Social Opinions Research Articles

„Socjologia aborcji”. Sposoby przedstawiania aborcji we współczesnym dyskursie nauk społecznych

W niniejszym artykule analizuję współczesny dyskurs nauk społecznych pod kątem obecności w nim badań nad przerywaniem ciąży. Aborcja jest często występującym zabiegiem medycznym, a jednocześnie stanowi jeden z najgorętszych przedmiotów debaty publicznej angażujący środowiska religijne, feministyczne i polityczne. W artykule szukam odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy popularność tego tematu w sferze publicznej znajduje odzwierciedlenie w dyskursie nauk społecznych. Interesuje mnie to, w jaki sposób skupienie dyskursu na konkretnych perspektywach badania aborcji – indywidualnej, społecznej i instytucjonalnej, a także dyskursywnej i metodologicznej – konstruuje „socjologię aborcji”. Analiza dyskursu na temat aborcji pokazuje, że badania nad aborcją w najbardziej prestiżowych czasopismach odnoszą się głównie do świata anglosaskiego. Ponadto badania aborcji stanowią niewielki procent artykułów w analizowanych czasopismach z zakresu nauk społecznych, a dominująca perspektywa to badanie aborcji przez pryzmat opinii społecznych na jej temat. Najmniej uwagi poświęca się natomiast perspektywie indywidualnej i doświadczeniom kobiet, które przerwały ciążę.

Online Fraud Review Detection Using Data Mining

Online reviews have great impact on today’s business and commerce. Decision making for purchase of online products mostly depends on reviews given by the users. Nowadays, there are a number of people using social media opinions to create their call on shopping for product or service. Opinion Spam detection is an exhausting and hard problem as there are many faux or fake reviews that have been created by organizations or by the people for various purposes. They write fake reviews to mislead readers or automated detection system by promoting or demoting target products to promote them or to degrade their reputations, opportunistic individuals or groups try to manipulate product reviews for their own interests. This paper introduces some semi-supervised and supervised text mining models to detect fake online reviews as well as compares the efficiency of both techniques on dataset containing hotel reviews.

Teachers’ understanding of the role of key competences in working with children: a study of the perceptions of early years educators in Southern Poland

ABSTRACT The nature of education has changed significantly in Poland recent years based on the rapidly changing reality of political, social and professional life and greater emphasis has been placed on a communicative model of teaching which has required the development of new sets of skills or competences by teachers. In this study research on the competences of early school education teachers was carried out in primary schools in the southern part of Poland in the area of Silesian Voivodship. A diagnostic survey was applied as a way of collecting information about the state of social awareness, opinions and views of the community of teachers. The research used a survey questionnaire (self-assessment) directed to a representative sample of 121 active early years teachers. The study analysed the respondents’ answers to four questions about the factors, activities, nature and role of competences in the work of a leading teacher, who is a form teacher of children in classes I–III. The results show the importance of early years teachers placed on different sets professional competences especially in relation to the preparation of the best materials for curriculum delivery, pupil motivation, and classroom organisation.

Sexualidad y homosexualidad en la obra de Carlos Alberto Seguin

La sexualidad ha sido siempre un tema de interés tanto en círculos académicos como para el público en general. El concepto de “lo normal” en la sexualidad estuvo relacionado con cuestiones morales, religiosas o legales hasta el siglo XIX, a partir del cual se le comenzó a relacionar con conceptos y temas médicos. En comparación con otros psiquiatras de su época, Carlos Alberto Seguin dio mucha importancia al estudio de la sexualidad humana. Consideró que el desequilibrio de una personalidad puede verse reflejado directamente en su actividad psico-sexual, por lo cual es necesario indagar detenidamente acerca de élla. Las “desviaciones sexuales”, con la homosexualidad como paradigma, suscitan tanto o más interés. La historia de la homosexualidad en el campo de la psiquiatría es compleja, algunos psiquiatras mantenían un enfoque de soporte y menos punitivo, mientras que otros jugaron un papel importante en el tratamiento médico de las conductas homosexuales. Seguin no consideró a la homosexualidad como una enfermedad, si bien la entendía como algo no deseable, contrapuesto al ideal de heterosexualidad. En base a su práctica clínica, postuló un sistema de clasificación de la homosexualidad y mantuvo una actitud comprensiva hacia ella, aun cuando no examinó de una manera directa las opiniones sociales y culturales sobre el tema, en el Perú de su época.

Spread, Then Target, and Advertise in Waves: Optimal Budget Allocation Across Advertising Channels

We analyze optimal strategies for the allocation of a finite budget that can be invested in different advertising channels over time with the objective of influencing social opinions in a network of individuals. In our analysis, we consider both exogenous influence mechanisms, such as advertising campaigns, as well as endogenous mechanisms of social influence, such as word-of-mouth and peer-pressure, which are modeled using diffusion dynamics. We show that for a broad family of objective functions, the optimal influence strategy at every time uses all channels at either their maximum rate or not at all, i.e., a bang-bang strategy. Furthermore, we prove that the number of switches between these extremes is bounded above by a term that is typically much smaller than the number of agents. This means that the optimal influence strategy is to exert maximum effort in waves for every channel, and then cease effort and let the effects propagate. We also show that, at the beginning of the campaign, the total cost-adjusted reach of an exogenous advertising channel determines its relative value. In contrast, as we approach our investment horizon (e.g., election day), the optimal strategy is to invest in channels able to target individuals instead of broad-reaching channels. We demonstrate that the optimal influence strategies are easily computable in several practical cases, and explicitly characterize the optimal controls for the case of linear objective functions in closed form. Finally, we see that, in the canonical example of designing an election campaign, identifying late-deciders is a critical component in the optimal design.

A 2020 perspective on “From buzz to bucks: The impact of social media opinions on the locus of innovation”: From surfaces to essences

Abstract Social media is believed as a privileged vehicle affording numerous ideas with multi-faceted insights from the crowds. In addition to the entertainment resource, social media, user-generated content (UGC) there, can also empower ideation and commercialization of innovation. We have proposed a novel approach to explore the pivotal role of social media in shaping corporation innovation performance in our article in 2018. In this commentary, we extend the literature review with more recent insights and identify the new possible directions to further inspire future research. Specifically, understanding the linkage between social media and organization innovation can be enriched via advancing deep learning methods, improving multi-modal data analysis, and fostering digital innovation.

Use of social media for surgical education in Australia and New Zealand.

Social media are an increasingly important tool for educators, although their use for surgical education in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) has not been quantified. This study aimed to determine the social media presence of surgical training institutions in ANZ, quantify the proportion of their social media content that is educational, compare engagement between educational and non-educational content, and determine perspectives on using social media for education. An online search was conducted in October 2018 to determine the social media presence of surgical training institutions accredited to deliver under- and post-graduate surgical education in ANZ. All their posts on Facebook and Twitter from November 2017 to October 2018 were categorized as educational or non-educational. Engagement on Twitter was analysed using retweets. An online survey was distributed to each institution to investigate their social media strategy and opinions on the use of social media for surgical education. Seven out of 37 (19%) surgical training institutions had active social media accounts. Educational content accounted for 677/4615 (14.7%) of their posts. Educational content was retweeted more often than non-educational content (17.2 versus 5.4, P = 0.002). Seven out of 37 (19%) institutions responded to the survey, with one respondent having a policy for and utilising social media for surgical education. Social media are being used by a minority of surgical training institutions for educational purposes in ANZ. Social media content is primarily non-educational although educational posts attract more engagement. Further research is required to assess the efficacy of surgical education on social media.

The Change in Classification of Asperger Syndrome: An Exploration of its Effects on Self-Identity

Recently, the American Psychiatric Association eliminated Asperger Syndrome (AS) and introduced the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnostic framework. This change in nosology socially implicates people who self-identify with and derive personal meaning from their AS diagnosis. The current study explored the opinions of adults with AS regarding their identity related to the diagnostic terminology of ASD. Twelve adults with AS completed a semi-structured interview that was transcribed and analyzed qualitatively using Thematic Analysis. The analysis revealed six themes: (a) Derived Meaning, (b) Knowledge and Understanding, (c) Perceptions and Labels, (d) Social Identity, (e) Opinions and Reactions to ASD, and (f) Barriers to Funding and Service Provision. Many participants socially identified and self-categorized as part of the AS community because their challenges matched those described by the DSM-IV. Importantly, many participants described the removal of AS as a threat to their identity, social status, and access to supports. Implications are discussed.

Automated vehicle acceptance in China: Social influence and initial trust are key determinants

Although automated vehicles (AVs) could offer a potentially effective solution to improving road safety, the benefit associated with AVs can be realized only when the public intend to use them. While some efforts have been made to understand why people would use AVs, few of them have investigated the role of social and personal factors in AV acceptance. The present study aimed to fill in this research gap. An AV acceptance model was proposed by extending the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with social and personal factors, i.e., initial trust, social influence, and the Big Five personality and sensation seeking traits. The validity of the proposed model was confirmed with a questionnaire survey administrated to 647 drivers in China. Results revealed that at the very beginning of AV commercialization, perception factors (i.e., perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) from the original TAM showed significant influence on users’ intention to use AVs. But more importantly, it was social influence and initial trust that contributed most to explain whether users would accept AVs or not. Some personality traits also played certain roles in AV usage intention. In particular, sensation seekers and those with a higher openness to experience were more likely to trust AVs and had a higher intention to adopt them. In contrast, neurotic people showed a lower level of trust and were less likely to accept AVs. Practically, these findings suggest that promotion of AVs to influential individuals that could help form good social opinions would have significant downstream effects on AV acceptance at the early state of its marketization.

INFLUENCE OF THE REFORM OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND, CONDUCTED IN THE YEARS 2009-2016, ON THE SECURITY OF THE COUNTRY IN THE OPINION OF CITIZENS

The conflict in Ukraine in 2014 raised questions in Poland about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the reform of the Polish army, which began in 2009. The abandonment of universal conscription and professionalization of the army resulted in a decrease in the number of people who underwent military training. And this began to raise concerns about the security of the state and its citizens. Research on the professionalization of the army and the impact of this decision on the increase or decrease of threats is important for Polish citizens. The article presents social opinions on this topic

Društveni angažman mladih umetnica u digitalnom kontekstu

Young women take more and more significant place in online space using all the benefits of the creative features of Internet and digital media. Even though gender inequality is possibly even more present in the online space comparing to the offline, digital environment also stands for a platform for (artistic) expression and an arena of the tension between attitudes, tastes, expressions and ideas. New generations of female authors in the local and regional digital context (could) precede, inspire and lead with their authentic critical thinking and production. This text examines if, to what extent and how young female authors use their artistic production, especially their digital platforms, for expressing social and political opinions. We were particularly investigating their understanding of feminism and gender (in)equality, as well as their experience of discrimination and sexism. The article is based on the individual interviews with selected female authors of the younger generation, through which their attitudes, values, critical artistic production, messages and narratives, as well as reactions to the global crisis and social problems were investigated. To the certain extent, the article also reflects on their content on digital communications channels (web sites, Facebook profiles and pages, Instagram profiles and other platforms for digital creativity and distribution of artistic content). This pilot research included eight female artists active in different artistic and creative fields in Serbia: visual and applied arts, music (popular and contemporary experimental), film, literature and performing arts. A particular topic that marked the social context of the first half of 2020 when the research was conducted, has been the pandemic caused by the virus covid19, as well as emergency state and isolation that came as a consequence. Additionally, context of their production, activism and life is marked by sexism existing in media, online as well as offline public space.

Polacy w słowackiej publicystyce i polityce od lat 30. do 60. XIX wieku

Poles in Slovak journalism and politics from the 1830s to the 1860s This paper sheds light on the perception of the Polish people, Polish politics, and their issues in Slovak journalism between 1830 and 1872. On the whole, the views were limited by the social opinions voiced by Slovak nationalists as well as by their interests and the general weakness of their National Movement. Slovak nationalists refused to accept political concepts that, on the one hand, supported the creation of nation states (by “large”nations such as Poland), and on the other hand, called for the assimilation of “small”nations living within them. This would spell the end of the Slavs and Romanians settled in Hungary, as Hungary would reform into one single national Hungarian state. Among all Austro-Slavs, the fear of “Magyarisation”contributed to the most intense and widespread Slavic solidarity and Russophilia in the Slovak-speaking environment. It also determined the difficult approach to the Polish issues. The Slovak nationalists sympathised with the Polish fate, however, at the same time, they had difficulties with accepting the Poland-Russia conflict. That is why we can find quite varied opinions of Poles and Polish issues. Idealising the Poles, Polonophilia, sympathising with Poles as regards their problems, careful and neutral views of those problems, efforts to limit the Poland-Russia conflict, and critical views of Poles were all entwined. For example, pro-Polish sympathies dominated in the Slovak National Movement in the 1830s, whereas in the 1840s the sympathies shifted towards Russia, despite the fact that some nationalists supported the Poles and their Uprising in Halych. The real Slovak-Polish co-operation can be seen particularly during the revolution in 1848–1849. Out of the Slovak political ideology emerged the Pan-Slavic work Slovanstvo a svet budúcnosti [Slavdom and the world of the future] by Ľ. Štúr, which combined the Slav perspective with the connections to Russia. The Polish issues were mainly present in the 1860s. During that time, the more conservative political wing, “Stará škola”[The Old School], was looking for support in the imperial Vienna, showing strong Russophilism and critical attitude to the Polish uprising. In contrast, the more liberal political line, “Nová škola”[The New School], striving for co-operation with Hungarian political parties, showed understanding for the Polish aversion and was critical of the imperial Russia. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the Slovak politics and culture considerably weakened. The interest in glossing over the problems of the northern neighbour also declined. The Polish issues re-entered Slovak journalism again after the 1890s in connection with analysing new geo-political affairs on the continent and polarisation of the European superpowers.

Student Opinions about their Retirement Future

The paper aims to identify respondents’ attitudes to and awareness of the retirement age and social protection, as well as their expectations with regard to educational activities in this area. The research was carried out in 2018, using an anonymous PAPI type interview on a non-random sample of economics students (N = 703 people) who were either full-time or part-time students. The detailed objectives of the analysis were related to the following issues: – elementary knowledge of social insurance (an open question), – attitudes towards future retirement, care for the elderly, and social solidarity (semantic differential technique combined with the Likert scale), – expectations and opinions regarding the attractiveness and importance of social insurance as a subject of education (techniques as above), – the desire to deepen knowledge in this area (a dichotomous question).
 The conducted research has shown that despite a lack of expressive attitudes towards social and pension insurance, respondents were interested in deepening their knowledge in this area. This implies the need to create teaching programmes that would broaden this knowledge and build a new insurance awareness based not on demanding attitudes but on the conviction that the retirement future is created independently of the existing system and institutions

Pochwała populizmu. Esej polemiczny

The author supports the claim that attempts to formulate a universal definition of the term “populism” are not worthwhile, because the sense of the term is usually determined by a specific social context. Understanding the utopian nature of populism provides a better understanding of the utopian nature of democracy and allows for a humble departure from dreams of a perfect social order, because, as has been shown in numerous survey studies, the contemporary shift of social mood, attitudes, and opinions toward some version of populism is a relatively simple consequence of the deficiencies of democracy in its neoliberal version.

Asymptotic properties of distributed social sampling algorithm

Social sampling is a novel randomized message passing protocol inspired by social communication for opinion formation in social networks. In a typical social sampling algorithm, each agent holds a sample from the empirical distribution of social opinions at initial time, and it collaborates with other agents in a distributed manner to estimate the initial empirical distribution by randomly sampling a message from current distribution estimate. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the theoretical properties of the distributed social sampling algorithm over random networks. Firstly, we provide a framework based on stochastic approximation to study the asymptotic properties of the algorithm. Then, under mild conditions, we prove that the estimates of all agents converge to a common random distribution, which is composed of the initial empirical distribution and the accumulation of quantized error. Besides, by tuning algorithm parameters, we prove the strong consistency, namely, the distribution estimates of agents almost surely converge to the initial empirical distribution. Furthermore, the asymptotic normality of estimation error generated by distributed social sampling algorithm is addressed. Finally, we provide a numerical simulation to validate the theoretical results of this paper.

Crypto-currencies narrated on tweets: a sentiment analysis approach

PurposeCrypto-currencies, decentralized electronic currencies systems, denote a radical change in financial exchange and economy environment. Consequently, it would be attractive for designers and policy-makers in this area to make out what social media users think about them on Twitter. The purpose of this study is to investigate the social opinions about different kinds of crypto-currencies and tune the best-customized classification technique to categorize the tweets based on sentiments.Design/methodology/approachThis paper utilized a lexicon-based approach for analyzing the reviews on a wide range of crypto-currencies over Twitter data to measure positive, negative or neutral sentiments; in addition, the end result of sentiments played a training role to train a supervised technique, which can predict the sentiment loading of tweets about the main crypto-currencies.FindingsThe findings further prove that more than 50 per cent of people have positive beliefs about crypto-currencies. Furthermore, this paper confirms that marketers can predict the sentiment of tweets about these crypto-currencies with high accuracy if they use appropriate classification techniques like support vector machine (SVM).Practical implicationsConsidering the growing interest in crypto-currencies (Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, Litcoin and Ripple), the findings of this paper have a remarkable value for enterprises in the financial area to obtain the promised benefits of social media analysis at work. In addition, this paper helps crypto-currencies vendors analyze public opinion in social media platforms. In this sense, the current paper strengthens our understanding of what happens in social media for crypto-currencies.Originality/valueFor managers and decision-makers, this paper suggests that the news and campaign for their crypto in Twitter would affect people’s perspectives in a good manner. Because of this fact, the firms, investing in these crypto-currencies, could apply the social media as a magnifier for their promotional activities. The findings steer the market managers to see social media as a predictor tool, which can analyze the market through understanding the opinions of users of Twitter.

Efectos del origen social y de la posición de clase en el bienestar material. Un abordaje sobre la desigualdad social en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2012-2013

Este artículo indaga en qué medida la posición de clase, tanto de origen como de destino, explica desiguales condiciones de vida, medidas a partir del acceso a determinados niveles de bienestar material. Se exploran, de este modo, tres aristas de la desigualdad social: las condiciones, las oportunidades y los resultados. En este sentido, se elaboran modelos explicativos que permitan comprender cómo determinadas condiciones de origen e individuales intervienen en el acceso a tres activos centrales que configuran el bienestar de los hogares: el nivel de ingresos laborales, la propiedad de la vivienda y el nivel de consumo material. La metodología asumida es de índole cuantitativa, utilizándose técnicas de regresión lineal múltiple y regresión logística binomial. La fuente de datos que se utiliza proviene de la Encuesta sobre movilidad social y opiniones sobre la sociedad actual del año 2012-2013, realizada en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires.

Enhancing the classification of social media opinions by optimizing the structural information

Sentiment Analysis is an extensively studied task, however an important aspect yet to study is the underlying structural information of opinions. An important aspect to tackle is the analysis underlying structural information of opinions. Social media is a great source of user opinions, which are structured in most of the cases in two sections: the title and the content or body of the opinion. We claim that the structure of social media opinions has useful information for the polarity classification task. We propose a model for optimizing the contribution of that underlying structural information for polarity classification. Our model is built by weighting the contribution of each section, title and body. We develop a modified Support Vector Machine that includes a weight parameter, which is optimized via a line-search strategy. We evaluate our proposal on three datasets of reviews from different domains written in two different versions of the Spanish language. The results show that our model outperforms the classification of the joint or individual classification of each section of the opinion. Therefore, our claim holds.

Robust fragmentation modeling of Hegselmann–Krause-type dynamics

In opinion dynamics, how to model the enduring fragmentation phenomenon (especially the bipartite cleavage) of social opinions has long been a central problem. It is widely known that the confidence-based opinion dynamics provide an acceptable mechanism to produce fragmentation. In this study, taking the famous confidence-based Hegselmann–Krause (HK) model, we examine the robustness of the fragmentation coming from HK dynamics and its variations with prejudiced and stubborn agents against random noise. Prior to possible insightful explanations, the theoretical results in this paper explicitly reveal that the fragmentation of HK dynamics and its homogeneous variations finally vanishes in the presence of arbitrarily tiny noise, while only the HK model with heterogenous prejudices displays a solid cleavage in noisy environment. Moreover, it is found that noise could help regularize the group to form the innate bipartite cleavage.

Chemical education in Vietnam – Get ready for reformation

The contribution comments on articles out of the Vietnamese Newspaper Vietnam News concerning the current educational situation in Vietnam documented by headings of distinctive articles. This will be combined with our experiences in lecturing and researching in Vietnam. Themes related to education and education reformation are discussed in public. The goal is obviously to regard social opinions and to make administrational decisions more transparent. The article also shows our awareness of the educational situation in Vietnam from a western scientific point of view.