Wider Social Groups Research Articles

The Roles the Women Had within the Family, in the Traditional Romanian Society. Considerations of the Feminine Hypostases in the Rites of Passage

"From the great diversity of female roles, in the present work we have proposed to review some important aspects that define the role of women in the Romanian traditional family, with special attention to the important biological thresholds that man crosses throughout his existence his (birth, marriage, death). It is known that in the essential moments of life, man undergoes a transition, a translation between two special existential modes, between two states or between two human conditions. These changes in the state of the man, within the family or the wider social group, presuppose an imbalance in the system of social relations. In this context, the customs, rites and rituals of the rites of passage have the role of restoring the affected balance and protecting the individual against the malevolent forces that are triggered during these periods. In practicing the ritual and ceremonial acts occasioned by these moments in human life, the woman has the essential role, and it is her responsibility to carry them out."

Are vehicle on-demand and shared services a favorable solution for the first and last-mile mobility: Evidence from China

Vehicle on-demand and shared services (VDSS), such as Uber, Lyft, Didi and Car2go, have experienced rapid growth over the last decade. While these emerging mobility services have advantages, such as serving as an alternative mode for public transit, it remains unclear to what extent the services are adopted by different user groups, particularly in the context of first and last-mile mobility and how demand varies in different periods. To fill this research gap, we conducted a comprehensive travel survey of 1,420 railway passengers in China, to examine how VDSS were utilized for the first and last-mile connection with train stations. Using binary and multinomial logit modeling analysis, the study shows that the attitude toward VDSS was influenced by various factors and the outcomes varied substantially before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the research findings, we recommend that transportation planning and operation agencies should add ride-sourcing waiting and car-sharing parking sites at railway stations to further improve their advantages of flexibility and convenience. Meanwhile, attention should be paid to maintaining a healthy, safe and relaxed riding environment to facilitate VDSS usage. The equity issue of VDSS should also be addressed through strategies, such as providing special discounts or subsidies to certain lower-income user groups so that wider social groups may also enjoy such services. In terms of mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, further attention should be paid to improving a healthy and clean riding environment in VDSS to reduce the risk to public health.

The regressive planning practice of private sector planners under the pressure of political and market forces in Turkey

ABSTRACT Private-sector planners in Turkey have been operating in a planning system that has been restructured within the framework of neoliberal urban policies for the last forty years. Especially after 2000, while the model of growth over construction was adopted as a basic economic policy, the planning practices that implemented these policies were seen as a means of capital accumulation by wider social groups. In this economic political environment, private-sector planners have entered into new relationships with politics, markets, and bureaucracy, and have settled in the centre of criticism with professional practices that fall behind the basic principles of the profession, such as land speculation and serving certain pressure groups instead of the public interest. This article focuses on the conditions in which private-sector planners realize their planning practices and the problems they encounter in their plan-making processes. According to private-sector planners, the most important problem is the increase in the determination of rent-oriented interest relations between public institutions and local market actors instead of public benefit in the planning process. Private-sector planners believe that at every stage of the planning process, politicians and market actors exert pressure on planners, and that these forces have caused Turkey's planning practices to decline.

A critical qualitative inquiry of the social practices of older adult gamblers

Abstract Background Older adults' participation in gambling is increasing internationally. Older adults have been identified as a group at greater risk of gambling harm. This may be due to their increased vulnerability due to life circumstances, such as retiring from paid work and social isolation. Current literature has focused on individual characteristics that may influence older adults gambling attitudes, behaviours, and experiences of harm, however, there has been little qualitative research that has explored other factors such as the influence of social practices surrounding gambling. This study explored how social practices influenced older adults' participation in gambling, and how these social practices may contribute to gambling risk. Methods A critical qualitative inquiry was conducted and involved semi-structured phone interviews with 40 Australian adults aged 55 years and over. A Constructivist Grounded Theory approach was taken, and Social Practice Theory guided the thematic analysis of the data. Results Two major themes were generated from the data. The first theme demonstrated that gambling was often embedded within older adults' social practices. For example, older adults would attend gambling venues with their social networks and engage in gambling as a way of building their social connection. Sometimes gambling occurred to try to meet the expectations of the wider social group, potentially increasing the risk of harm. Second, it was evident that gambling had become part a routine activity for older adults' everyday life. Conclusions Older adults social practices related to gambling were linked with the accessibility and availability of gambling products in community environments. Interventions aimed at preventing and reducing gambling harm in older adults need to shift away from the individual and instead focus on disrupting social practices, including the routines associated with gambling. Key messages Gambling was used by older adults to consolidate social connections and strengthen their sense of belonging within social groups and often involved routines around gambling. To prevent further harm from gambling to older adults, strategies should focus on the social context of older adults gambling rather than the individual characteristics of gamblers.

Seasonal variation in airborne infection risk in schools due to changes in ventilation inferred from monitored carbon dioxide.

The year 2020 has seen the world gripped by the effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic. It is not the first time, nor will it be last, that our increasingly globalized world has been significantly affected by the emergence of a new disease. In much of the Northern Hemisphere, the academic year begins in September, and for many countries, September 2020 marked the return to full schooling after some period of enforced closure due to COVID‐19. In this paper, we focus on the airborne spread of disease and investigate the likelihood of transmission in school environments. It is crucial to understand the risk airborne infection from COVID‐19 might pose to pupils, teachers, and their wider social groups. We use monitored CO2 data from 45 classrooms in 11 different schools from within the UK to estimate the likelihood of infection occurring within classrooms regularly attended by the same staff and pupils. We determine estimates of the number of secondary infections arising via the airborne route over pre/asymptomatic periods on a rolling basis. Results show that, assuming relatively quiet desk‐based work, the number of secondary infections is likely to remain reassuringly below unity; however, it can vary widely between classrooms of the same school even when the same ventilation system is present. Crucially, the data highlight significant variation with the seasons with January being nearly twice as risky as July. We show that such seasonal variations in risk due to changes in ventilation rates are robust and our results hold for wide variations in disease parameterizations, suggesting our results may be applied to a number of different airborne diseases.

Opening up space for compassion in nurses’ handover meetings

In this paper, we complement research into compassion in medical contexts with an analysis of the representation of patients in nursing handovers and the ways in which such practitioner–practitioner interaction can be said to demonstrate and evoke feelings of compassion towards patients. We label such representation as ‘Compassion Talk’ and suggest that potentially it can complement the information given as part of the standard format for handovers. The analysis is based on instances of non-scripted talk (NST) from three nursing handover meetings from a highly performing Medical Assessment Unit in the UK. In a data-led qualitative analysis, we find that within NST patients are represented in terms that not only make nurses’ actions to alleviate their suffering seem possible and necessary, but that also highlight their shared humanity and position the patients as if they are members of the nurses’ wider social group. We further demonstrate how NST can be successfully managed by experienced nursing staff and suggest, therefore, that handovers can function not only to pass on information accurately and concisely, but also as a space for nurses to regroup as a community of practice and to relate to their patients in human terms, as a defining principle of the profession.

Conceptual Foundation of Social Policy: Dignity, Justice, Equality

Modern sociology places dignity and justice at the center of social debate. In estatebased societies only the aristocrats possessed the right to dignity and honor. The article analyzes these concepts as elements of the general structure of meaning underlying the institutions of modern societies. However, the progress of society conducive to their entry into the state of modernity the right to dignity kept extending towards an ever greater number of citizens. Dignity became an element of the policy of equality that tended to override the line of distinction charted by estates or other social subjects. In the early years of equalization policy, the struggle of dignity and equality assumed the form of recognition of the so-called natural rights of man, that constituted the essence of human condition. The idea of natural rights led to a debate and later to policy measures that resulted in the modern concept of citizenship. The latter asserted the right of every human being to dignity, equality before law and freedom to engage in productive, entrepreneurial activity without interference from other actors of political or economic life. The idea of equality, embedded in citizenship, came to be expressed in the policy of inclusion that overcame social prejudice and consequently in policies that extended political recognition to ever wider social groups. In the 20th century the egalitarian policy led to a wider scope of social rights that were regarded as a necessary condition of social justice and human independence. At present the principles of dignity and justice are implemented in social policy as acquired “capabilities” — a sum of life forces and means that allow citizens to uphold their citizenship regardless of the conditions in which they find themselves. Inclusion turns into the main vector of social policy, setting out to endow citizens with equal rights and resources that are necessary for their implementation.

Understanding the psychological mechanisms that constrain the transfer of dialogue effects

An intrinsic component of evaluating the success of a dialogue programme is the concept of transfer. This refers to the means by which the effects of dialogue extend beyond the immediate participants to their wider social groups and go on to influence broader societal and policy change. In this paper I am interested in exploring, from a psychological perspective, why positive dialogue effects at an individual level (i.e., the micro level) sometimes fail to motivate future positive behaviour in the local social milieu (i.e., the meso level). This failure of dialogue effects to permeate beyond the immediate group can mean that transfer is limited, thus raising questions about the effectiveness of dialogue interventions. Drawing on psychological research that looks at mechanisms of indirect contact (whereby positive effects of contact with an out-group member spread beyond the immediate setting) I propose that a factor which might hinder the process of transfer is a cognitive bias called vicarious moral licensing. I propose that by understanding the psychological mechanisms that stymie the transfer of individual attitudinal change in to group behavioural outcomes, one can better address the crucial question of how to maximise the degree of transfer following from dialogue

Φαρμακογονιδιωματική: Ηθικά διλήμματα

In the present article I will depict some of the emerging controversies that are expected to be of serious concern in the developing field of pharmacogenomics. Pharmacogenomics is the branch of genetics concerned with determining the likely response of an individual to therapeutic medications. The first upcoming issue is the voluntary agreement of the patients, concerning the research of their genome, that is also reflected in their relatives, as well as in their wider social group (s). Secondly, the great financial costs of pharmacogeonomic therapies is most likely to lead to new social inequalities or upsurge the existing ones in commodity of health. Furthermore, this will possibly lead to more group minorities, based on the rarity of some alleles among individuals and their following response to the applied medication. As for cognitive functions, pharmacogenomics seems to be a great challenge for the enhancement of both cognitive dysregulation in patients and intellectual ability in healthy individuals. Consequently, this will lead to an unbridgeable gap between the users and nonusers of newer medications regarding their intellectual abilities, that are unachievable by normal training of physical abilities. Last but not least, l will refer to whether or not genetic data regard strictly confidential personal data, not allowed to be published, despite of possible social benefit and to what extent their carrier has the right of ignoring it.

Sustainable Fisheries Management and the Welfare of Bycaught and Entangled Cetaceans.

The incidental capture of cetaceans and other protected marine wildlife in fishing gear has significant welfare implications. Many thousands of cetaceans are bycaught in fishing gear in European waters and hundreds of thousands die globally. We can expect many more to survive, but suffer from such interactions. As marine policy focuses on “population level” impact assessments and “sustainability” of fishing to preserve fish populations, the impacts to the bycaught individual, and their wider social group, are often largely underestimated, despite the large numbers affected. The wide range of recorded injuries, including abrasions, cuts, bruising, and broken bones, along with the potential for panic associated with forced submersion, indicate that the welfare of bycaught cetaceans is, individually and collectively, very poor. Commercial fishing is the last human activity targeting wildlife (fish) on a grand scale where slaughter includes incidental killing of other large sapient wildlife on such a regular basis. Here, we review the compelling evidence of the short and long term welfare impacts of bycatch, and the progress made toward implementation of measures to understand and solve this significant welfare issue. We argue that policy decisions surrounding fishing do not adequately consider cetacean bycatch, including welfare impacts. Ultimately, there are welfare issues in all bycatch situations and suffering cannot plausibly be reduced without preventing bycatch. The well-documented welfare implications provide a strong argument for zero tolerance of cetacean bycatch and provide a compelling case for immediate action in fisheries where bycatch is taking place. The only way to reduce the suffering of bycaught cetaceans is to decrease, or ideally eliminate, the number of animals caught in fishing gear. Uncertainties around the scale of bycatch should not delay management, even where individual bycatch estimates are considered “sustainable.” Lack of monitoring of sub-lethal impacts on populations may result in flawed impact assessments. We urge that animal welfare considerations should become an integral part of management decision-making in relation to bycatch globally. Enhanced, robust and transparent management systems are urgently required for the range of fisheries within which cetacean bycatch occurs, with the aim to better document and most importantly, work toward eliminating cetacean bycatch altogether.

Elementary school teachers in the national movement. Polish-Ukrainian educational context in Galicia in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century

The profession of a national teacher is considered in the context of the demands of the national movement against the background of aggravation of Polish-Ukrainian controversies in Galicia in the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries. Paragraph 19 of the Basic Law on Citizens' Responsibilities and Rights provided for equal opportunities for the development of their own education and language for representatives of all nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy. Due to the fact that the policy of decentralization of Franz Joseph I was implemented, first of all, under pressure from the Polish and Hungarian elites, the Poles in Galicia considered their own right to fill the intellectual and cultural space freed from Germanization. However, they were opposed by a numerical Russian element, calling for equality proclaimed at the state level. In this context, the issue of public schooling has become extremely acute, because primary school was the instrument that allowed spreading national consciousness among the general public. Particularly contradictions emerged after 1869, when the general school obligation was introduced. Changes in the perception of the role of the teacher are also associated with these transformations. As the lowest level of the intelligentsia, according to national discourse, the national teachers obliged the figures of the national movement to act as mediators between the wider social groups and the intellectual elite. These responsibilities were often at odds with the teacher's educational function and forced him to seek a compromise between national and professional requirements. The choice of a teacher in favor of national responsibilities has often caused conflicts with the school administration and the provincial authorities. The practice of community-based translation also made it difficult for teachers to engage with local communities. The local school board used the transfer of especially active teachers in the national movement to ethnically other communities as a form of punishment for political activity within the school. This meant that the Ruthenian teachers often found themselves in an almost completely Polish environment, and the Poles - in Russian. Such translations adversely affected the quality of work, both because of linguistic problems and moral and psychological pressure. On the other hand, the moment of the teacher's personal values ​​was important. A large number of teachers viewed their profession through the lens of humanism, that is, service without exception to everyone, regardless of nationality. These teachers abandoned the demands of the national movement, provoking condemnation and accusations in the absence of national consciousness. Keywords Galicia, teacher, national movement, intellectuals.

Can Caring Create Prejudice? An Investigation of Positive and Negative Intergenerational Contact in Care Settings and the Generalisation of Blatant and Subtle Age Prejudice to Other Older People

Caring is a positive social act, but can it result in negative attitudes towards those cared for, and towards others from their wider social group? Based on intergroup contact theory, we tested whether care workers' (CWs) positive and negative contact with old‐age care home residents (CHRs) predicts prejudiced attitudes towards that group, and whether this generalises to other older people. Fifty‐six CWs were surveyed about their positive and negative contact with CHRs and their blatant and subtle attitudes (humanness attributions) towards CHRs and older adults. We tested indirect paths from contact with CHRs to attitudes towards older adults via attitudes towards CHRs. Results showed that neither positive nor negative contact generalised blatant ageism. However, the effect of negative, but not positive, contact on the denial of humanness to CHRs generalised to subtle ageism towards older adults. This evidence has practical implications for management of CWs' work experiences and theoretical implications, suggesting that negative contact with a subgroup generalises the attribution of humanness to superordinate groups. Because it is difficult to identify and challenge subtle prejudices such as dehumanisation, it may be especially important to reduce negative contact. © 2016 The Authors. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Why are Food Practices not (More) Environmentally Friendly in France? The role of collective standards and symbolic boundaries in food practices

AbstractDespite concern about environmental issues, the majority of French households do not adopt eco‐friendly practices. We propose a practice theory approach, enriched by key concepts from Bourdieu (distinction) and Lamont (symbolic boundaries), to understand the links between individual practices and collective frameworks. Drawing on an ethnographic study of 30 households in France, we explore food practices and the way people describe them. Our results are twofold: first, individuals see eco‐friendly practices as strongly related to specific groups and normative standards, from which they may want to distinguish themselves. Even when people display eco‐friendly practices, they associate them with other rationales. Second, because eco‐friendly practices are not widely valued, they do not provide the same rewards as the implementation of other standards that are more consensual. We draw some practical implications for public policies from these results. A desegmentation of eco‐friendly practices might prove useful, allowing them to be associated with wider social groups and to convey more collective positive meanings. Moreover, a large proportion of eco‐friendly practices are in continuity with what individuals are already doing. Their implementation could benefit if it were made coherent with other practices, rather than being portrayed in public discourse as requiring a radical change. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh.

Searching for a New Approach to Face Poverty on the Local Level, a Case Study in a Small Russian Town

This paper re-examines poverty in a small Russian town, drawing attention to the public attitude towards the poor and the readiness of local society to be involved in the process of helping these people. The Russian official measurement and general approach to the study of poverty are not adequate to targeting the involvement of wider social groups in poverty reduction. This process needs a new approach for investigating poverty in Russia and the implementation of new social security services. A new approach could be based on interaction between people in difficult situations, local society, authorities and other stakeholders. This paper examines the opportunity to employ the idea of a participatory methodology for providing social security in the Russian Federation.

A STRUCTURAL SOCIAL JUSTICE APPROACH TO FAMILY POLICY: A CRITIQUE OF THE DRAFT SOUTH AFRICAN FAMILY POLICY

Sexist language aside, the following quotation aptly captures the power of the family:“The institution of the family stands in a peculiarly central, crucial position. It faces inward to the individual, outward toward society preparing each member to take his place in the wider social group by helping him to internalize its values and traditions as part of himself … It has enormous creative potential, including that of life itself, and it is not surprising that, when it becomes disordered, it possesses an equal potential for terrible destruction.” (Skinner cited in De Bruyn, 1992:21)

Stereotypes That Help Define Who We Are

The research Fay Fransella undertook with stereotypes is reviewed in this article. It concentrates on her lesser-known articles dealing with relations between the self and stereotypes in certain “symptom groups” (stutterers, arsonists, alcoholics, and heroin addicts) as well as in wider social groups, such as students and scientists. In these articles, Fransella voiced important insights that have appeared in more recent writings of social constructionism, at the same time being strikingly similar to the position of thinkers in contemporary theoretical physics.

A MODEL FOR GENOMIC IMPRINTING IN THE SOCIAL BRAIN: ELDERS

Genomic imprinting refers to the process whereby genes are silenced when inherited via sperm or egg. The most widely accepted theory for the evolution of genomic imprinting-the kinship theory-argues that conflict between maternally inherited and paternally inherited genes over phenotypes with asymmetric effects on matrilineal and patrilineal kin results in self-imposed silencing of one of the copies. This theory was originally developed in the context of fitness interactions within nuclear families, to understand intragenomic conflict in the embryo and infant, but it has recently been extended to encompass interactions within wider social groups, to understand intragenomic conflict over the social behavior of juveniles and adults. Here, we complete our model of genomic imprinting in the social brain by considering age-specific levels of expression in a society were generations overlap, to determine how intragenomic conflict plays out in older age. We determine the role of sex bias in juvenile dispersal, reproductive success, and adult mortality in mediating the direction and intensity of conflict over the competing demands of parental and communal care as the individual ages. We discover that sex-specific asymmetries in these demographic parameters result in intragenomic conflict at early age but this conflict gradually decays with age. Although individuals are riven by internal conflict in their youth and middle age, they put their demons to rest in later life.

A construção da identidade de sujeitos deficientes no grupo terapêutico-fonoaudiológico

Neste estudo, consideramos que o sujeito se constitui à medida que suas ações vão sendo interpretadas pelo outro, através da internalização de papéis, definidos, inicialmente, pelas pessoas que são referência mais concreta da criança, como a família e, posteriormente, pelo grupo social maior do qual ela faz parte. Nosso objetivo foi refletir sobre a formação/construção da identidade de jovens deficientes mentais que participavam de atendimento fonoaudiológico, realizado em grupo, analisando o papel da linguagem no processo de construção da imagem que o sujeito faz de si mesmo. O estudo teve sua origem a partir dos resultados obtidos em pesquisas realizadas anteriormente, com grupos de irmãos de sujeitos considerados deficientes mentais. Esses resultados revelaram a imagem negativa que os irmãos têm em relação ao irmão deficiente. O material analisado faz parte de um banco de dados de dois anos de filmagens das interações de jovens deficientes no grupo terapêutico-fonoaudiológico de uma clínica-escola. Os dados foram transcritos e analisados segundo diretrizes da análise microgenética considerando as minúcias dos acontecimentos, os detalhes e o recorte de episódios interativos, sendo o exame orientado para o funcionamento dos sujeitos, as relações intersubjetivas e as condições sociais da situação. As análises realizadas procuraram relacionar a imagem que esses sujeitos têm de si com a imagem transmitida pelo grupo social do qual eles fazem parte. Os resultados mostraram a ressonância do discurso do grupo social nos dizeres dos sujeitos. Concluímos que para transformar a imagem que os sujeitos deficientes mentais têm de si mesmos, precisamos ações que incidam sobre aqueles que os rodeiam, ou seja, a família, os amigos, os colegas e o grupo social em geral.