Idea Of People Research Articles

Finding Out About Young People's Ideas on Drugs and Drug UseÂmethodology

ABSTRACT Young people's ideas about drugs and drug use were elicited in two separate studies, one at Key Stage Two and the other at Key Stages Three and Four. The first study was used to assess primary children's drug education needs; this assessment was carried out as part of a consultancy in which three primary schools were helped to formulate drug education policies. The second study was part of an evaluation of Tacade's Skills for Life (1994), a secondary school PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) pack. This evaluation was conducted with special reference to drug education. This paper reviews the methodologies of elicitation used in the two studies; the following paper discusses their application and limitations.

Finding Out About Young People's Ideas on Drugs and Drug UseÂapplication and limitations

Young people's ideas about drugs and drug use were elicited in two separate studies, one at Key Stage Two and the other at Key Stages Three and Four. The first study was used to assess primary children's drug education needs; this assessment was carried out as part of a consultancy in which three primary schools were helped to formulate drug education policies. The second study was part of an evaluation of Tacade's Skills for Life (1994), a secondary school PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) pack. This evaluation was conducted with special reference to drug education. The previous paper reviewed the methodologies of elicitation used in the two studies; this paper discusses the application and limitations of those methodologies.

Laypeople's viewpoints about the reasons for expert controversy regarding food additives

The focus in this study is on the thoughts and opinions of the general public to the divergence in expert standpoints regarding additives in food. The relation of education, length of work experience, occupational field, gender, and people's ideas on this matter, as well as the changes in it, were of interest. Fifty-nine young and middle-aged Finnish adults were interviewed during the years 1986-1988 and again in 1993-1994. The semi-structured interview included straightforward questions about reasons for disagreements among experts regarding additives; in other parts of the interview people could spontaneously comment on the discrepancies. Three main categories of reasons for the disagreement emerged. General difficulty in obtaining scientific knowledge was the most common reason given. In the second interview round, a greater number of less well-educated interviewees expressed views in this category. The second category was various interest-related reasons. The increase of these notions was statistically significant among the academics. The least common category concerned differences in the caliber and personal background of experts. Especially people with long experience in working life increased their notions in all three categories. The results showed that people are well aware of the many factors that may influence the acquisition of scientific knowledge, as well as its use. Moreover, the results showed that the more education people have the more aware they are of the various interests. Because laypeople have experiences and viewpoints about various open questions and risks, it is suggested here that their opinions should receive more attention in the public discussion of similar issues.

Perceptions of self, self-esteem, and the adolescent smoker

Adolescent tobacco use remains a key problem in health education and health promotion. The continuing growth of youthful smoking and other substance use is often explained by appeal to global psychological variables such as self- esteem, where the young smoker is assumed to smoke, drink, or take drugs to compensate for low levels of self-esteem. This paper sets out a brief critique of the deployment of 'self-esteem' as a global variable in understanding adolescent smoking, and argues for a more complex vision of self-identity as a means of connecting young people's ideas about themselves with their concrete health behaviours.

'Fatalism', accident causation and prevention: issues for health promotion from an exploratory study in a Yoruba town, Nigeria.

As countries experience the 'epidemiological transition' with a relative decline in infectious diseases, accident rates tend to increase, particularly road traffic accidents. The health promotion interventions intended to prevent or minimize the consequences of accidents have been developed in predominantly Western, industrialized countries. Although some of these solutions have been applied with success to less developed countries, there are also good reasons why such solutions are ineffective when tried in a different context. Health promotion as developed in the West has a particular ideological bias, being framed within a secular, individualist and rationalist culture. Different cosmologies exist outside this culture, often described as 'fatalist' by Western commentators and as obstructing change. Changing these cosmologies or worldviews may not fit with the ethic of paying due respect to the cultural traditions of the 'target group'. Health promotion is therefore faced with a dilemma. In addition to different worldviews, the different levels of development also mean that solutions formulated in richer countries do not suit poorer countries. This paper uses a small exploratory study in a Yoruba town in Nigeria to examine these points. Interviews with key informants were held in March 1994 in Igbo-Ora and data were extracted from hospital records. Levels of accidents from available records are noted and people's ideas about accident prevention are discussed. Recommendations as to the way forward are then proposed.

Beyond Medicare: a Determinants of Health perspective.

Taken and adapted from an article by the Determinants of Health working group of the National Forum on Health. Discusses people's ideas about health and healthcare and their views on medicare.

How examples may (and may not) constrain creativity.

Three experiments were performed to test Smith, Ward, and Schumacher's (1993) conformity hypothesis-that people's ideas will conform to examples they are shown in a creative generation task. Conformity was observed in all three experiments; participants tended to incorporate critical features of experimenter-provided examples. However, examination of total output, elaborateness of design, and the noncritical features did not confirm that the conformity effect constrained creative output in any of the three experiments. Increasing the number of examples increased the conformity effect (Experiment 1). Examples that covaried features that are naturally uncorrelated in the real world led to a greater subjective rating of creativity (Experiment 2). A delay between presentation and test increased conformity (Experiment 3), just as models of inadvertent plagiarism would predict. The explanatory power of theoretical accounts such as activation, retrieval blocking, structured imagination, and category abstraction are evaluated.

Health Perceptions

People with chronic disease often make a sharp distinction between being ill and having a serious underlying problem. This distinction is more than semantic. There is substantial danger in using, as a basis for making plans, people's ideas about their feelings about contracting diseases or entering into states of disability. The discrepancies between how people with serious health problems feel about these problems and the conceptions of those who do not have serious health problems raise warning flags about how far to proceed on the basis of theoretical preconceptions. Several studies suggest that patients' actual behavior is quite different from what we might expect. They may be less willing to eschew technology than we have thought.

Social and Behavioural Baseline for Guiding Implementation of an Efficacy Trial of Insecticide Impregnated Bed Nets for Malaria Control at Nsukka, Nigeria

Insecticide impregnated bed nets are being tested in many tropical areas as a major tool to control malaria. In a few African countries, there is a history of local bed net production and use, while in most others, ownership of commercially-produced nets is rare due to high costs relative to local income. Such variations in pre-existing bed net use behavior must be studied prior to designing new intervention trials. A "baseline" diagnostic study in Nsukka Local Government of Enugu State, Nigeria, found that local beliefs about malaria causation, which include heat from the sun and hard work, may reduce the perceived efficacy of bed nets as an appropriate malaria control action. While the belief that mosquitos can cause malaria increased with level of formal education, the study also documented that educated people simultaneously hold both indigenous and scientific perceptions about malaria. Although the project provided bed nets, curtains and residual house spray for free, long-term sustainability may be influenced by the main constraint to current ownership of a bed net, i.e., cost. Issues, such as concern about feeling hot under the nets, a tendency to sleep outside during the hot dry season, and variations in people's ideas about what constitutes a malaria episode, point to the need to monitor the bed net intervention. This is recommended as a means of learning how people perceive the efficacy of the nets, whether they use them correctly and whether the intervention can be sustained and integrated into local primary health care programs.

Changing the subject

Current research, science fiction, and wishful thinking suggest that cyberspace will be a realm in which physical markers such as sex, race, age, body type, and size will eventually lose their salience as a basis for the categorization of self/other. Because these features are not obviously discernible in cyberspace, the logic runs, they will cease to be a primary means of structuring interaction. Here is a typically hopeful expression of the potential of electronic interactions: For me, words and thoughts and people's ideas are the most important thing about a person. Online reality gets to the core of things. In some ways there is so much less racism, sexism, lookism (quoted in Adams 1993).

The social image of smoking among young people in Scotland

This study aimed to gain an understanding of the contemporary images of smoking held by young people, the sources of such images, and their relationship to young people's social groupings and smoking behaviour. It involved an in-depth qualitative investigation using focus groups to elicit young people's ideas, attitudes and experiences of smoking. A total of 234 people from three age groups (11–12, 13–15 and 16–20 years) participated in the study. Cigarette smoking was found to be predominantly a social and group activity. It was also a behaviour about which young people often held ambivalent and contradictory attitudes, e.g. expressing both positive and negative images irrespective of whether or not they smoked. For many smokers, smoking was part of their social and cultural worlds, e.g. in their group activities, or the focus of specific concerns such as weight loss. Smokers often seemed to view their own behaviour and that of others differently. The research has implications for health promotion, particularly the need to understand and address the meanings that young people attach to their behaviours, and acknowledge the ambivalence and contradictions in their attitudes.

Clarify Our Line of Thinking

From now through 2010 is a critical period in this era of transition between centuries. The goals of developing technology in higher education shall follow the guidelines of "stabilizing one end and loosening and opening up a whole big piece." This was promulgated by the central government, with the state making decisions with regard to technological development. This includes fully recognizing and affirming the status and role of technological development of colleges and universities within the overall technological development in the country; changing people's ideas; exploiting potential strengths; forming a group advantage in certain spheres; and obtaining breakthroughs on certain major technological issues. In this way, the reform of technological development in colleges and universities may reach a new plateau. The result will be to make even greater contributions to the construction of the national economy, to the country's technological advancement, and to the nurturing of high-level personnel. The basic thought toward bringing about the realization of these goals is that of firmly—even ferociously—grasping "both ends." In other words, we need to stabilize, even strengthen, one end, that is, basic scientific research, while propelling and strengthening the other end, that is, transforming the fruits of technological research into industrial production. This is also the fundamental point of departure for setting the plan for the development of technology in colleges and universities during the period of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, with a view toward accomplishing a "trinity" among bases, personnel resources, and the major items and projects.

Vocational and technical education: Promoting change and influencing young people's ideas about employment in modern China

Vocational and technical education: Promoting change and influencing young people's ideas about employment in modern China

Changing Constructions of Masculinity in a Sepik Society

The last decade has seen increasing interest in effects of colonialism on Melanesian culture and identity. Several excellent collections (Carrier 1992; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; White and Lindstrom 1993) have demonstrated that exposure to Europeans and to their ideas about Pacific Islanders has wrought changes in Melanesian and cultural practices, even those that appear to be most conservative (e.g., Carrier and Carrier 1989; Thomas 1992a, 1992b). Altered self-images and practices almost inevitably have political implications. Keesing (1989) and Babadzan (1988), for example, argue that national elites borrow romantic European images of Island cultures as egalitarian communities to mask inequalities within new Pacific Island nations. Conversely, other local groups draw on negative European images of Pacific Islanders as ignoble savages with moral failings to justify national and international inequalities. Scholars have also suggested that colonization has transformed power relations within rural communities. Subtle alterations in gender (Clark 1989; contributors to Jolly and Macintyre 1989a; Jolly 1992; Kulick 1992; Lattas 1991) and in people's ideas about qualities necessary to be a good person (Gewertz and Errington 1993a, 1993b, 1994; Keesing 1989; Kulick 1992; White 1991) have a profound influence on gender relations and on villagers' attitudes toward local and national leaders (Gewertz and Errington 1993a, 1993b, 1994; Keesing 1989, 1992; Kulick 1992, 1993; White 1980a, 1991). This article examines politics of identity by analyzing changing conceptions of person and community among eastern Kwanga of East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea.(1) It specifically concerned with a set of assumptions that distinguish two components of personality: a stubborn, aggressive autonomy, on one hand; and a sensitivity to concerns of others, on other. Ethnographers working in many areas of Melanesia have reported that ideas about these two personality traits shape attitudes toward gender and leadership (Harrison 1982; Kulick 1992; Read 1959; White 1978, 1980a, 1980b, 1991). Harrison (1982), for example, reports Avatip villagers of East Sepik Province as saying that people are born with and understanding. Spirit the individual's life-force, an elan vital conceived as source of growth and health, of self-assertion and self-will and, in time, of mystical powers over others (Harrison 1982:117). When enhanced in males through initiation, spirit leads to the development by individual of autonomy from constraints imposed by others, with a kind of transcendence of moral conditions of existence (Harrison 1982:117) and allows men to be effective warriors who strike fear into hearts of their opponents. Understanding, on other hand, is means by which an individual aware of social conventions and apprehends them as having moral force. It source of sociability, compassion, respect, `amity' in Fortes's sense, and all `Apollonian' virtues involved in ethos of secular equality (Harrison 1982:117). Harrison argues that these assumptions about personality shape gender relations and leadership patterns. Women, who are thought to have an abundance of understanding, are valued for their nurturing and co-operative natures. But they are also viewed as somewhat lacking in spirit and, therefore, as weak and dependent (Harrison 1982:125). Many men, on other hand, have an excess of spirit that enables them to defend village; but same personality trait generates a selfish lack of concern for others' autonomy and wishes (Harrison 1982:120). But some men have a special kind of understanding that allows them to curb their aggressive spirit in interest of communal needs and this makes them good leaders, a characteristic seldom found in women. Read (1959) says that similar ideas about character shape attitudes toward leaders among Gabuku-Gama of Eastern Highlands. …

The Product of Our Environment

The importance of Japan as an economic competitor in the world marketplace gives special significance to stereotypes and prejudice that non‐Japanese hold concerning these people. There is a feeling, for example, that the Japanese are wonderful imitators of other people's ideas and inventions, but have yet to produce a world‐class invention of their own. The Japanese are said to think alike, work alike, act alike and generally be so homogeneous that it is hard to imagine a culture emphasizing individuality flourishing in the island nation. As with all such stereotypes, there is probably a kernel of truth in these, but they ill serve anybody hoping to trade or in any way get to know a society so successful that it has become one of the world's pre‐eminent industrial powers where only 50 years ago it lay in ruins and defeat. There must be much more to this society than lockstep regimentation and slavish copying of what the world outside affords.

Young People's Ideas about Inheritance and Evolution

(1994). Young People's Ideas about Inheritance and Evolution. Studies in Science Education: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 29-47.

Rebel males: Clift, Brando, and Dean

Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean, the three male stars of the 1950s, were richly talented. They were symbols of masculinity, yet they reflected a new appreciation of the ambiguities of sexual identities, they were the heroes of a generation of young people, but compared to Hollywood's traditional idols, they were anti-heroes. This book features the three men, revealing the shared concerns that dominated their personal and professional lives. It explores the social and cultural reasons for their emergence and their continuing influence. Clift, Brando and Dean remain mythic stencils, against whom many people's ideas and ideals of their youth, adolescence and adulthood - images of masculinity and individuality - are patterned. They invoke American individualism, acting, politics and sexuality. They were culturally ravenous young men, testing everything that was new and exciting in the society around them. To study them is to study much of the popular culture of the time.

Gender Differences in Attitudes toward Science

Analysis of nationwide surveys taken from 1972 through 1990 showed that, at all education levels and in all age groups from 20 to 79 years, females had less confidence in science than males. Greater percentages of females than males agreed with statements that, "science breaks down people's ideas of right and wrong" and "science pries into things." The relationships between gender differences in attitudes toward science and theories about biological differences in cognitive abilities between the sexes, traditional societal roles of women, and the impediments to participation of women in historically male-dominated science are discussed.

リゾート開発をめぐる住民の環境意識に関する調査研究

After the so called “resort law” was enacted in 1987, construction booms of new resort areas took place throughout the country. This movement has caused environmental disruption in many places, giving rise to various social problems and confusions concerning the objectives and the meaning of “resort area development”. With such situation in mind, this study took up the Genkai Recreation and Resort Area Development Plan presented by Fukuoka Prefecture, and conducted a questionnaire survey concerning the people's desire for the resort area development and their consciousness about its possible impacts to their living environment. It was found that people's appreciation of the environmental quality of their living areas was largely determined by their satisfaction with the state of public services and infrastructure systems currently available to them. Those who lived in countryside cities and towns tended to be less satisfied with their environmental conditions, making them prefer development rather than enviromental preservation. With respect to the content of desirable resort lives, people's dominant idea was a short-time or one-day family trip to recreational facilities rather than a long-time stay in a certain place to enjoy its good natural environment. People's idea about “resort life” as suggested by this survey seemed immature compared with that in European countries. Fundamental change in people's working habit and values would be essential to disseminate true resort lives in Japan.

Safety and risk in a context of culture

The question of safety and risk in people's ideas about health and care is approached here from an anthropological perspective. One strength of such an interpretive approach which seems especially important in this context, is that, although the researcher provides an account of the beliefs and actions of other people, the exercise is undertaken with an awareness that the interpretation is itself a product of particular historical and cultural determinants.Cultures, including those of industrial-capitalistic societies like Sweden, form systems of meanings which provide explanations of how the world works, of what is thought of as real and what is designated as natural and inevitable as well as what is morally right. These meanings link people to one another and form the basis for social action. It is thus within this framework that the notion of risk and safety get their content and meaning.In this line of thought a description is provided of what happens when people meet in joint health care encounters where their interests do not coincide, their understanding of what is going' on is not the same, or their expectations of what the other should or should not do differ. How considerations of safety and risk in our health care may be interpreted by people with other health theories and views or other understandings about such things as what life is, what is a person, what is good health, a good life or a normal body, and what death means, are also discussed. An attempt is made to profile the need to define variations in the notions of risk and safety in health care over cultural boundaries with examples from cross-cultural studies.