Personal Context Research Articles

Inclusive culture in the aspect of realizing the rehabilitation potential of subjects accompanying children with autism spectrum disorders

Introduction. Socialization of children with autism spectrum disorders is carried out through their immersion in the sociocultural space. The most important component of sociocultural integration is reliance on the rehabilitation potential of both individuals with autism spectrum disorders and their immediate environment. An analysis of understanding inclusive culture was embedded in the ideological concept of the research initiative. The study aims to determine the conceptual positions of inclusive culture as a specific system of attitudes, knowledge and skills that contribute to solving problems of including children with autism spectrum disorders and their immediate environment in various sociocultural spaces and relationships. Materials and methods. The study involved 307 people representing four subject groups of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast of the Russian Federation: teachers/specialists of preschool educational institutions, teachers/specialists of general education organizations, parents of children with autism spectrum disorders and students receiving defectology education. The main research method was the author's questionnaire survey of respondents followed by expert assessment. Results. The obtained results reflect the variable subjective positions of respondents in relation to various aspects of inclusive culture as the basis for the inclusive potential of persons with autism spectrum disorders and their immediate environment. The differences in understanding the essence and mechanisms of inclusive culture and of its place in personal and social context among different subjects of educational space are updated. This aspect allows objectifying the problem of effective interaction between family and educational organization in disclosure and implementation of the rehabilitation potential of persons with autism spectrum disorders. More than 50% of teachers/specialists of educational organizations, as well as 70% of surveyed students and parents of children with autism spectrum disorders, differentiate the concepts of ‘culture of inclusion’ and ‘inclusive culture’, giving them different content contexts. 57% of surveyed teachers and 65% of parents consider persons with disabilities to be objects of inclusive culture, i.e. they are assigned a more passive role as a consumer of this very culture specially formed for them. Conclusion. The results obtained allow determining the main directions of educational, advisory and psychocorrectional work aimed at increasing psychological and pedagogical competence of specialists and parents who accompany children with autism spectrum disorders. Subjective expectations and ideas of respondents about the indicators and criteria of psychological culture, inclusion and features of interaction between society and people with disabilities act as a guideline for strategic planning of comprehensive support for families raising children with autism spectrum disorders

Rooted in the Existential True Self Case Report about Potential of Religious Faith for Geriatric Psychological Counselling

For older people, religious faith is a significant part of their identity. There is a lack of research that reveals the faith of practicing Roman Catholics as a multi-component phenomenon that can develop, through an internal perspective in personal and social context. Aim: to explore how religious faith is experienced in the life of an older practicing Roman Catholic. Methods: A qualitative approach was selected for this case study. Data was gathered through faith development interviews, and it was analysed using these methods: thematic narrative analysis, structural and content analysis. The faith of an older practicing Roman Catholic (woman, 84 years old) is analysed. Results: The case study revealed that religious faith is meaningful to the practicing older Roman Catholic woman as a multi-component faith construct, consisting of internal and external aspects, the essential of which is the internal relationship with God, which forms an integral spiritual, moral and social identity of a person; through the course of life it becomes a continuously nurtured value at each stage of life; through faith development as a conscious, social and integrated faith in her life; through an internal psychosocial perspective providing internal psychological resources that help her overcome difficulties, maintain well-being in her life and give the meaning to her life. Conclusion: The potential of religious faith in counselling the older practicing Roman Catholic lies in the awareness of personal feelings, beliefs, behaviours, the image of God, self-worth, early experiences, and the relationships related to religious faith in the context of a person’s life.

Narrative potential of the June issue of A.Sumarokov’s journal “Hardworking Bee” (1759)

Most of the studies of Sumarokov’s work as a journalist regard the writer as a satirist. In contrast, this article suggests a different perspective on the problem of Sumarokov’s literary legacy. Based on the analysis of the narrative potential of the June issue of “Hardworking Bee”, the study proposes to look at the public activity of Sumarokov the publisher as a special communicative strategy. The journal began to claim the formation of a public sphere, offering its conception of personal and social identity. Sumarokov’s journal became an entirely new institution with its audience, along with literary and scientific societies, secular salons, public theatres, and Masonic lodges. The article contains historical commentary and interpretation of the historical-literary and personal contexts of June 1759. The aim of the article is to study the journal metatext of the June issue of “Hardworking Bee”, to examine the problematics and poetics of the texts published in it. The article uses methods of literary studies: historical-typological, cultural-historical, biographical and comparative-historical. The study demonstrates that Sumarokov’s metatextual narrative realized a new model of cyclization for Russian literature. At the lowest, ordinary level, the reader could remain a profane, and at the highest level the reader the reader is turned into a hermetic wise man. We can conclude that Sumarokov’s journal “Hardworking Bee” stimulated the creation of most monthly editions not only in the Russian 18th century. The article emphasizes the importance of Sumarokov’s experience as a publisher and editor for the evaluation of his creativity in general.

Отставной королевский мушкетер между наукой, салоном и будуаром

The present paper aims to examine the biological works of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), a prominent French scientist and philosopher, on the problems of animal reproduction and heredity. His scientific career exemplifies how, in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, various scientific disciplines were intertwined with literature, art, and philosophy. In one of his major publications dealing with these issues, “Venus physique” (1745), from one role to another time and again, combining theory, observation, everyday experience, and literary narrative. His objections to preformationism unfold in a stylized literary context that itself references the more personal context of salon conversation and flirtation. Maupertuis’s epigenetic conception of reproduction (with its origins in Antiquity) drew on a wide range of arguments from a variety of sources: anatomy and monster studies, observations of racial differences and family resemblance, analysis of the breeding experience of animal breeders, microscopic observations, and chemical insights. The French scientist presented the dynamics of processes in living nature in terms of naturalized desire and aversion, which function as guiding inclinations inherent in the smallest units of organic matter. In “Venus physique”, Maupertuis, in presenting his biological views, played on the appeal in certain Parisian circles of socially acceptable epathetics associated with philosophical texts, eroticism, unorthodox religious beliefs, and illicit sexual liaisons.

Why Doesn’t Executive Function Training Improve Academic Achievement? Rethinking Individual Differences, Relevance, and Engagement from a Contextual Framework

ABSTRACT Performance on lab assessments of executive functions predicts academic achievement and other positive life outcomes. A primary goal of research on executive functions has been to design interventions that improve outcomes like academic achievement by improving executive functions. These interventions typically involve extensive practice on abstract lab-based tasks and lead to improvements on these practiced tasks. However, interventions rarely improve performance on non-practiced tasks and rarely benefit outcomes like academic achievement. Contemporary frameworks of executive function development suggest that executive functions develop and are engaged within personal, social, historical, and cultural contexts. lab-based tasks do not well-capture the real-world contexts that require executive functions and should not be expected to provide generalized benefits outside of the lab. We propose a perspective for understanding individual differences in performance on executive function assessments that focuses on contextual influences on executive functions. We extend this contextual approach to training executive function engagement, rather than training executive functions directly. First, interventions should incorporate task content that is contextually relevant to the targeted outcome. Second, interventions should encourage engaging executive functions through reinforcement and contextual relevance, which may better translate to real-world outcomes than training executive functions directly. While such individualized executive functions interventions do not address systemic factors that greatly impact outcomes like academic achievement, given the extensive resources devoted to improving executive functions, we hypothesize that interventions designed to encourage children’s engagement of executive functions hold more promise for impacting real-world outcomes than interventions designed to improve executive function capacities.

Digital leadership as a tool for strengthening the market position of the company: corporate and personal context

The article examines the tools of digital leadership for building the company’s interaction with the target audience and for getting ahead of competitors. The essence of digital marketing is analyzed, its main characteristics, advantages and disadvantages are determined. The company’s digital leadership to strengthen market positions is formed through the effective development of digital marketing tools in order to form competitive advantages in the market. To ensure such characteristics, it is necessary to develop the key factors of the company’s success based on digital technologies and the digital competencies of the company’s leader. The main tools of digital marketing and the features of their application, their strengths and challenges for companies are substantiated. The main problem of digital marketing is the inadequate use of tools – approaches to the implementation of digital marketing functions and metrics for substantiating their effectiveness. Therefore, the use of each tool must be justified. Options for using digital marketing tools in the B2C segments for the provision of services and B2C for the sale of goods have been determined.

Exploring the lived experience of mental health and coping during unemployment

BackgroundUnemployment is known to involve various psychosocial challenges that can negatively impact mental health. However, the intricacies of how individuals experience these challenges and strive to cope within the context of varied sociocultural and individuating factors, remain comparatively understudied. The present qualitative study used an interpretative phenomenological approach to explore the lived experiences of mental health and coping during unemployment.MethodsFifteen Australian adults who had recently experienced unemployment (for ≥3 months in the last 2 years), despite being available for and able to work, participated in semi-structured interviews from August to September 2021. Maximum variation sampling ensured participants represented diverse sociodemographic backgrounds. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis within NVivo12 software.ResultsFour major themes were identified: 1) disrupted identity and direction in life; 2) navigating conflicting views of contribution and progress; 3) knowing how to cope is not enough; and 4) unemployment as a catalyst for new understandings. Unemployment disrupted participants’ sense of purpose, identity and visions for the future. It signified a perceived failure to meet societal standards of value based upon the economic functions of work, which participants struggled to reconcile with their own priorities for work that satisfied psychosocial needs. Participants were aware of effective coping strategies, although these had mixed positive and negative effects on mental health, or were difficult to mobilise during unemployment. The COVID-19 pandemic, while normalising unemployment to some degree, exacerbated future uncertainty and prevented engagement with known coping strategies (e.g., social interaction). However, unemployment could also instigate growth through re-defining markers of achievement, re-aligning goals with one’s core values, and developing greater compassion.ConclusionsExperiences of mental health and coping during unemployment share complex relationships both with each other and with broader personal and sociocultural contexts. Service providers may better meet the mental health needs of those experiencing unemployment by balancing the economic and psychosocial functions of work, understanding that coping is a wholistic issue that goes beyond knowledge of effective strategies, and being aware of the opportunities for self-development that unemployment can create.

Mobile Serious Game for Enhancing User Experience in Museum

Mobile technology offers new opportunities to enhance the visitor experience in museums. Mobile serious games can support experiential learning with authentic exhibits in an authentic museum environment based on the contextual learning model with the interaction between the personal, socio-cultural, and physical context. In developing the game, we wondered whether it could appropriately motivate and engage different age groups in the museum experience with its challenges of different difficulty levels; whether a mobile game could, through its challenges interacting with the museum environment, prevent “head-down” behavior; and whether museum exhibits could be better recalled by visitors participating in a tour with a mobile game than in two other traditional tours (i.e., guided tours, tours with museum brochures). The results of the study showed that a tour with a mobile serious game with challenges of different difficulty levels is suitable for visitors of two target groups (i.e., families and students). Since each challenge encourages interaction with the museum environment, it could largely prevent “head-down” behavior. The results also show that a tour with appropriately planned multisensory challenges motivates visitors to actively engage with the museum environment, resulting in slightly better recall of exhibits compared to other tour types. The results of this study can help bring museums and the history they represent closer to digital generations, 1 and popularize modern informal learning methods associated with incidental and experiential lifelong learning that can take place anytime, anywhere, and help achieve higher taxonomic knowledge levels.

CHANGES IN PERSONALITY TRAITS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT BEFORE AND AFTER RETIREMENT

Abstract Aging is tied to transitions in occupational, social, and personal contexts, which can have implications for changes in who one is and how connected they feel to others. The current study uses data from 5,844 older adults (Ages: 60-66) with six annual reports on the Big Five personality traits and three distinct social support types (family, friends, relationships) to investigate how personality and social support change together, and the role retirement plays in these changes. Random intercept-cross lagged panel models were conducted to evaluate the associated changes in each trait and social support type while accounting for the time-varying covariate of retirement status. Higher social support across all relationship types was associated with higher agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness and lower neuroticism both between- and within-person. Furthermore, entering retirement predicted an increase in social support with friends and relationship partners, but no consistent change in any of the personality traits.

What influences physician opioid prescribing for children with acute pain?

Pain is one of the most common symptoms encountered in the healthcare system, and opioids are among the top three medications used to treat it. Understanding the reasoning behind physicians' opioid prescribing practices is vital to safe practice. The primary objective of our study was to describe pediatric emergency physicians' decision-making process when prescribing opioids for children's acute pain management. This study employed qualitative methodology, using one-on-one semi-structured interviews within a grounded theory analytic framework. We employed purposeful sampling to recruit pediatric emergency physicians from across Canada. Interviews were conducted by telephone (December 2019-January 2021). Transcript analysis occurred concurrently with data collection, supporting data saturation and theory development considerations. Eleven interviews were completed with participants representing each of Canada's geographic regions. Nine major themes emerged: (1) practice setting and outpatient opioid use, (2) condition-specific considerations, (3) physician confidence in medical evidence, (4) pain assessment challenges, (5) patient and family perspectives, (6) opioid safety concerns, (7) personal biases and experiences, (8) personal practice context, and (9) the Opioid Crisis/media influence. Most clinicians felt that they limited opioid use to those who needed it most; all participants described challenges managing acute pain, emphasizing the need for accurate pain measurement and better guidelines, evidence-based data, and knowledge translation. Clinicians were more comfortable treating pain in the emergency department, compared to discharge prescribing. They recognized the importance of co-therapy with non-opioids and the need for opioid risk assessment when prescribing. A family centered approach was recognized as the goal of practice. Clinicians are less comfortable prescribing opioids to children for at-home use and find pain assessment and lack of clear guidelines to be barriers to pain care. Knowledge translation strategies for safer practice and optimal acute pain management could support responsible and judicious opioid use.

The Causes and Consequences of Low Morale Amongst Public Librarians

A Review of:Kendrick, K. D. (2020). The public librarian low-morale experience: A qualitative study. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 15(2), 1-32. http://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v15i2.5932 Objective – To understand if, how, and within what parameters, librarians working in public libraries experience low morale. Design – Semi-structured interview, phenomenology Setting – Public libraries in Canada and the United States Subjects – Participants (N = 20) were credentialed librarians who worked or had worked in a public library, and who experienced low morale due to their work. Methods – Invitations were distributed to 10 electronic mailing lists. Purposive sampling was used to select the participants -- they represented librarians with a range of experience, working within a variety of specialties. The researcher received informed consent and the participants completed a short survey in order to collect demographic data before taking part in semi-structured interviews. The interviews were transcribed and coded, after which data were analyzed and thematic clusters identified. Main results – Various types of abuse, either performed by library users (ex. physical and verbal abuse), or by colleagues/managers/administrators (ex. emotional abuse, system abuse, and negligence) were revealed to cause low morale in public librarians. Data show that the participants' responses to the abuse influenced their affective, cognitive, and physiological well-being, as well as professional expectations and trajectories. This study identified three low morale impact factors and seven enabling systems that were unique to public librarians when compared to academic librarians. The unique impact factors are: personal safety, resilience narratives, and social contexts. The enabling systems are: organizational structure, library workplace culture, on-demand relocation, policies, training, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and politics. Conclusion – This study builds on the literature and provides additional evidence on the prevalence of low morale in LIS workplaces. The data show that there are similarities in the causes and consequences of low morale in the workplace amongst public librarians and their academic counterparts. Understaffing, mission creep, and working with underserved and marginalized communities all play a part in the morale of public librarians. Low morale negatively affects public librarians’ mental and physical health, as well as their professional outlook and trajectory. The author makes a case for comprehensive leadership training for public library management, as well as the presence of people with different expertise (such as social workers and first responders) in public libraries. Additionally, the author suggests the need for further research on topics that came up in this study.

Emotional Development and Integral University Education

Currently university students live a series of problems, both external and internal to the educational institution that induce them to dropout school and/or poor academic performance and to highly vulnerable social development in the professional, work and even personal context. In the external context: violence, loss of values, injustices and even alterations in the order of the ecological system among others and in the context within the educational institution can be mentioned the low motivation of the student, the lack of knowledge of study techniques, the weakness of knowledge prior to the corresponding point of his school career, the low resilience to the changes presented in his personal context; factors (all of them) that keep him in a critical situation of stress. The purpose of this study was to analyse the need for an integral formation that can be implemented and endowed with socio-emotional tools to the student. Through the documentary analysis it is found that from the socioformation each one of the actors of the educational process must form a community in continuous learning that lives the elements of an emotional education that contributes to the social.

Lived experiences of women with low birth weight infants in the Solomon Islands: A descriptive qualitative study.

Every year, around 20 million women worldwide give birth to low birth weight (LBW) infants, with majority of these births occurring in low-and middle-income countries, including the Solomon Islands. Few studies have explored the pregnancy lived experience of women who deliver LBW infants. The aim of the study is to understand the lived experience of women in the Solomon Islands who gave birth to LBW infants by exploring their personal (socio-demographic and health), behavioural, social and environmental contexts. We used a qualitative descriptive approach and purposely selected 18 postnatal women with LBW infants in the Solomon Islands for an in-depth interview. All data were analysed using thematic analysis in NVivo. We identified six themes reported as being related to LBW: health issues, diet and nutrition, substance use, domestic violence, environmental conditions and antenatal care. Our findings suggest that women in the Solomon Islands are exposed to various personal, behavioural, social and environmental risk factors during pregnancy that can impact birth outcomes, particularly LBW. We recommend further research should be redirected to look at the factors/themes identified in the interviews.

Understanding and Encountering the Ethics of Self and Others in Autoethnography: Challenging the Extant and Exploring Possibilities

In cultural and institutional contexts, autoethnography examines personal and professional experiences. While conducting and representing autoethnography, these considerations raise ethical challenges for self and others. This expository paper examines and explores the various forms of the ethics of self and others in autoethnography in South Asian contexts. Furthermore, ethical positions in an autoethnographic inquiry are presented and explored by challenging the extant and exploring the possibilities. Moreover, ethical standards are maintained based on the first author's experiences. We also realized that the emerging challenges of the ethics of self and others in autoethnography are ongoing and real. Likewise, we brought the first author’s lived experiences of conducting autoethnographic inquiry in his personal, professional, and cultural contexts (i.e., South Asian contexts) as a guiding principle. Above all, following the foundational understanding of ethics in autoethnography, one may engage with others in the account of self-experiences. The paper concludes by highlighting possible procedural and situational ethics pertaining to Dharma and Karma in autoethnography as a transformative educational research methodology (Luitel & Dahal, 2020) that might be demonstrated while conducting an autoethnographic inquiry.

Cognitive questionnaire on violence and assistance in diabetology. The experiences of diabetes community AMD and gender differences

The Gender medicine strategic group of AMD promoted an online survey in summer 2022 in order to know the size of violence in the workplace in the diabetologist community and this phenomenon can be correlated to lacks of Risk Assessment in the workplaces. We asked 20 questions about any experiences of violence suffered in the workplaces. The partecipants were 137, mainly women (71,5%). The most representative age range is 45 - 60 years (43,1%). About half of the respondents (46%) regardless of genders had been subjected of some form of violence during the exercise of profession, more often in surgeries daily, mainly by male patients, while women are mainly exposed to the risk of both verbal and physical violence. Among the subjects who have suffered experience of violence, in 74,6% of cases the phenomenon was repeated. Probably this data cannot exclude that some health workers due to personal characteristics or context are more often the target of this phenomenon, especially since health services and or companies do not provide readily available and effective strategies for rescue and or escape. It is a low propensity to report the violence and the lack of standardized procedures for the report management. Establishing a violence prevention program must the business goal aimed at guaranteeing safety in the workplace. KEY WORDS violence in the workplace; diabetology; age; gender; violence prevention program.

Les anabases de Saint-John Perse et de Zbigniew Herbert

The Anabases of Saint-John Perse and Zbigniew Herbert This article deals with the motif of “anabasis” in the poetry of Saint-John Perse and the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The former, a poet and diplomat, gave this title to a poem written in the early 1920s, before he stepped onto the stage of international politics of the interwar period. It, in a way, anticipates his professional and existential choices. Herbert’s “Anabasis” appeared in 1983 in his collection of poems entitled Raport z oblężonego miasta [Report from a Besieged City]. Although two generations and vastly different geopolitical points of origin separate the authors of these poems, both writers left their “small homelands” (Guadeloupe, Lwów), to become witnesses to history filled with socio-political events in the face of which they could not remain neutral. Saint-John Perse began his own poetic “anabasis” in 1940, as an “exile” having escaped to the USA. Zbigniew Herbert published his “Anabasis” in a time when communist Poland would, once again (following the institution of Martial Law in 1981), would confirm his “internal exile.” Personal contexts aside, the “anabases” of Perse and Herbert represent a search for the “right word” which anticipates the script of existence or which is a meditation on exile, expressing through modern poetic means the desire to recover, or constantly (re)construct, their imaginative and spiritual homelands.

Impact of Adolescent Social Media Use on Body Image, Mental Health and Eating Disorders: A Review

Adolescents are considered vulnerable to negative influences on social media because their use of the medium expands at a time when they are in a transition period in their lives dealing with many other issues such as puberty, exam stress and anxiety about their future. This review focuses on primary research articles exploring the impact of social media on adolescents’ mental health, body image and eating disorder related issues. This review also includes articles regarding how social media can be used to deliver positive messages, recruit vulnerable subjects for early intervention and explore the effectiveness of new treatment strategies. Based on the reviewed articles, it seems that girls, boys and transgender persons are similarly at-risk from negative social media influence. Going ahead, there is a need to focus on the nature of social media activity rather than just time spent to identify vulnerable young persons. It is possible that in some cases social media usage can drive a vicious cycle that amplifies negative psychological attitudes initiated due to social and personal context. Further research is required to explore the role parents and social media platforms can play in maintaining positive attitudes and effecting early intervention programs.

(Im)migrants’ appropriation of culture: Reciprocal influence of personal and work contexts

Increasing internationalisation in organisations demands further research on acculturation within international business (IB). Based on triangulated qualitative data on South Asian diasporas’ food consumption in the UK and Bahraini contexts, we introduce two acculturative orientations: essentialism and boundary spanning. We contribute to literature by linking acculturative orientations with relevant drivers and resulting adoption and adaptation of cultures to offer a new perspective towards analysing (im)migrants’ appropriation of culture in personal and work settings. We push the boundary of IB research by highlighting and enriching the understanding of, and reciprocity between, social and occupational contexts that shape (im)migrants’ acculturation.

The Journalist on Social Media: Mapping the Promoter, Celebrity and Joker Roles on Twitter and Instagram

This study takes an empirical approach to analyze how journalists perform the roles of promoter, celebrity, and joker on social media. These roles already play out in print and broadcast, but much less is known about how they are performed outside of traditional media contexts. This study addresses this gap in the literature through a content analysis of 4,100 posts by 23 Chilean journalists in 2020 on Twitter and Instagram. The analysis draws on key variables derived from the literature, including frontstage and backstage performance, personal context, platform, follower count, gender, and type of parent media organization. Results suggest that Twitter tends to serve as a space for professional performance bounded by established norms and practices, while Instagram tends to offer a space for a more fluid performance beyond the institutional boundaries of the news media. Findings indicate that professional social media contexts are more suited spaces to perform the promoter role, while personal or backstage contexts are more suited for the celebrity and joker roles. Results indicate how journalists take on specific roles on Twitter and Instagram, considering the affordances of these platforms.

From the Margins: Positionality in Area Studies

This article analyzes the positionality of the researcher in the field of area studies, taking as an example our engagement with African and Dalit studies and issues of race and caste. We present an autoethnographic essay on our own historically constituted agentive positionality by weaving together different angles of inquiry – Lithuanian area studies (and its institutional context), Lithuania’s position in the post-Soviet and postcolonial narratives (the historical context), and our positionality in area studies and our particular fields of research (the personal context). The article shows how we as researchers construct our professional identities and relations with our interlocutors as we navigate through the Soviet past and the globalized present. We argue that the crucial question for scholars of area studies is not only the macro-political context in which knowledge production takes place (the predominant focus of area studies for decades), but also the personal micro-dimensions of knowledge production, which are inherent in the particular researcher as a historically constituted and strategically acting individual.