qatar.

Copyright © Australian International Academic Centre, Australia Representations of the ‘Palestinian Prisoners-Shalit Swap’ in Selected Arab and Israeli Online News Articles

Copyright © Australian International Academic Centre, Australia Representations of the ‘Palestinian Prisoners-Shalit Swap’ in Selected Arab and Israeli Online News Articles

Ethnic Discrimination: Lessons from the Israeli Online Market for Used Cars

Using a combination of randomised field experiments, follow‐up telephone surveys and other data collection efforts, this article studies the extent and the sources of ethnic discrimination in the Israeli online market for used cars. We find robust evidence of discrimination against Arab buyers and sellers which, the analysis suggests, is motivated by ‘statistical’ rather than ‘taste’ considerations. We additionally find that Arab sellers manipulate their ethnic identity in the market by leaving the name field in their advertisements blank.

Stories that matter: subverting the before-and-after weight-loss narrative

Contemporary scholarship does not pay enough attention to stigma in relation to its temporal status; i.e. whether the stigma is temporary and changeable, or is it permanent? The present article links the study of sociology of time, of de-stigmatization strategies and of narrative resistance, through a case study of individuals who are stigmatized on the basis of an attribute perceived as temporary and changeable – fatness. Conducting a comparative analysis of Before-and-After weight-loss articles appearing in an Israeli online health magazine, I examine how these narratives marginalize fat people by presenting fatness as temporary and changeable. I then compare these narratives to life narratives produced by Israeli-Jewish women, who self-identify as fat. Participants subvert mainstream narratives in two ways: (1) assigning the fat body to “After,” thereby challenging the temporary and transient status of fatness and (2) subverting other discursive characteristics of Before-and-After Weight-Loss Narratives. As a result, participants produce valid knowledge and social criticism from a stable fat subject position.

Israeli public relations and the Internet

This paper explores Israeli online public relations practice, including Web 1.0, and social media usage among Israeli public relations practitioners and organizations. The paper demonstrates a gap between the dialogic potential of the Internet and its actual utilization by Israeli practitioners and organizations. Still, it is expected that Internet usage, and mainly social media usage among Israeli practitioners will grow as well as their awareness to the dialogic and interactive potential of social media.

User generated content in the Israeli online journalism landscape

The paper provides a review of research on user generated content in the Israeli online journalism landscape. Findings reveal that scholarly attention has been focused primarily on user comments, with initial insight on the role of blogs and citizen journalism in the Israeli journalism landscape. Methodologically, research is derived primarily from interviews with newsroom staff and case study content analyses. The review suggests that future research should complement current data with user based inquiry about orientations and use of UGC, and examine the role of Israeli culture in the practice of UGC.

Vertical Restraints as Contract Enforcement Mechanisms

IT is now generally recognized that there are many cases of vertical restraints that do not fit the standard "consumer free riding on special services" theory.1 For example, the widespread use of resale price maintenance in the marketing of brand name clothing cannot be explained as inducing retailers to supply services such as dressing rooms. It is unlikely that consumers must be prevented from trying on clothing free of charge at a full-service retailer before purchasing the clothing at a discount from retailers who do not supply dressing rooms. A number of authors recently have attempted to correct this deficiency in the standard theory by expanding the type of services that vertical restraints may induce retailers to supply and the corresponding retailer free-riding problems.2 The standard economic analysis of how vertical restraints operate to induce desired retailer behavior has remained essentially unchanged, however. The standard analysis assumes that when it is not feasible for a manufacturer to write explicit, court-enforceable contracts with retailers for the supply of particular services, the only alternative mechanism manufacturers can use to induce the supply of desired services is to increase the direct return retailers receive from consumers when those

The Optimum Enforcement of Laws

All prescriptions of behavior for individuals require enforcement. Usually the obligation to behave in a prescribed way is entered into voluntarily by explicit or implicit contract. For example, I promise to teach certain classes with designated frequency and to discuss matters which I, and possibly others, believe are relevant to the course titles. By negotiation, and in the event of its failure, by legal action, I and my employer seek to enforce the contract of employment against large departures from the promised behavior. Performance of some kinds of behavior is difficult or impossible to enforce-such as promises to be creative, noble, or steadfast in crisis-and as a result such contractual promises are either not made or enforced only when there is an uncontroversially flagrant violation. The influence upon contract, and upon economic organization generally, of the costs of enforcing various kinds of contracts has received virtually no study by economists, despite its immense potential explanatory power. When the prescribed behavior is fixed unilaterally rather than by individual agreement, we have the regulation or law, and enforcement of these unilateral rules is the subject of the present essay. Departures of actual from prescribed behavior are crimes or violations, although one could wish for a less formidable description than "criminal" to describe many of the trifling offenses or the offenses against unjust laws. My primary purpose is to construct a theory of rational enforcement, a theory which owes much to Gary Becker's major article on the subject (1968). In the conclusion the problem of explanation, as distinguished from prescription, will be commented upon.