People In Social Context Research Articles

Social context matters: The role of social support and social norms in support for solidarity in healthcare financing.

In many European countries, including the Netherlands, the healthcare system is financed according to the principles of solidarity. It is important, therefore, that public support for solidarity in healthcare financing is sufficient in order to ensure that people remain willing to contribute towards solidarity-based systems. The high willingness to contribute to the healthcare costs of others in the Netherlands suggests that support is generally high. However, there are differences between groups. Previous research has focused on mechanisms at the individual and institutional level to explain these differences. However, people's social context may also play a role. Little research has been conducted into this. To fill this gap, we examined the role of perceived social support and social norms in order to explain differences in the willingness to contribute to other people's healthcare costs. In November 2021, we conducted a survey study in which a questionnaire was sent to a representative sample of 1,500 members of the Dutch Healthcare Consumer Panel. This was returned by 837 panel members (56% response rate). Using logistic regression analysis, we showed that people who perceive higher levels of social support are more willing to contribute to the healthcare costs of others. We also found that the willingness to contribute is higher when someone's social context is more supportive of healthcare systems that are financed according to the principles of solidarity. This effect does not differ between people who perceive low and high levels of social support. Our results suggest that, next to the individual and institutional level, the social context of people has to be taken into consideration in policy and research addressing support for solidarity in healthcare financing.

Re-centering Relationships: Obstetric Violence, Health Care Rationalities, and Pandemic Childbirth in Canada.

Emerging evidence suggests that the COVD-19 pandemic is eroding childbirth rights. Drawing on narratives of women who gave birth in Canada during the pandemic, this article exposes a paradox in that policies aimed at limiting interpersonal contact implicitly acknowledge the connection between health, well-being, and the social context of people's lives, yet they frame this relationality as a liability to be eliminated. They do this despite the many benefits that social support is known to confer for pregnancy and childbirth. I suggest that obstetric violence theory could be expanded to include the perinatal health care system's failure to consider the well-being of pregnant and birthing persons as necessarily interdependent with that of close others. Conscientiously and routinely making the safeguarding of these relationships a priority in perinatal health care planning may strengthen existing health care systems against certain forms of obstetric violence. [childbirth, COVID-19, obstetric violence, relational personhood, Canada].

Social context matters: the role of social support and social norms in healthcare solidarity

Abstract Background In many European countries, including the Netherlands, the healthcare system is based upon solidarity. It is important that public support for solidarity-based systems is sufficient, to ensure that people remain willing to contribute to them. Although support is generally high, as indicated by high levels of willingness to pay for the healthcare costs of others, there are differences between groups. Previous research has focused on individual and institutional characteristics when explaining these differences. However, people's social context may also play a role. Little research has been conducted into this. To fill this gap, we examined the role of perceived social support and social norms in order to explain differences in the willingness to pay for other people's healthcare costs. Methods A questionnaire was sent to a representative sample of 1,500 members of the Dutch Healthcare Consumer Panel in November 2021 (56% response rate, N = 837). The relationship between the social context of people and their willingness to pay was studied via logistic regression analysis. Results Higher levels of perceived social support are associated with higher levels of willingness to pay for other people's healthcare costs (p = 0.038). We also found that willingness to pay is higher when someone's social context is more supportive of the solidarity-based healthcare system (p = 0.001). Contrary to our expectations, the effect of social norms does not differ between people who perceive low and high levels of socials support. Conclusions The degree to which people feel connected to others and the degree to which someone's social context supports the solidarity-based healthcare system affect the willingness to contribute to the healthcare system. Our results suggest that the social context of people has to be taken into account in both policy and research that addresses healthcare solidarity, next to individual and institutional characteristics. Key messages • Social support and social norms play a role in the willingness to pay for healthcare costs of others. • People's social context must be taken into account in policy and research on healthcare solidarity.

Understanding social relationships with person-pair relations

Social relationship understanding infers existing social relationships among individuals in a given scenario, which has been demonstrated to have a wide range of practical value in reality. However, existing methods infer the social relationship of each person pair in isolation, without considering the context-aware information for person pairs in the same scenario. The context-aware information for person pairs exists extensively in reality, that is, the social relationships of different person pairs in a simple scenario are always related to each other. For instance, if most of the person pairs in a simple scenario have the same social relationship, "friends", then the other pairs have a high probability of being "friends" or other similar coarse-level relationships, such as "intimate". This context-aware information should thus be considered in social relationship understanding. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end trainable Person-Pair Relation Network (PPRN), which is a GRU-based graph inference network, to first extract the visual and position information as the person-pair feature information, then enable it to transfer on a fully-connected social graph, and finally utilizes different aggregators to collect different kinds of person-pair information. Unlike existing methods, the method—with its message passing mechanism in the graph model—can infer the social relationship of each person-pair in a joint way (i.e., not in isolation). Extensive experiments on People In Social Context (PISC)- and People In Photo Album (PIPA)-relation datasets show the superiority of our method compared to other methods.

Stress Ocare : An advance IoMT based physiological data analysis for anxiety status prediction using cloud computing

In modern times individuals are facing an important social challenge in the form of stress. Combining sensor devices that capture physiological, and brain waves data, this study develops a machine learning technique using cloud computing to recognize stress in people in social contexts. In this paper, we are comparing several classifiers, including Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, k-nearest neighbor and AdaBoost, and also inventing a method that uses sensor data in day-to-day life. It detects stress levels with high accuracy. Our results show that by combining data from all the sensors, we are able to accurately differentiate between the stressful and normal situations of humans. In addition, this paper also evaluates the individual capabilities of each sensor modality and its applicability for stress detection in real-time situations. Methods: We have provided unique technology to incorporate sensor signals using cloud computing. It monitors the user’s sweat level, temperature, heart rate variation, and EEG under various motion estimations and also chooses the best model to detect the anxiety level based on the user’s motion conditions. Results: Evaluation of algorithms using sample data reveals an overall concern detection accuracy of 94% along with a significant reduction in false positives compared to the ultramodern techniques.

Pushing poverty off limits: quality improvement and the architecture of healthcare values

BackgroundPoverty and social deprivation have adverse effects on health outcomes and place a significant burden on healthcare systems. There are some actions that can be taken to tackle them from within healthcare institutions, but clinicians who seek to make frontline services more responsive to the social determinants of health and the social context of people’s lives can face a range of ethical challenges. We summarise and consider a case in which clinicians introduced a poverty screening initiative (PSI) into paediatric practice using the discourse and methodology of healthcare quality improvement (QI).DiscussionWhilst suggesting that interventions like the PSI are a potentially valuable extension of clinical roles, which take advantage of the unique affordances of clinical settings, we argue that there is a tendency for such settings to continuously reproduce a narrower set of norms. We illustrate how the framing of an initiative as QI can help legitimate and secure funding for practical efforts to help address social ends from within clinical service, but also how it can constrain and disguise the value of this work. A combination of methodological emphases within QI and managerialism within healthcare institutions leads to the prioritisation, often implicitly, of a limited set of aims and governing values for healthcare. This can act as an obstacle to a genuine broadening of the clinical agenda, reinforcing norms of clinical practice that effectively push poverty ‘off limits.’ We set out the ethical dilemmas facing clinicians who seek to navigate this landscape in order to address poverty and the social determinants of health.ConclusionsWe suggest that reclaiming QI as a more deliberative tool that is sensitive to these ethical dilemmas can enable managers, clinicians and patients to pursue health-related values and ends, broadly conceived, as part of an expansive range of social and personal goods.

Relative deprivation and phubbing: Fear of missing out as a mediator

Phubbing, defined as paying attention to one's smartphone instead of interacting with other people in social contexts, has become a common phenomenon. However, the determinants of this behavior remain unclear. Therefore, we explored whether fear of missing out mediates the relationship between relative deprivation and phubbing. A sample of 858 college students completed measures to assess relative deprivation, fear of missing out, and phubbing. The results show that relative deprivation was positively correlated with phubbing. Further, fear of missing out fully mediated the relationship between relative deprivation and phubbing, which indicates that college students who perceived more relative deprivation tended to be more prone to experiencing fear of missing out, and thus more vulnerable to phubbing. Our findings extend understanding of the antecedents of phubbing from the individual microlevel to the psychosocial factor macrolevel.

Signs of Our Time: Time-Use as Dedication, Performance, Identity, and Power in Contemporary Workplaces

Time-use refers to the amount of time spent working and how that time is allocated over a particular period. A growing number of scholars are considering how social context—people’s immediate social environments (e.g., colleagues and managers, norms, work groups, and nonwork demands)—shape time-use. However, this research is fragmented across disciplines, methods, and levels of analysis. To integrate and advance knowledge in this area, we review empirical studies that inform current understanding of social context and time-use. In doing so, we develop a framework that reveals how the extant literature coalesces around four taken-for-granted social meanings: time-use as dedication, time-use as performance, time-use as identity, and time-use as power. These four meanings are anchored in broadly shared societal ideologies but are enacted and interpreted locally as people engage time in a specific context. Looking across the four social meanings, we discuss how they are interconnected, and identify overarching themes that unite them. Building on these insights, we suggest important directions for future research on the social context of time-use.

Detrimental effects of the 'bath salt' methylenedioxypyrovalerone on social play behavior in male rats.

Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) is the most popular synthetic cathinone found in products marketed as 'bath salts', widely abused among teenagers and young adults. Synthetic cathinones have pharmacological effects resembling those of psychostimulants, which are known to disrupt a variety of social behaviors. However, despite the popular use of MDPV by young people in social contexts, information about its effects on social behavior is scarce. To investigate the impact of MDPV on social behavior at young age, and the underlying neurobehavioral mechanisms, we focused on social play behavior. Social play behavior is the most characteristic social behavior displayed by young mammals and it is crucial for neurobehavioral development. Treatment with MDPV reduced social play behavior in both juvenile and young adult male rats, and its play-suppressant effect was subject to tolerance but not sensitization. As the behavioral effects of MDPV have been ascribed to dopaminergic and noradrenergic neurotransmission, and given the role of these neurotransmitters in social play, we investigated the involvement of dopamine and noradrenaline in the play-suppressant effects of MDPV. The effects of MDPV on social play were blocked by either the α2 adrenoceptor antagonist RX821002 or the dopamine receptor antagonist flupenthixol, given alone or together at sub-effective doses. In sum, MDPV selectively suppresses the most vigorous social behavior of developing rats through both noradrenergic and dopaminergic mechanisms. This study provides important preclinical evidence of the deleterious effects of MDPV on social behavior, and as such increases our understanding of the neurobehavioral effects of this popular cathinone.

Impaired Interpretation of Others' Behavior is Associated with Difficulties in Recognizing Pragmatic Language in Patients with Schizophrenia.

Much attention has been paid to the pragmatic language function in schizophrenia. This study of Japanese patients with schizophrenia examined the relationship between impaired interpretation of the behaviors of other people in social contexts and the ability to recognize metaphor and irony. We assessed 34patients with schizophrenia and 34 normal subjects using first- and second-order theory of mind tasks, the Metaphor and Sarcasm Scenario Test, and the Dewey Story Test (which tests the ability to judge others' social behaviors). We compared the performance between the groups and analyzed correlations between the tasks. All tasks revealed significant deficits in the patients compared with the controls. In the patient group, metaphor comprehension was correlated with the ability to judge normal behaviors, and irony comprehension was correlated with the ability to judge abnormal behaviors, suggesting that deficits of social cognition in schizophrenia include these two types of factors associated with pragmatic language.

It’s not just physical: a qualitative study regarding the illness experiences of people with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy

Purpose: Little is known about the illness experiences of people with Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD). The aim of this study was to provide insight into the illness experiences of people with FSHD in order to tailor rehabilitation programs to individual needs and expectations.Methods: Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with people with FSHD. The interviews were audiotaped, transcribed and member checked. Computerized (MAXqda) and manual techniques were used for thematic data analysis.Results: Intra- as well as extra-individual aspects play a role in the illness experiences of people with FSHD. Integrating the consequences of the diagnosis and symptoms, coping with heredity and progenity, adjusting to a decreasing independence, and the accompanying changing relationship with one’s partner, are mentioned as intra-individual aspects. As extra-individual factors are the responses of the social environment, which was mentioned as well as used assistive devices, and maintaining or giving up work.Conclusions: Better understanding of the individual illness experiences, cognitions, and social context of people with FSHD can give health professionals tools to improve their care and give researchers direction for future studies to evaluate healthcare improvements from a holistic, patient-centred perspective.Implications for RehabilitationFSHD has a major impact on people’s lives. Besides the physical consequences, issues such as heredity, progenity, changing (intimate) relationships, social interactions and work should be addressed by rehabilitation professionals.Dependent on the timing of the diagnosis (early or later in life) people with FSHD could, in addition to medical consultation and physical therapy, profit from support by a social worker, occupational therapist and/or genetic Counselor for the above-mentioned themes to be addressed more extensively.It is relevant for rehabilitation professionals to become familiar with the personal characteristics and social circumstances of the patient before communicating the diagnosis and prognosis in order to individually tailor the content of the communication.

Decision Making: A Core Problem of Social Cognition

Successful decision making involves our ability to understand the intensions, emotions and beliefs of other people. An important feature of decision making in a social setting concern the interaction of areas and Social cognition is an integral part of social psychology, which deals with the psychological mechanisms that mediate the individual’s responses to the social environment. Notable to social cognitive theories are the ideas which are applied and extended to many concepts, theories, models and paradigms from cognitive psychology in social context. This approach leads to remarkable progress in understanding of social scenario, people’s decisions and also offers insights into social issues. It helps to understand reactions of people in social context. Decision making is just one of the many areas in which social cognition has an important role. Decision making is a complex cognitive skill. Social cognition attempts to explain the broad social aspects of human experience, such as how decision making are influenced by the presence of others as well as the social situations in which they find themselves. This article presents a fundamental idea of social cognitive perspective of decision making process and factors that influence our decisions.

Trajectory Optimization of Packet Ferries in Opportunistic Social-Based Machine-to-Machine Networks

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is an emerging paradigm to connect a large number of devices through wireless technologies. In recent application scenarios, devices are normally carried by people in social contexts. Like the behavior of people, the moving activity of devices always happens in a specific area, which corresponds to some specific communities. How to guarantee the higher packet delivery ratio while reducing forwarding delay in such M2M networks is a challenging issue and has not been well addressed yet. In this paper, we put some special mobile devices (called postmen) in the opportunistic social-based M2M networks and their main responsibility is to carry packets for normal devices which belong to specific communities. Our work focuses on the optimization of the moving trajectory by considering the minimum transmission delay. We formulate the optimal issue into semi-Markov Decision Process model. The decision process includes two parts: packets-choosing strategy and trajectory of packet-ferrying determination strategy. By maximizing the individual reward of a postman, its optimal trajectory will be found. Furthermore, the proposed solution guarantees the packet delivery ratio and delay for isolated communities. Simulation results show that the proposed packet-ferrying solution outperforms the two existing ferrying solutions in terms of packet delivery ratio.

Resilience and Refugees: From Individualised Trauma to Post Traumatic Growth

Resilience and Refugees: From Individualised Trauma to Post Traumatic Growth

Empathizing with sensory and movement differences: moving toward sensitive understanding of autism.

The autism diagnosis requires deficits in social interaction and communication, yet neither occurs in isolation. This brief literature-based analysis provides evidence that other factors are involved in autistic people's atypical social communication. The brain is a complicated system where regions serve multiple, general, and overlapping roles. Sensorimotor and broad cognitive processes underlie both neurotypicals' and autistics' social cognition and behavior. Sensory strengths sometimes underlie autistic people's difficulties, especially in dynamic contexts that require multimodal integration. Social abilities and behaviors occur between people in social contexts, and autistic and neurotypical people share mutual difficulties in understanding one another. This paper challenges attempts to reduce autism to social deficits, and suggests the need for better interpersonal and societal understanding of and support for autistic people.

The use of social network methodological framework in nursing care to breastfeeding women

This study aimed to discuss the contribution of the social network methodological framework in nursing care delivered to women who breastfeed their children up to six months of age. This qualitative study aimed to elaborate the social network map of 20 women through tape-recorded interview. Social network analysis evidenced a 'strong' bond between these women and members from their primary network, especially friends, neighbors, mothers or with the child's father, who were reported as the people most involved in the breastfeeding period. The contribution of this framework to nursing practice is discussed, especially in care and research processes. We believe that nurses' appropriation of this framework can be an important support for efficacious actions, as well as to favor a broader perspective on the social context people experience.

Social support and self-management of type 2 diabetes among immigrant Australian women

To elucidate the social meanings and interpretations that immigrant women attach to the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, and the social support and professional advice that they receive following this diagnosis. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 immigrant women living in Melbourne, Australia, from communities with a higher than average incidence of type 2 diabetes. Women were recruited purposively through general practitioners and community organizations. The women's initial reaction to the diagnosis of diabetes, understandings of the behavioural changes required to control symptoms and prevent complications and the nature of the social and professional supports were discussed. Interviews were audio-taped, transcribed, coded and analysed thematically by both authors. Some women were critical of their doctors but also manipulated their encounters to avoid receiving unwelcome information about the progress of the disease and consequent required changes in management. Social interactions influenced women's adjustments to diagnosis and informed their communication and adaptation of their lives. Choice of support varied by cultural background, but many respondents reflected on the thin line between support and interference. All women found most understanding from others living with diabetes. The social context of people with type 2 diabetes is important in facilitating or inhibiting the management of the condition. Variations in attitudes to family and professionals influenced adherence to advice and emphasized the need for appropriate support to women to sustain behavioural change.

Cognitive–Behavioural Intervention for People with Intellectual Disability and Anxiety Disorders

Background Distinct cognitive models and treatments have been developed for people without intellectual disability with a wide range of anxiety disorders. However, these have not been reported as applied to people with intellectual disabilities. In fact, much of the cognitive therapy literature for people with intellectual disabilities does not distinguish between different presentations of anxiety.Methods We take the particular example of social phobia and describe the specific cognitive model and associated intervention developed for people without intellectual disabilities. We then consider research on the social context of people with intellectual disability and research on developmental factors predictive of anxiety and make suggestions for adaptation of treatment approaches.Conclusion We suggest that such an approach would be useful to apply to other anxiety presentations and to identify areas for further clinical and research development.