1,720,980 research outputs found
Introducing Age.Vol.A: digital tools to promote communication between seniors, foreign caregivers and families
No full textThis presentation introduces Age.Vol.A.– Ageing, Volunteers, Assistants. Multilingual tools for
Assisting the Ageing, a research project on ageing issues focusing on the demographic and social
situation of Varese, an 80,000-inhabitant city in North-West Italy, with 13% of its population over 65
and foreigners representing over 8% of the province’s population, a significant proportion of whom
is employed as caregivers to assist elderly people at home. Age.Vol.A. starts from the assumption
that, between home-assisted Italian seniors and their non-Italian caregivers, there exists a linguistic
and cultural barrier as well as a digital divide, which tends to increase the physical and social
isolation of the elderly population (Russo et al., 2019; Vicentini & Grego, 2019; Vicentini et al.,
2020).
The paper intends to offer an overview of the output of this research project, i.e. a multilingual
website and a multilingual smartphone application aimed at providing the foreign caregivers with
terminology and practical information related to their assisted and the institutions aimed to assist
those who assist the elderly, from health and healthcare to administrative issues. The terminology is
divided into three macro areas – health, institutions, daily life – with secondary fields according to
various communicative situations. The concept of the digital tools rests on the notions of
translanguaging in migrant communities (Canagarajah, 2013; Hafner & Jones, 2015; Schreiber,
2015) as a means to deploy communication practices which digital tools can support through
adaptive moves through linguistic, textual, and audiovisual media.
References
Canagarajah, S. (2013) “Negotiating Translingual Literacy: An Enactment.” Research in the
Teaching of English 48(1):40–67.
Hafner, C. A., & Jones, R. H. (2015). Digital literacies and language learning. Language Learning &
Technology, 19(3), 1–7.
Russo, D., Luraschi, M., Grego, K., Vicentini, A., Pasquaré Mariotto, F., Rovelli, G. (2019)
“Designing a Survey for Care Workers, the Elderly and Their Families”, presentation at the
conference Seniors, foreign caregivers, families, institutions: Linguistic and multidisciplinary
perspectives, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy, 9-10/04/2019.
Schreiber. B. R. (2015). “I am what I am”: Multilingual identity and digital
translanguaging. Language Learning & Technology, 19(3), 69–87.
Vicentini, A., Grego, K. (2019) (eds) “Linguistic perspectives on ageing issues, ethics and ideology”,
Expressio, 3.
Vicentini, A., Grego, K., Russo, D., Grechi, D., Pasquaré-Mariotto, F. & Rovelli, G. (2020).
“Sociolinguistic and statistical methods to improve health communication between the elderly,
caregivers and institutions: The Age.Vol.A. research project”. presentation at the conference
Communication, Medicine and Ethics Conference (COMET) 2020, Aalborg (DK), 01-03/07/2020
The Age.Vol.A. research project: Findings from a survey on caregivers, the elderly and their families in Northern Italy
No full textIn 2019, 20.3% of the EU-27 population was aged 65 and over. The share of EU people aged 80 years or above is projected to have a two and a half fold increase between 2019 and 2100, reaching 14.6 % of the total (United Nations, 2019). Italy is facing a demographic decline. According to ISTAT (2019), the country’s birth rate has constantly decreased over the past few decades: for every 100 deaths there are just 67 births (there were as many as 96 births 10 years ago), which is the lowest turnover population level since 1918. This phenomenon, combined with the increased life expectancy in Italy (almost 81 years for men and over 85 for women), paints a picture of a country where the average age of the population is 45.7 years old and is expected to be over 53 years old in 2050 (Lallo and Raitano 2018).
For these reasons, elderly care plays a key role in Italy’s social fabric: if people live longer, the extra years will not necessarily be spent in good health, which means that the demand for assistance, especially home care, will increase in the next decades. A large share of the population is expected to spend more time looking after their elderly family members, which might result in a negative impact on their working lives, an aspect which has emerged significantly during the present COVID-19 pandemic (Petretto and Pili, 2020).
This presentation introduces Age.Vol.A.– Ageing, Volunteers, Assistants. Multilingual tools for Assisting the Ageing, a research project on ageing issues focusing on the demographic and social situation of Varese, an 80,000-inhabitant city in North-West Italy, with 13% of its population over 65 and foreigners representing over 8% of the province’s population, a significant proportion of whom is employed as caregivers to assist elderly people at home. Age.Vol.A. starts from the assumption that, between home-assisted Italian seniors and their non-Italian caregivers, there exists a linguistic and cultural barrier as well as a digital divide, which tends to increase the physical and social isolation of the elderly population. The output of this research project will be a multilingual website and a multilingual smartphone application aimed at providing the foreign carers with terminology and practical information related to their assisted and the institutions aimed to assist those who assist the elderly, from health and healthcare to administrative issues (Russo et al. 2019; Vicentini and Grego 2019; Vicentini et al. 2020;).
The paper intends to offer an overview of the data collected in a survey launched in 2020 by the Age.Vol.A. project to study the populations of caregivers, the assisted elderly and their families in the province of Varese, which takes into account specific demographic, social, linguistic and communicative aspects, including the current epidemiological situation.
References
ISTAT (2019), Natalità e fecondità della popolazione residente, https://www.istat.it/it/files/2020/12/REPORT-NATALITA-2019.pdf
Lallo, C., Raitano, M. (2018). “Life expectancy inequalities in the elderly by socioeconomic status: evidence from Italy”. Population health metrics, 16(1), 7.
Petretto, D. R., Pili, R. (2020). Ageing and COVID-19: What is the role for elderly people?. Geriatrics (Switzerland), 5(2).
Russo, D., Luraschi, M., Grego, K., Vicentini, A., Pasquaré Mariotto, F., Rovelli, G. (2019) “Designing a Survey for Care Workers, the Elderly and Their Families”, presentation at the conference Seniors, foreign caregivers, families, institutions: Linguistic and multidisciplinary perspectives, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy, 9-10/04/2019.
United Nations (2019). World Population Ageing 2019 https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/ageing/WorldPopulationAgeing2019-Report.pdf
Vicentini, A., Grego, K. (2019) (eds) “Linguistic perspectives on ageing issues, ethics and ideology”, Expressio, 3.
Vicentini, A., Grego, K., Russo, D., Grechi, D., Pasquaré-Mariotto, F. & Rovelli, G. (2020). “Sociolinguistic and statistical methods to improve health communication between the elderly, caregivers and institutions: The Age.Vol.A. research project”. presentation at the conference Communication, Medicine and Ethics Conference (COMET) 2020, Aalborg (DK), 01-03/07/2020
The Age.Vol.A App and Weportal: Bridging the communicative gap between the elderly, their families and foreign caregivers
No full textWith this paper, we wish to present the Age.Vol.A (Ageing, Volunteers, Assistants. Multilingual Tools for Assisting the Ageing) App, whose pilot version is currently being finalized at the Universities of Varese and Milan (Italy), and is being released in June 2022. The App is the main practical output of a four-year research project bearing the same name (2018-2022) that received major funding by Fondazione Cariplo (2021), one of the world’s main philanthropic organizations. The project’s aim consists in facilitating communication between elderly Italian citizens living in the northern Province of Varese (Italy) and assisted by foreign caregivers, the elderly’s families and the foreign caretakers themselves. The wider scope of the project is to ultimately improve the health and wellbeing of all the social actors involved in these often delicate family settings (Vicentini/Grego 2019). For example, (foreign) caregivers, who “are not family members but often end up making up for weak or non-existent family networks, and their relationship with the older people they look after often merges into that of an unofficial relative. They are relied upon, confided in” (Brannigan et al. 2020).
Age.Vol.A started off with the objective of shedding light on the experience of assisted ageing in a country which ranks among the four oldest countries in the world (Istat 2020) and provide technological tools for bridging the communicative and cultural gaps between the three above mentioned social groups. Specifically, the Age.Vol.A App is introduced, illustrating the mixed-method – linguistic, statistical and sociological – research applied in the collection of the data, administration of interviews and needs analysis carried out among the interested social groups, in order to determine the content of the App (Russo et al. 2020). The selection process of the material to include is then described, together with the recommendations received by local institutional parties (the Varese Town Council, health authority and welfare institute) about specific themes and aspects they considered relevant. Finally, the step of translation and localization into six languages (English included) of the output of the research is outlined, focusing on how the actual languages (e.g. Ukranian rather than lingua-franca Russian), or even the local varieties of the standard languages (e.g. Spanish and Russian) spoken by the caregivers in the Varese Province were specifically targeted, based on the statistical research carried out at the beginning.
The Age.Vol.A. App shall be distributed free of charge to all involved social actors, and is hoped to represent a practical output of multi-disciplinary, applied research that is beneficial to society, albeit at a limited local level thus far, and that brings the academia closer to the needs and expectations of their territory-s population.
Keywords: Northern Italy, elderly care, foreign caregivers, sociolinguistics, statistics, translation.
References
Brannigan Michael, Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim, Bacchini Simone C. (2020) (eds), Practical perspectives on older people, caregivers, families and organisations, Special issues, “Working with Older People”, 5(3), Emerald, London.
Fondazione Cariplo (2021), https://www.fondazionecariplo.it/en/the-foundation/la-fondazione.html).
Istat (2020), Rapporto annuale 2020. La situazione del Paese, https://www.istat.it/storage/rapporto-annuale/2020/Rapportoannuale2020.pdf.
Russo Daniel, Grechi Daniele, Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim (2020), ‘Sociolinguistic and statistical methods to survey the communicative needs of home-assisted elderly, their families, and foreign caregivers in Northern Italy’, in Davis Boyd, Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim (2020) (eds), Seniors, foreign caregivers, families, institutions: Linguistic and multidisciplinary perspectives, Mimesis international, Milan/London.
Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim (2019) (eds), Linguistic perspectives on ageing issues, ethics and ideology, “EXPRESSIO”, 3, Mila
The European Tourism Industry in Crisis : a Stock Market Perspective
Full text linkThis article aims to evaluate the market performance of the European tourism industry from 2004 to 2014, a period that includes the financial and economic crises, to highlight which macroeconomic factors influenced the industry stock returns. The Stoxx Europe 600 Travel & Leisure price index is used to proxy the industry stock performance, and a multifactor market model is employed to individuate which macroeconomic variables are able to drive tourism stock performance. Results highlight that tourism stock performance is influenced by market conditions and by uncertainty, measured through the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility index (VIX). Despite the importance of tourism in Europe and its contribution to the economic growth, there is scant evidence on the performance of this industry in this area and on its relationship with economic conditions. The article, to the best of knowledge, represents the first contribution on the performance of European tourism industry in crisis years with a macroeconomic perspective
Brain, technology and creativity : BrainArt : a BCI-based entertainment tool to enact creativity and create drawing from cerebral rhythms
No full textThe present article presents a high-level study on creativity. From a theoretical point of view, we conceptualized cognitive framework of creativity based on the notion of balance between conscious and unconscious processes. Indeed, creativity may be considered a borderline state of mind, in which the thought seems to fluctuate in a near-consciousness state. When the idea arises to the consciousness, the mind turns back to its previous equilibrium, and divergent thinking is replaced by canonical thinking. Starting with this framework, we designed and developed an entertainment application, in which creativity is enacted by unconscious processes, but in collaboration with conscious motivation. Our aim was then to activate a new, dedicated balance between conscious and unconscious processes, in order to obtain a state of mind similar to the spontaneous creative process, but directly guided by brain activity without the intervention of verbal and semantic modulations.
We developed BrainArt, which is essentially a workbench that allows users to create drawing using their own cerebral rhythms, that are then collected by a commercial BCI device. The application gave us the possibility to observe and analyze the spontaneous creative expression of the participants’ insight during an experimental session, where users created an artwork using the application. Therefore, this work presents both the BrainArt application possibility for entertainment and freedom to express individual conscious and unconscious creative insight, as well as the preliminary experimental results obtained by a combined approach of statistical, signal and behavioral analysis
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
