Societal Trends Research Articles

Pengaruh Online Shop Terhadap Perilaku Konsumtif Mahasiswa di Sekolah Tinggi Ekonomi Islam (STEI) Walisongo Sampang

Today, the growth of the internet has altered every aspect of life, including the business world. Online retailers are available for shopping, provided you have access to the internet. The provided convenience amenities also influence overindulgence, which results in consumptive behavior. This is a common occurrence among adults and youth, especially Walisongo Sampang Islamic Economics College pupils. This study examines a number of variables, including product quality, price, ease of access to information, and societal trends, to determine the extent to which the presence of an online store (X) influences consumer behavior (Y). This study employs a quantitative research design. Twenty-seven students made up the sample used in this study. Written statements are sent to respondents who make online purchases as part of the data gathering process. IBM SPSS Statistics V.20 was used to process data in order to perform data analysis. Next, perform an examination of the data utilizing partial tests (t-test), validity, reliability, classical assumption tests, and simple linear regression analysis. The study's findings demonstrate that, with a coefficient of determination (R Square) of 42.8%, the online shop variable (X) significantly influences the consumer behavior variable (Y). Meanwhile, other factors not covered in this study have an impact on the remainder.

Finding the Right Channel: An Analysis of Communication Channel Preferences Amongst Potential Extension Clientele

New communication methods and technology continue to emerge and evolve – as do societal trends – making it paramount that Extension professionals stay abreast with the preferred communication channels of potential clientele. By being aware of clients’ preferred communication channels, Extension professionals can increase the number of participants who benefit from their work while also improving the quality of the message being delivered. The present study examined the preferred communication channels of potential Extension clientele specifically when gathering information regarding their community. Specifically, a non-probability opt-in sampling procedure was employed whereby respondent (N = 3,347) communication channel preferences were analyzed from an audience segmentation and uses and gratifications perspective. Overall, the results indicated the most effective channels through which to reach potential Extension clientele under 50 years of age is through the internet and social media, while word of mouth and newspaper are preferred channels for those 50 and over. However, the results of the study indicate there are a variety of potential communication channels with varying degrees of preference among different audiences. Using study results as a starting point to inform communication channel strategy may help to Extension professionals ensure the correct message is provided to the correct audience via the correct channel.

Popularity of Video Games and Collective Memory.

Describing the permanence of cultural objects is an important step in understanding societal trends. A relatively novel cultural object is the video game, which is an interactive media, that is, the player is an active contributor to the overall experience. This article aims to investigate video game permanence in collective memory using their popularity as a proxy, employing data based on the Steam platform from July 2012 to December 2020. The objectives include characterizing the database; studying the growth of players, games, and game categories; providing a model for the relative popularity distribution; and applying this model in three strata, global, major categories, and among categories. We detected linear growth trends in the number of players and the number of categories, and an exponential trend in the number of games released. Furthermore, we verified that lognormal distributions, emerging from multiplicative processes, provide a first approximation for the popularity in all strata. In addition, we proposed an improvement via Box–Cox transformations with similar parameters (from ( CI: , ) to ( CI: , 0)). We were able to justify this improved model by interpreting the magnitude of each Box–Cox parameter as a measure of memory effects.

Impact of societal and legal context on the blood supply of African-ancestry populations in Western countries: A review of practices and the French example.

In Western countries, blood supply agencies encounter impediments in providing blood groups defined as rare or of interest, notably for sub-Saharan African ancestry (SSAA) recipients. To establish warning levels and anticipate future blood needs, an estimate of the current carriers of rare blood groups, both potential patients or donors, is crucial but complex. Indeed, if the strict needs can be estimated in medical terms, the modalities of blood product collection must be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, at the interface of biological data and social norms. Here, we aim to understand how legal choices and a set of representations of otherness may influence the supply of rare blood for SSAA populations. After examining these issues, considering different norms and limits that govern French society, we compare this data with those of four Western countries facing the same difficulties (United States, United Kingdom, Italy and the Netherlands). This work began as part as the reflections of Social Lab, an institutional programme created by the French Blood Establishment (EFS). How can we effectively improve the qualitative blood coverage for SSAA populations? There is no unique solution, but there are many more or less effective answers. Comparison across countries reveals a strong influence of the socio-political histories and ethical choices before technical and medical considerations. We consider that an institutional policy is required to resolve recruitment issues of SSAA donors sustainably. Lastly, we introduce a working group called the EFS Social Lab, which aims to set up a monitoring mechanism for donors and societal trends to make blood donation effective.

When URLs on social networks become invisible

Extant research has addressed various concerns of representativeness in digital social research including: bias in researchers’ selection of online spaces, foci on single-platform approaches, and limited or skewed samples due to API (application programming interface) restrictions. This paper adds to that work through an illustration of tool bias towards specific social media logics (e.g., Twitter logics) in a URL-based network across/within social media sites (illustrative case study = greenwashing). These “biases” are implicit in design, mirror extant societal trends, and are reinforced through platform biases. As such, researchers using such tools (above all, non-computational scholars) may have little awareness of these subliminal influences. The paper consequently argues that (a) tool choices often fall prey to issues in representation, reinforcing existing biases on a subliminal level; and, that (b) non-platform-specific creative situational approaches (like cross-platform URL explorations) provide a much-needed understanding of wider platform dynamics that highlight such biases.

Representation of professions in entertainment media: Insights into frequency and sentiment trends through computational text analysis.

Societal ideas and trends dictate media narratives and cinematic depictions which in turn influence people's beliefs and perceptions of the real world. Media portrayal of individuals and social institutions related to culture, education, government, religion, and family affect their function and evolution over time as people perceive and incorporate the representations from portrayals into their everyday lives. It is important to study media depictions of social structures so that they do not propagate or reinforce negative stereotypes, or discriminate against a particular section of the society. In this work, we examine media representation of different professions and provide computational insights into their incidence, and sentiment expressed, in entertainment media content. We create a searchable taxonomy of professional groups, synsets, and titles to facilitate their retrieval from short-context speaker-agnostic text passages like movie and television (TV) show subtitles. We leverage this taxonomy and relevant natural language processing models to create a corpus of professional mentions in media content, spanning more than 136,000 IMDb titles over seven decades (1950-2017). We analyze the frequency and sentiment trends of different occupations, study the effect of media attributes such as genre, country of production, and title type on these trends, and investigate whether the incidence of professions in media subtitles correlate with their real-world employment statistics. We observe increased media mentions over time of STEM, arts, sports, and entertainment occupations in the analyzed subtitles, and a decreased frequency of manual labor jobs and military occupations. The sentiment expressed toward lawyers, police, and doctors showed increasing negative trends over time, whereas the mentions about astronauts, musicians, singers, and engineers appear more favorably. We found that genre is a good predictor of the type of professions mentioned in movies and TV shows. Professions that employ more people showed increased media frequency.

Relationship of Work-Related Stress and Offline Social Leisure on Political Participation of Voters in the United States

In the United States (US), citizens’ political participation is 15%. Contemporary psychological models explaining political participation are based on education and socioeconomic status, which are unable to explain the overall low political participation figures. The study suggests a holistic approach, with two societal tendencies: increasing work-related stress and diminishing offline social leisure, together with a mediating effect of participatory efficacy to assess associations with the political participation of US voters. The quantitative correlational study uses structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis on the General Social Survey representative sample of US voters (N = 295, Mage = 44.49, SD = 13.43), controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Work-related stress was not significantly associated with political participation (β = 0.08, p = 0.09). Offline social leisure was positively associated with political participation (β = 0.28, p < 0.001). The mediating effect of participatory efficacy on the relationship between offline social leisure and political participation was positive and significant (β = 0.05, p < 0.001). Additional analyses, regression and SEM on the European Social Survey sample (N = 27,604) boosted internal and external validity. Results indicate that offline social leisure is more predictive than education and socioeconomic status, showing that examining societal trends leads to a better understanding of political participation.

Managing Moral Decadence among Youths in the Contemporary Nigerian Society: Women as Mentors

Socio-cultural values and beliefs are crucial for the maintenance of law and order in a society. They are passed from the older generation to the younger ones. Therefore, there is no gainsaying that much is expected from the younger generation. However, with the current societal trends, showing high levels of moral decadence with youths at the vanguard of vices like kidnapping, cultism, internet fraud, drug abuse, rape, robbery, and money laundering, among others, it then becomes inevitable to check these societal ills. This paper, thus, seeks to review the state of moral decadence in our present-day society with the aim of proffering workable solutions, particularly by looking at the roles of women as mentors to the youths in a bid to stem the tide of moral decadence in the society.

Proposing Strategies for Efficiency Improvement by Using a Residential Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Co-Generation System in a Small-Scale Apartment Building

The high levels of energy consumption commonly seen today have severe consequences. For example, energy consumption in buildings traditionally takes the form of electricity generated from fossil fuels, which causes serious air pollution. Hence, the efficient application of clean energy systems in buildings is crucial. An increasing number of small-scale apartment buildings, such as single-room apartments and dormitories, have emerged as modern culture, and societal trends have led to a greater number of people living on their own. In this study, two strategies were proposed to improve the efficiency of solid oxide fuel cell co-generation systems (SOFC–CGSs) in small-scale apartments. A small-scale apartment building in Busan, Korea, was selected as the research object to verify the effect of the proposed strategies. One strategy was sharing a single SOFC–CGS among multiple households, and the other was integrating an SOFC–CGS with a photovoltaic (PV) system. The efficiency of the SOFC–CGS is expected to improve under these two operational strategies. In addition, the two proposed operational strategies were combined to improve the efficiency of the SOFC–CGS. To verify the proposed strategies, various simulations were conducted in this study. The simulation results indicate that each of the proposed strategies can improve the efficiency of the SOFC–CGS and save energy to varying degrees.

Marine biorefinery: an environmentally sustainable solution to turn marine biomass and processing wastes into value-added products and profits

Marine biorefinery: an environmentally sustainable solution to turn marine biomass and processing wastes into value-added products and profits

Why Australian common bird names should respond to societal change

ABSTRACT The common names of birds have always been changed to reflect societal trends in language usage. We suggest that guidelines should be developed for assessing the current acceptability of names associated with people from Australia’s past, particularly from colonial times.

From nutrition to glamour: The Australian Women’s Weekly’s cookery editors, 1933–1970

This article explores the influence of The Australian Women’s Weekly’s ‘cookery experts’, or food editors, from the 1930s to 1970. Until the end of the Second World War, the magazine’s cookery editors were highly trained experts in the field of domestic science and they shared their extensive knowledge of nutrition, economy and cookery skills with their readers. After the war, the magazine’s focus shifted. The Weekly’s food editors became anonymous, and they started advising their readers how to cook increasingly glamorous, cosmopolitan, ‘modern’ cuisine. Despite acknowledgement that the Weekly influenced Australian domestic cuisine, the experiences and contributions of the Weekly’s food editors have received little scholarly attention. This article intends to recover the history of the Weekly’s cookery editors, exploring the way that their professional backgrounds, as well as societal trends towards modernity and consumerism, influenced the Australian palate.

Reflexivity through practice-informed student journals: how “sustainable wellbeing” relates to teleoaffectivities

The COVID-19 pandemic that first swept across the world in 2020 led to disruptions in habits and routines—central themes in social practice approaches to consumption. Teaching was also disrupted: the move to online classes forced the development of new modalities of teaching and learning. As a result, a group of social science instructors in a “sustainable consumption” network came together to engage students in a reflexivity exercise through weekly journal entries at four universities located in Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland. The students were invited to document how their everyday practices were changing, and how these reported changes related to “sustainable wellbeing.” Further, they were encouraged to reflect on how notions of the collective were reimagined in light of the uncertain sanitary situation. Our analyses show how individual wellbeing is tied to time and social interactions, which are both structured by spatial arrangements. We also discuss how students situate changes in relation to broader, societal trends, hinting at how “sustainable wellbeing” contrasts with other teleoaffective formations such as economic health. We conclude with a discussion around the implications of the journaling method in relation to other participatory processes toward the normative aim of a good life for all.

The Promise of Sociology of Television: Investigating the Potential of Phenomenological Approaches

Mills (1959) saw the true potential of sociology in exploring the link between micro‐level human experience and macro‐level societal trends and structures. And yet, sociological inquiry has largely overlooked micro‐level approaches to a common quotidian American experience: watching television. Overemphasis on “top‐down” approaches to studying television leads to three main misconceptions about television‐watching and any micro‐level approach to studying it: that the practice of watching television is too individualistic, too mundane, and too difficult to study. In fact, television‐watching is social in myriad ways and, although mundane in its quotidian nature, is not devoid of complex power dynamics for sociological investigation. Research by scholars in other fields indicates that studying television at the micro‐level is sometimes challenging, but possible. A truly effective and comprehensive sociology of television cannot exist until sociologists use phenomenological approaches to investigate people’s experience of structure in their lives, engaging micro‐ alongside macro‐level perspectives. The promise of sociology of television, then, can only be realized by tapping the potential of phenomenological approaches to create a more complete understanding of television—one that must reconcile the power of institutions with agency, context, and experience in daily life.

Age and Gender Representation on German TV

Television offers an enticing glimpse into the world, but its perspective is often skewed. When societal groups are systematically excluded from appearing on the screen, they lose the chance to represent their characteristics and interests. Recipients may then form distorted perceptions and attitudes towards those groups. Empirical research on the prevalence of such biases - especially across stations, time, and genre - has been limited by the effort of manual content analyses. We develop and validate a deep-learning based method for measuring age and gender of faces in video material. An analysis of approximately 16 million faces from six years of German mainstream TV across six stations is fused with existing program metadata indicating timing and genre of broadcasts, including advertisements. Multilevel regression models show a consistent and temporally stable discrimination against women and elderly people, along with a double discrimination of elderly women. A significant amount of variation across genres and systematic differences between public and private broadcasters furthermore indicate previously undocumented heterogeneity in the representation of societal groups on TV. We discuss potential implications of a genre-specific differentiation against the backdrop of societal trends.

Value of corporate social responsibility for multiple stakeholders and social impact – Relationship marketing perspective

Despite extensive corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature most of research has examined corporate performance as its only outcome. We aim to fill this gap by assessing companies' perceptions of their CSR activities’ benefits for society and specific stakeholders. We discuss societal trends such as diversity and inclusion embedded in employee-focused CSR conceptualization as a prerequisite for the perception of CSR’s societal impact. We bring together CSR and relationship marketing theories to test a conceptual model on a sample of 411 business-to-business (B2B) companies. The results confirm a positive relationship between employee-oriented CSR and the perceived usefulness of CSR actions for society, customers and employees (but not suppliers). In order to maximize relationship quality, CSR activities should be targeted at specific stakeholders (customers and employees) and not at society at large. Finally, differences are observed between SMEs and large B2B firms with opposite perceptions of antecedents and outcomes of relationship quality.

The Engagement Imperative: Experiences of Communication Practitioners’ Brand Work in the Music Industry

Due to societal trends, such as digitalisation, platformisation, and active and co-creative audiences, new organisational practices have surfaced. This study examines how communication practitioners experience their changing work in a new communication environment in which participatory cultural norms are becoming standard in strategic communication. I argue that the requirements to produce audience engagement affect the communication work and the communication workers. This study uses the popular music industry as a case, and is based on interviews with communication practitioners as well as on the qualitative text analysis of reports and newsletters from the music marketing firm Music Ally to the music industry. The study shows that communication practitioners within the industry experience a duty to create audience engagement—an engagement imperative. Although the practitioners are highly skilled in digital communication and social media, they often see the development of digital promotional culture as a challenge and express a lack of a deeper understanding of engagement. This study highlights implications for their professional roles, competences, and identities as well as ethical implications regarding the exploitation of audiences in communication work.

A pedagogical model for effective online teacher professional development—findings from the Teacher Academy initiative of the European Commission

AbstractDuring their careers, teachers experience change in education policy, societal trends, and cultural shifts in pedagogical thought, requiring continual adaptation and innovation of their practices. Coupled with this is an assumed intrinsic desire to progress, whether as part of their own subject expertise, or with a view to taking on a role as leader in school management or a specialist area. Effective support and opportunities for teachers to develop and apply their competences is crucial for maintaining both motivation and high standards in the profession. However, many teachers across Europe claim to struggle to have access to effective forms of continued professional development coupled with the numerous demands already made on their work. On‐site courses with opportunities for peer learning remain popular but demand time and are not financially cost‐effective in reaching a large number of teachers, nor are they viable during pandemic restrictions. By exploring the pedagogical model of the online courses of the European Commission's Teacher Academy in the context of these challenges, this article discusses how an effective, collaborative approach to online continued professional development can be developed as a way of addressing both teacher and education system needs.

Yelling from the sidelines? How German parties employ populist and crisis-related messages on Facebook

ABSTRACT The possibilities of unfiltered communication in social media provide the perfect opportunity structure for spreading populist ideas. Generally, populist communication features an antagonistic worldview that blames elites for betraying the people and promises to reverse a ‘downward societal trend’ by bringing the people's ‘real’ interests back into politics. Although populist success is often attributed to crisis-induced dissatisfaction, research remains unclear on whether and how political actors foster such negative societal perceptions. Building on the German case, our paper accomplishes two things: It explores the use of populist social media communication and relates it to the exploitation of crisis-related messages among political parties. Conducting a manual content analysis of 3,500 Facebook posts by German parties and leading politicians, we find that the outsider parties AfD and the Left use and combine populist and crisis-related messages by far the most. Insider parties also spread crisis-related content to some extent. However, like the government parties, they are very reluctant to communicate in a populist way. By explaining the communicative output with their relative position in the party system, we deepen the understanding of parties’ social media behaviour. Overall, this study offers more in-depth insights into how politicians influence perceptions of the societal state.

The Future of IVF: The New Normal in Human Reproduction

Increased demand for in vitro fertilization (IVF) due to socio-demographic trends, and supply facilitated by new technologies, converged to transform the way a substantial proportion of humans reproduce. The purpose of this article is to describe the societal and demographic trends driving increased worldwide demand for IVF, as well as to provide an overview of emerging technologies that promise to greatly expand IVF utilization and lower its cost.