30115 research outputs found
Sort by
From an investigator's perspective: Challenges and opportunities in building and maintaining rapport in cross-cultural investigative interviewing contexts
Get PDFPurpose
Given the geopolitical context of war, terrorism, human trafficking and organized crime, the pursuit of justice increasingly relies on effective interactions between individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. Interviewers who fail to communicate effectively with interviewees from different cultural backgrounds to themselves risk derailing investigations, jeopardize the safety of potential victims and compromise the delivery of justice. Building rapport constitutes a critical component of effective investigative interviewing and is associated with enhanced investigative outcomes (i.e. detailed and informative accounts). The main objective of the current research was to explore the perceptions of investigators, experienced in the conduct of cross-cultural interviews, with respect to building rapport in interviews with people from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted 13 focus groups with a culturally diverse sample of investigative professionals to examine their perceptions of challenges and opportunities pertaining to building rapport in cross-cultural interviews.
Findings
Given the exploratory nature of the research objective and the absence of prior research on this issue, the authors used a qualitative approach to reflect on key themes and subthemes in our data. The authors extracted four key themes as underpinning approaches to building rapport in cross-cultural interviews: i) preparation; (ii) situational awareness (during the interview); (iii) relationship building through communication; and (iv) hierarchy in interviews.
Practical implications
These results highlight the value of cultural competence and benefits of cultural humility in the domain investigative interviewing.
Originality/value
Understanding the challenges and opportunities for improved investigative interviewing in cross-cultural contexts is crucial for research, training and practice going forward
Marketing's Boundary-Work with IT in the Digital Age
Get PDFThis article examines how the global marketing profession sought new ways to ensure legitimacy and sustainability in the digital age by conjoining professional and managerial logics. Through field-level professional discourse analysis, the article examines marketing’s efforts to control the movement of increasingly fluid professional boundaries in the digital economy through jurisdictional boundary-work with the IT profession. The article uncovers professional marketers’ efforts to: (1) regain ‘command and control’ within organisations through protectionist, expansionary and hybridising discourses designed to build digital capital for the marketing profession through collaboration with IT; (2) formalise the emergence of marketing technology or ‘MarTech’ as a new technology specialism reporting to marketing; and (3) assert new areas of control for marketing within the organisation
The role of volitional reconsumption in the lives of gay men living with concealable stigmatized identities
Get PDFVolitional reconsumption involves consumers intentionally and actively seeking to relive specific consumption experiences. Various factors in consumers’ personal lives, such as identity transitions, personal crises, and different life stages, can influence their reconsumption experiences. Based on an oral history approach, our study investigates the role of volitional reconsumption among middle-aged gay men in Ireland. These men, living with concealable stigmatized identities (CSIs), have experienced severe stigma from the Irish Catholic church for most of their lives. Our study reveals that for our participants, the volitional reconsumption of specific objects and practices goes beyond simple recreation; they serve as a safeguard against the pain of stigma stemming from a homophobic church and society. Specifically, their volitional reconsumption experiences serve four main purposes: evading reality, giving a sense of permanence, providing power through contagion, and enabling identity reification. These purposes are achieved through four types of reconsumption: regressive, progressive, relational, and reflective, involving the use of specific objects and practices. The theoretical contribution of our study pertains to linking the growing field of consumer stigma, in our case concealable stigma, to volitional reconsumption and its benefits to consumers
Permanence and Change
Get PDFSonya Dyer’s ‘Hybrida Compositus’ (2024) is the culmination of a one-year artist’s residency with The Box in Plymouth (2023–4), which took place in the context of 20/20, the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute’s national commissioning and network project designed to catalyse the careers of artists of colour and change in collections. Speaking at her studio in London’s Somerset House, Dyer sat down with artist, writer, curator and former advisor to the representation and decolonisation process at The Box, Ashish Ghadiali, in September 2024 to discuss the new work and the creative intentions that have informed it
BioBERT-RxReadmit: Improving Hospital Readmission Predictions Through Clinical Text Analysis with BioBERT
Get PDFThis study introduces BioBERT-RxReadmit, a dual stage model designed to predict hospital readmissions using unstructured clinical data from the MIMIC-III dataset. The model's name reflects its dual focus: leveraging BioBERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Texts) for analyzing medical text and Rx, symbolizing prescription and medical intervention, to address readmission risks. In the first stage, BioBERT identifies key clinical features such as symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments from free-text clinical notes. These features are then integrated with the complete clinical text in the second stage, where BioBERT is fine-tuned for classification to predict 30-day readmissions. This comprehensive approach improves the model's ability to recognize complex patterns in patient data, resulting in improved predictive accuracy. BioBERT-RxReadmit helps identify high-risk patients more effectively, reducing preventable readmissions, optimizing healthcare resources, and improving patient care, showcasing the transformative potential of advanced NLP mod-els in healthcare
Interview with Sinah T. Kloß and Antonia Villinger on ‘Pregnant Bodies – Embodied Pregnancy’
Get PDFTomoko Tamari conducted the interview with the editors of the Body & Society special issue ‘Pregnant Bodies, Embodied Pregnancy’ in order to explore their rationale for developing issues on pregnant bodies, and explore how their personal experience as being pregnant women during their editing process of the issue, influenced their analytical insights of pregnancy and pregnant bodies. Tomoko also raises the issues of transgender male’s pregnancy which is often stigmatized, and analyses the lived experience so as to further discuss multifactorial and complex embodied pregnancy in society. Furthermore, Tomoko introduced the Body & Society’s special section on ‘Biocircularities: Lives, Times and Technologies (Vol. 29. Issue 2, 2020) and the notion of ‘recursion’ to raise the question of how the development of reproductive science and technology has transformed ‘the temporality’ of pregnant bodies to make possible ‘multiple temporalities’. Finally Kloß and Villinger discuss their thoughts about experiences of ‘after pregnancy’ and ‘becoming a mother’ in order to open up potential future research topics
The associations of negative and disorganization symptoms with verbal fluency in schizophrenia: the mediation effect of processing speed and cognitive flexibility
Get PDFBackground: Psychopathological symptoms appear important for cognitive functions in schizophrenia. Nevertheless, the factors and their impact on relationships between negative or disorganized symptoms and verbal fluency are still debatable. The preliminary objective of the study was to compare verbal fluency, including clustering and switching as cognitive strategies, executive functions, and processing speed between individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and healthy controls (HC). The main aim of the study was to investigate mediation models and identify whether relationships between negative and disorganization symptoms and verbal fluency in schizophrenia are mediated by cognitive flexibility and processing speed.
Methods: Semantic (animal and fruit) and phonemic (letter k and letter f) fluency tasks, the Berg Card Sorting Test (BCST), and the Color Trails Test (CTT) were administered in the SZ group (n = 108) and a matched HC group (n = 108). The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) was applied to measure psychopathological symptoms in schizophrenia patients.
Results: SZ produced fewer words, had larger cluster size, and fewer switches in semantic fluency than HC. Moreover, the SZ group had longer completion time in CTT 1 and CTT 2 and higher percent of perseverative and non-perseverative errors in BCST than HC. Three mediation models demonstrated good fit indices, suggesting that processing speed and cognitive flexibility were significant mediators for relationships between: (1) psychopathological symptoms and productivity or semantic clustering in animal fluency; (2) negative symptoms and productivity in semantic or phonemic fluency; and (3) disorganization symptoms and productivity in semantic fluency.
Conclusions: Individuals with schizophrenia are characterized by a specific performance profile on verbal fluency tasks. They manifest poor productivity and problems using cognitive strategies for semantic fluency. Referring to executive functioning, schizophrenia patients exhibit decreased cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, and formulating concepts, as well as slow processing speed. It was found that processing speed and cognitive flexibility may be understood as the neuropsychological mechanisms modifying the relationships between negative symptoms, disorganization symptoms, and semantic and phonemic fluency. Therefore, these results provide a foundation for including cognitive flexibility and processing speed in cognitive training for schizophrenia patients
