World Wide Views Research Articles

Appraising Unmet Needs and Misinformation Spread About Polycystic Ovary Syndrome in 85,872 YouTube Comments Over 12 Years: Big Data Infodemiology Study.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrinopathy in women, resulting in substantial burden related to metabolic, reproductive, and psychological complications. While attempts have been made to understand the themes and sentiments of the public regarding PCOS at the local and regional levels, no study has explored worldwide views, mainly due to financial and logistical limitations. YouTube is one of the largest sources of health-related information, where many visitors share their views as questions or comments. These can be used as a surrogate to understand the public's perceptions. We analyzed the comments of all videos related to PCOS published on YouTube from May 2011 to April 2023 and identified trends over time in the comments, their context, associated themes, gender-based differences, and underlying sentiments. After extracting all the comments using the YouTube application programming interface, we contextually studied the keywords and analyzed gender differences using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. We applied a multidimensional approach to analyzing the content via association mining using Mozdeh. We performed network analysis to study associated themes using the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm and then manually screened the comments for content analysis. The sentiments associated with YouTube comments were analyzed using SentiStrength. A total of 85,872 comments from 940 PCOS videos on YouTube were extracted. We identified a specific gender for 13,106 comments. Of these, 1506 were matched to male users (11.5%), and 11,601 comments to female users (88.5%). Keywords including diagnosing PCOS, symptoms of PCOS, pills for PCOS (medication), and pregnancy were significantly associated with female users. Keywords such as herbal treatment, natural treatment, curing PCOS, and online searches were significantly associated with male users. The key themes associated with female users were symptoms of PCOS, positive personal experiences (themes such as helpful and love), negative personal experiences (fatigue and pain), motherhood (infertility and trying to conceive), self-diagnosis, and use of professional terminology detailing their journey. The key themes associated with male users were misinformation regarding the "cure" for PCOS, using natural and herbal remedies to cure PCOS, fake testimonies from spammers selling their courses and consultations, finding treatment for PCOS, and sharing perspectives of female family members. The overall average positive sentiment was 1.6651 (95% CI 1.6593-1.6709), and the average negative sentiment was 1.4742 (95% CI 1.4683-1.4802) with a net positive difference of 0.1909. There may be a disparity in views on PCOS between women and men, with the latter associated with non-evidence-based approaches and misinformation. The improving sentiment noticed with YouTube comments may reflect better health care services. Prioritizing and promoting evidence-based care and disseminating pragmatic online coverage is warranted to improve public sentiment and limit misinformation spread.

The Impact of Public Deliberation on Climate Change Opinions Among U.S. Citizens

Governance of climate change has become a major global environmental issue in the 21st century, and in the absence of wider citizen engagement poses risks of global proportions. Much of the current climate governance debate, unfortunately, is limited to scientists, politicians, and interest groups. With few exceptions, everyday citizens are spectators at best, their views, if not absent, are dismally represented in policy processes. To close the widening gap between citizens and policymakers, thereby increasing the sense of ownership of environmental policies by ordinary people, several methods of citizen engagement for global environmental governance have emerged. The effectiveness of these methods, however, relies upon the ability of citizens to deliberate meaningfully, especially in issues such as climate change. We conducted a study in conjunction with World Wide Views on Climate and Energy, a global citizen consultation that aims to solicit carefully considered public views on pressing issues, to determine whether American citizens are receptive to deliberation, and to ascertain what effect it had on their opinions, if any, could be observed. Along with the descriptive analysis, we performed a non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test of selected pre-and post-event opinions of the participants from the US. Our study revealed that providing US citizens with the opportunity to engage in deliberation resulted in increased awareness regarding climate change and greater trust in science, technology, and international agreements. The change in opinion was more pronounced among people whose political orientation titled to the right or who considered themselves as neutral. Citizen’s opinions, especially after the event, resulted in less polarized views towards the global consensus on climate change. This finding suggests that US citizens are receptive to scientific information if it is communicated in an appropriate manner – a characteristic necessary for the creation of deliberative democratic governance on socially contested issues.

Global citizen deliberation: Case of world-wide views on climate and energy

As the global environmental issues are increasingly coordinated through international negotiations, new methods are needed to engage citizens worldwide in the policy-making processes. In this paper, through quantitative analysis of the data from World Wide Views, we draw insight about the citizens' views on issues of climate and energy. We employed bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis to identify significance associated with public views on climate and energy. In bivariate analysis, we used non-parametric statistical tests. Logistic regression was also employed to identify association with specific variables. The results from nonparametric tests by country and country groups show statistically significant associations with citizen's views on curbing GHG emissions through renewable energy, carbon pricing, and devising policies to address climate change. The national contexts also contributed to directing citizens' views with respect to their attitudes and proposed action on climate and energy. More than any other variables, country and country group showed significant relation with public views, highlighting the complexity of global deliberative forums in issues related that transcend international boundaries. Despite common agreement toward a globally binding goal of zero emissions in the Paris agreement, we also found variation at the country level.

Concussion knowledge among family physicians in Croatia.

Aim:The objective of this study was to administer and analyze results of a survey targeting knowledge about concussion symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and expected recovery among family medicine specialists in the Split–Dalmatia County of Croatia.Methods:An electronic survey questionnaire was developed utilizing concepts from previously published studies on concussion knowledge, attitudes and beliefs completed by physicians. The survey was intended to briefly and broadly assess concussion knowledge of Croatian healthcare providers. The first section of the survey included five questions clarifying professional practice, years of experience and experience with concussions; the second section included 15 questions about typical concussion symptoms; the third section included 12 questions focused upon three primary components of concussion knowledge: concussion diagnosis, treatment and recovery.Results:Out of 242 surveys mailed, 81 questionnaires (33%) were completed while 161 respondents (67%) did not answer. Out of the 81 completed surveys, 76 (94%) were returned by family physicians specialist and five (6%) by resident physicians in training. 39 (48%) had treated less than ten patients with concussion during last year: 40 (49%) treated 11–20 patients with concussion; and two (3%) treated greater than 20 patients with concussion during last year. While most responses did accurately reflect knowledge of common symptoms (90–100% correct), there was significant lack of knowledge in three areas: only 19% of participants stated that diagnosis of concussion does not require loss of consciousness; three quarters of respondents believed that a diagnosis of concussion requires direct contact to the head and 83% of the respondents believed that persistent subjective complaints are always the result of a more severe initial injury.Discussion:This is the first investigation conducted in Croatia to examine knowledge of concussion diagnosis, as well as the management practices held by medical professionals. Overall, the findings suggest that the knowledge and management practices among family doctors in the region are not consistent with current worldwide views and recommendations. There was not an accurate knowledge of concussion diagnosis, treatment, recovery and prognosis among family physicians. Continued education of medical staff to better identify concussion and increased reliance on objective methods for managing concussion will improve patient management and outcome.

Reasoning Together about Climate Change: Coproducing Science and Public Reason in a Global Citizen Panel

Citizen panels convene a small segment of the population to engage in intensive, structured conversations about particular policy issues with the view to inform policy makers. These initiatives provide participants with the opportunity to reason together by examining justifications for policy choices before coming to informed collective judgements about which avenues to take. While most citizen panels take place within individual nation-states, recent experiments have been scaled up in response to global policy issues. The participatory methodology World Wide Views (WWViews) provides an illustrative example. Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship demonstrates that public reason is situated rather than universal, suggesting that shared ideas about what knowledge is considered legitimate and what normative commitments are relevant are deeply rooted in particular national and institutional contexts. In the context of global deliberative settings, what configurations of public reason take hold when shared assumptions about how to link knowledge, value and action cannot be assumed in advance? The aim of this article is to explore the coproduction of science and public reason in the WWViews initiative. The design of the WWViews participatory methodology and the forms of public reasoning that take shape therein are informed and conditioned by the globalising impulses of contemporary climate governance where science is a powerful actor. While this design provides the conditions for a global political community to take shape, it serves to erase important epistemic distinctions among and within nation-states. Alternatively, a pluralistic approach to public deliberation would enable global actors to acknowledge cultural diversity before coming to agreement over which forms of knowledge and action are desirable and permissible.

Representing Global Public Concern: A Critical Analysis of the Danish Participatory Experiment on Climate Change

Drawing on the recognition that questions of discourse and power are vital components in analysing the public participation in environmental governance, this paper examines the ways in which dominant scientific discourses about the Earth's climate inform the types of public talk facilitated in and by mini-publics, particularly when they are ‘scaled up’ to address environmental issues such as climate change. World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) serves as a case study. Conceived and organised by the Danish Board of Technology, WWViews was a historically unprecedented public forum in which participants, invited from a range of nations, were given the opportunity to deliberate on key themes addressed in the negotiations taking place during the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen (COP 15). The overarching purpose of this analysis is to invite reflection on the practices and assumptions that serve to make up publics in relation to issues that have been framed, predominantly, as scientific, universal and global.

Public Engagement with Climate Change as Scientific Citizenship: A Case Study of World Wide Views on Global Warming

World Wide Views (WWViews) is an innovative participatory methodology that scales up formal public engagement in response to global environmental issues that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. In September 2009, WWViews on Global Warming enrolled 4,400 lay participants from across 38 countries to discuss global climate policy. The most remarkable outcome was how consistently people from across different political regions and social groups called for a stringent global climate policy. Drawing on scientific citizenship as an analytic lens, this result is positioned, not as a straightforward input into global policy but as an output from a highly formalized process. What forms of citizenship are embodied, projected, and negotiated in WWViews? What are the implications of these tacit forms of citizenship for the types of epistemic agency that emerge as a result? WWViews participants were situated as consumers of scientific knowledge tasked with responding to a limited slate of policy options that they had no role in creating, vetting, or altering. WWViews also projected an image of the global citizen shorn of any meaningful geographical, cultural, or political particularity. Effectively tethering the epistemic capacities of its participants to dominant scientific meanings, WWViews offered limited opportunity for alternative issue-framings or perspectives to emerge. Organizers and researchers of formal public engagement should be attentive to the potential for these initiatives, once scaled up to the global, to impose scientistic issue-framings and correspondingly limited models of epistemic agency.

Localized Responses to Unsustainable Growth

As another IPCC report about the causes and effects of climate change is under consideration by decision-makers everywhere, many question the scale of action best able to bolster resilience in the face of environmental crises and the always contested tragedy of the commons. How can individuals and societies live well under the constraints of a anite environment? This question points to the entanglement between local and global dynamics, endogenous and exogenous factors, and the intensiacation of multi-scale experiments in how to interpret and implement the slogan “think globally, act locally.” Three recent books attempt to provide responses in this debate. In The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift, editors Raymond De Young and Thomas Princen gather a collection of interdisciplinary historic and contemporary texts to advocate for the downscaling of human activities and the necessity of preparing for the consequences of downscaling through “positive localization.” Also focused on the local, Robert Scruton, in How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism, puts forward a conservative response to environmental problems, rooted in territorial attachment and homescape. Finally, in Citizen Participation in Global Environmental Governance, Mikko Rask, Richard Worthington, and Minna Lammi contribute detailed accounts of a speciac case of place-based citizen mobilization with regard to inouencing environmental global policy-making, the 2009 World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews). All three books ascertain the root of the environmental crisis, propose solutions, and address challenges that may arise.

Over viewing Electoral System in India

At present democracy is not only a political system but social and economic arrangement too. Election is a capable means through which modern states create a sense of participation and share into public affair amongst citizens. Flawless election process is a foundation of the real representative government. Accordingly the present paper attempts to look into worldwide views about Electoral system to know what idea was conceived by the world for survival of it and why they liked It for making in public opinion in different manners. The example of electoral process from the World is need for better option against west minster systems. About criminalization of politics is also a serious point of view concerned by me. And voting procedures of the world is also surveyed to Initiate regularize or compulsion to voting and rid the neutrality of voters lest system become healthy and more healthy.

Building the capacity for public engagement with science in the United States

This paper reviews efforts of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) to begin to build capacity for public engagement with science in the United States. First, the paper sets a context in the US of the current challenges to democracy and for science. It then reviews the literature on the accomplishments of the National Citizens' Technology Forum (NCTF) on nanotechnology and human enhancement, held in 2008, as well as some caveats that emerged from that enterprise. It concludes with a brief discussion of two kinds of activities - participation in the World Wide Views process organized by the Danish Board of Technology, and methodological innovations that include more concrete and experiential modes of engagement - that have spun off from the NCTF.

Engendering Climate Change: The Swedish Experience of a Global Citizens Consultation

Research on gender dimensions of climate change response is needed if we are to succeed in providing decision-makers with a relevant scientific basis for climate change policy. Although action at the municipal level has become a high priority for Swedish climate change response, knowledge of how gender perspectives affect that response is scarce. This paper contributes knowledge of how to integrate a gender perspective in planning for climate change response, through the modification and application of a system of gender categorization that was originally developed for evaluating the World Bank's performance of environmental impact assessments. That system is used, in this paper, to analyse the Swedish component of a global citizen consultation, World Wide Views on Global Warming. The research is based on analysis of our participation in the World Wide Views as well as interviews and documentation. A conclusion from our analysis is that the Swedish part of the citizen consultation was driven by an approach that, according to the system of gender categorization, strongly demonstrated both feminine and masculine attributes. The results show that an approach that incorporates not only masculine attributes, but also feminine ones, is likely to generate a more robust and concrete climate change response.

The Essential handbook of women's sexuality: v.1: Meanings, development, and worldwide views; v.2: Diversity, health, and violence

The Essential handbook of women's sexuality: v.1: Meanings, development, and worldwide views; v.2: Diversity, health, and violence

The Role of Information in Public Participation

A large body of scientific literature on public participation research evaluates specific methods, describes outcomes and impacts of a process or deals with participants’ and officials’ expectations. Yet, there is surprisingly little work on a key part of most participatory processes that deal with complex issues: the information passed to participants. Topics like Global Warming cannot be grasped easily. Even if global warming is happening very quickly on a geological time scale, for human beings it is not easily perceivable. Such a discrepancy between everyday experiences and scientific knowledge can influence one’s opinion tremendously. Therefore, providing sound information and respecting the power of information is essential for meaningful outcomes of participatory processes. In this paper we examine different communication and information pathways within participatory processes. As the main object of interest, we analyzed ‘World Wide Views on Global Warming’. In this distinct process of information and deliberation, citizens formulated recommendations for the decision makers of the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen and voted on different aspects of how to deal with global warming. Results from this process connected to insights from a literature review, contribute to a refined picture of the role information plays within participatory processes and social learning.

Policy pathways, policy networks, and citizen deliberation: Disseminating the results of World Wide Views on Global Warming in the USA

Leading a coalition spanning 38 countries, the Danish Board of Technology organized World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) on September 26, 2009. WWViews represented a pioneering effort to hold simultaneous citizen deliberations focusing on questions of climate change policy addressed at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in December 2009. Sponsors and organizers envisioned WWViews as a means to affect the COP15 negotiations, and the project included numerous strategies to influence policy-making. This paper examines the success of such strategies in the USA through the lens of 'policy pathways,' routes of influence to affect the behavior of policy-makers and policy-making bodies. Our analysis highlights the difficulty of connecting citizen deliberations to meaningful policy pathways, and the importance of recognizing and enlisting policy networks, which we define as the collection of relationships, nodes, or pre-existing organizational ties that can be mobilized in the service of agenda- or alternative-setting. Copyright The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

Electoral System of India: A Case for ‘Real Democracy’

Election is the ‘backbone’ of democracy. In the absence of elections, democracy will stagger and unable to maintain its state position. Fair and transparent election is a timely dose for maintaining the health of the democratic system. Democracy and elections symbolize modern and cultured nations in the present era. At present democracy is not only a political system but also a socioeconomic arrangement. Election is a capable and powerful instrument through which modern states create a sense of participation and sharing among the citizens. A flawless election process is the foundation of the real representative government. The author looks at the worldwide views about electoral systems to understand what ideas helped different democracies in the world to survive and why they sought for public opinions via different means and methods. Better alternative models of electoral processes are needed in place of electoral processes that typically follow the Westminster system. Criminalization of politics is also a serious detriment to holding fair and free elections, another point that the author will dwell upon in this article. Different voting procedures across the world as well as how they initiate and regularize the voting process and compel citizens to vote and get rid of voters’ neutrality in order to strengthen democratic governance are also discussed.

The tragedy of citizen deliberation – two cases of participatory technology assessment

Despite welcoming rhetoric and increased practice of citizen participation in S&T governance, there is little evidence of the political impact of such processes. In this paper I will analyse how the roadblocks to translating the results of citizen participation to effective policy making manifested in the context of two transnational participatory technology assessment projects, global-level World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) and EU-level Citizen Visions of on Science, Technology and Innovation (CIVISTI). Resulting from the analysis, three types of roadblocks are identified: (1) diffuse understanding of the usability of deliberation as a component of policy making (cognitive level); (2) inadequate infrastructures for facilitating the translation of public-interest oriented deliberations into effective public policy (structural level); (3) inadequate resources and skills in deliberative bodies for effective social outreach of participatory processes (operational level). The paper contributes to more effective pTA by proposing a new ‘guiding vision’ for citizen deliberations, anticipating more influential policy pathways and proposing new skills for pTA.

Prospects of Deliberative Global Governance

Global governance is often equated with international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank that were established after World War II to address problems transcending national borders. While these institutions incorporate norms of representative democracy that evolved in national societies, their legitimacy is often questioned on grounds of limited effectiveness and remoteness from the citizens they purportedly serve. The arguments of many democratic theorists that deliberation among ordinary citizens can legitimize policies that heed these views thus bear important implications for global governance. In this paper, the possibility and different ways that civil society enhancing public participation, transparency and accountability in global governance are addressed. The empirical focus will be on the world's first global deliberation—WWViews (world wide views on global warming) that was held in 38 countries with all inhabited continents in 2009. The social drivers that encourage innovation in global democratic governance are analysed, as the main successes and challenges of WWViews and sketch three scenarios of the future of deliberative global governance are based on the experiences and plans around global citizen participation. The authors argue that despite some challenges, such as ensuring high quality of deliberation in highly variant policy cultural contexts and building policy pathways conducive to political impact, the prospects of deliberation in helping solve global environmental and policy problems are high, and likely to see cumulative progress in the near future.

The Australian Experience of World Wide Views on Global Warming: The First Global Deliberation Process

World Wide Views on Global Warming was the first ever global-scale citizen deliberation process, held on 25-26 September 2009 and involving approximately 4,000 citizens in 38 countries. WWViews sought to provide citizens with a voice in the 2009 UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen (COP15) by engaging them in a deliberative process about global political positions on climate change. The process produced clear, comparable results across all participating countries that were given to COP15 negotiators. The Danish Government agencies, the Danish Board of Technology and the Danish Cultural Institute, initiated the global process. Organisers in each participating country ran events using the same standardised process. The University of Technology Sydney, the organisers of the Australian WWViews event, paid special attention to several elements of the process to maximise participation and impact within the local context.This paper outlines the standardised global process used for this deliberative event and describes and reflects upon the tailored approaches developed for Australia. It examines in detail the objectives, processes and outcomes of recruiting and supporting participants and recruiting, training and coordinating facilitators, communications and dissemination of results and specific features of the Australian event. It includes the organisers’ reflections on success factors, challenges and surprises, as well as feedback from facilitators and participants. This paper concludes with a number of critical questions arising from the Australian experience of World Wide Views on Global Warming that are pertinent for practitioners designing other deliberative forums and particularly anyone concerned about future prospects for global deliberative democracy.

Global Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change: Insights from World Wide Views on Global Warming in Australia

On 26 September 2009, approximately 4,000 citizens in 38 countries participated in World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews). WWViews was an ambitious first attempt to convene a deliberative mini-public at a global scale, giving people from around the world an opportunity to deliberate on international climate policy and to make recommendations to the decision-makers meeting at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15) in December 2009. In this paper, we examine the role that deliberative mini-publics can play in facilitating the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response. We pursue this intent through a reflective evaluation of the Australian component of the World Wide Views on Global Warming project (WWViews). Our evaluation of WWViews is mixed. The Australian event was delivered with integrity and feedback from Australian participants was almost universally positive. Globally, WWViews demonstrated that it is feasible to convene a global mini-public to deliberate on issues of global relevance, such as climate change. On the other hand, the contribution of WWViews towards the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response was limited and it achieved little influence on global climate change policy. We identify lessons for future global mini-publics, including the need to prioritise the quality of deliberation and provide flexibility to respond to cultural and political contexts in different parts of the world. Future global mini-publics may be more influential if they seek to represent discourse diversity in addition to demographic profiles, use designs that maximise the potential for transmission from public to empowered space, run over longer time periods to build momentum for change and experiment with ways of bringing global citizens together in a single process instead of discrete national events.