1,720,995 research outputs found
Exclusion of ethnic groups from the realm of humanity: Prejudice against the gypsies in Britain and in Romania
No full textCopyright @ 2005 PromolibroPrejudice against ethnic minorities is investigated not only as the establishment of difference between social groups on valued dimensions but also as the denial of similarities that would prevent the inclusion of both ingroups and outgroups in the superordinate category of human-beings. The present study sought to explore the two concepts that are advanced to describe the phenomenon of dehumanisation of out-groups: their ontologisation and their infrahumanisation in relation to the Gypsy minority. British and Romanian participants were asked to rate their national ingroup and the Gypsies using characteristics judged typically human and typically animal following the ontologisation and infrahumanisation literature. The results indicated the the ontologisation of the Gypsies occurs in both national samples whereas their infrahumanisation is only verified for the British participants. The implications of these findings are discussed from the perspectives of the infrahumanisation and ontologisation
Whose Lyme is it anyway? Subject positions and the construction of responsibility for managing the health risks from Lyme disease
No full textMaking sense of unfamiliar risks in the countryside: the case of Lyme disease
Full text linkThe focus of this paper is on how popular representations of the countryside provide countryside users with a discursive framework to make sense of unfamiliar countryside-based risks, taking Lyme disease as an example. Sixty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted with 82 visitors in Richmond Park, New Forest, and Exmoor National Park in the UK. The data were analysed using thematic analysis and was informed by social representations theory. The analysis indicated that a lay understanding of the risk of Lyme disease was filtered by place-attachment and the social representations of the countryside. Lyme disease was not understood primarily as a risk to health, but was instead constructed as a risk to the social and restorative practices in the context of the countryside. The findings suggest that advice about zoonoses such as Lyme disease is unlikely to cause panic, and that it should focus on the least intrusive preventative measures.<br/
Accounting for personal and professional choices for pandemic influenza vaccination amongst English healthcare workers.
Full text linkHealthcare workers (HCWs) are encouraged to get vaccinated during influenza pandemics to reduce their own, and patients', risk of infection, and to encourage their patients to get immunised. Despite extensive research on HCWs' receipt of vaccination, little is known about how HCWs articulate pandemic influenza vaccination advice to patients
Dilemmatic human-animal boundaries in Britain and Romania: Post-materialist and materialist dehumanization
No full textThis is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2007 The British Psychological SocietyTheories of dehumanization generally assume a single clear-cut, value-free and non-dilemmatic boundary between the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal.’ The present study highlights the relevance of dilemmas involved in drawing that boundary. In 6 focus groups carried out in Romania and Britain, 42 participants were challenged to think about dilemmas pertaining to animal and human life. Four themes were identified: rational autonomy, sentience, speciesism, and maintaining materialist and postmaterialist values. Sentience made animals resemble humans, while humans’ rational autonomy made them distinctive. Speciesism underlay the human participants’ prioritization of their own interests over those of animals, and a conservative consensus that the existing social system could not change supported this speciesism when it was challenged. Romanian participants appealed to Romania’s lack of modernity and British participants to Britain’s modernity to justify such conservatism. The findings suggest that the human-animal boundary is not essentialized; rather it seems that such boundary is constructed in a dilemmatic and post hoc way. Implications for theories of dehumanization are discussed
Increasing the intent to receive a pandemic influenza vaccination: Testing the impact of theory-based messages
No full textObjective: Vaccination is an effective preventive measure to reduce influenza transmission, especially important in a pandemic. Despite the messages encouraging vaccination during the last pandemic, uptake remained low (37.6% in clinical risk groups). This study investigated the effect of different types of messages regarding length, content type, and framing on vaccination intention.Method: An online experiment was conducted in February 2015. A representative sample of 1424 people living in England read a mock newspaper article about a novel influenza pandemic before being randomised to one of four conditions: standard Department of Health (DoH) (long message) and three brief theory-based messages - an abridged version of the standard DoH and two messages additionally targeting pandemic influenza severity and vaccination benefits (framed as risk-reducing or health-enhancing, respectively). Intention to be vaccinated and potential mediators were measured.Results: The shortened DoH message increased vaccination intention more than the longer one, by increasing perceived susceptibility, anticipated regret and perceived message personal relevance while lowering perceived costs, despite the longer one being rated as slightly more credible. Intention to be vaccinated was not improved by adding information on severity and benefits, and the health-enhancing message was not more effective than the risk-reducing.Conclusion: A briefer message resulted in greater intention to be vaccinated, whereas emphasising the severity of pandemic influenza and the benefits of vaccination did not. Future campaigns should consider using brief theoretically-based messages, targeting knowledge about influenza and precautionary measures, perceived susceptibility to pandemic influenza, and the perceived efficacy and reduced costs of vaccination
Strategies for dismissing dietary risks: insights from user-generated comments online
No full textCommunication around chronic dietary risks has proved challenging as dietary health risks are ostensibly met with attenuated perceptions of their likelihood and consequences. In this article, we examine the strategies that an online public use to negotiate risk messages from expert stakeholders that may be incongruent with their own position on a risk. Progressing from conceptualisations of amplification as laid out in the social amplification of risk framework, we are particularly interested in understanding whether and how amplifications of risk may be attributed towards other stakeholders. The article presents an analysis of comments posted on a website oriented to a British audience. These comments were left by members of the public in reply to two online media articles published in 2012 reporting on an epidemiological study carried out in the United States on the risks of red meat consumption. We found that the comments generally expressed resistance to the risk message, embodied in two main strategies. The first strategy was to discount the message itself by deploying rules of thumb that undermined the applicability of the general risk message to the particularities of the individual. The second strategy was to undermine the risks by casting doubt on the credibility of the message source. Together, these strategies allowed the commenters to argue that the risks and the process of communicating them resulted in an exaggerated picture. These findings highlight that by attributing amplification to others, further polarisation of risk views between stakeholders may occur. Thinking about amplification as an attribution provides a distinct and significant conceptual contribution to the study of incongruent risk responses
Analogies, metaphors, and wondering about the future: Lay sense-making around synthetic meat
No full textDrawing on social representations theory, we explore how the public make sense of the unfamiliar, taking as the example a novel technology: synthetic meat. Data from an online deliberation study and eighteen focus groups in Belgium, Portugal and the UK indicated that the various strategies of sense-making afforded different levels of critical thinking about synthetic meat. Anchoring to genetic modification, metaphors like ‘Frankenfoods’ and commonplaces like ‘playing God’ closed off debates around potential applications of synthetic meat, whereas asking factual and rhetorical questions about it, weighing up pragmatically its risks and benefits, and envisaging changing current mentalities or behaviours in order to adapt to scientific developments enabled a consideration of synthetic meat’s possible implications for agriculture, environment, and society. We suggest that research on public understanding of technology should cultivate a climate of active thinking and should encourage questioning during the process of sense-making to try to reduce unhelpful anchorin
Public preferences for vaccination and antiviral medicines under different pandemic flu outbreak scenarios.
Full text linkDuring the 2009-2010 A(H1N1) pandemic, many people did not seek care quickly enough, failed to take a full course of antivirals despite being authorised to receive them, and were not vaccinated. Understanding facilitators and barriers to the uptake of vaccination and antiviral medicines will help inform campaigns in future pandemic influenza outbreaks. Increasing uptake of vaccines and antiviral medicines may need to address a range of drivers of behaviour. The aim was to identify facilitators of and barriers to being vaccinated and taking antiviral medicines in uncertain and severe pandemic influenza scenarios using a theoretical model of behaviour change, COM-B
Experience of Lyme disease and preferences for precautions: A cross-sectional survey of UK patients
Full text linkThis article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ 2013 Marcu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background: Lyme disease (LD) is a tick-borne zoonosis currently affecting approximately 1000 people annually in the UK (confirmed through serological diagnosis) although it is estimated that the real figures may be as high as 3000 cases. It is important to know what factors may predict correct appraisal of LD symptoms and how the experience of LD might predict preferences for future precautionary actions.
Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with early LD patients via the Lyme Borreliosis Unit at the Health Protection Agency. One hundred and thirty participants completed measures of awareness of having been bitten by ticks, knowledge of ticks and LD, interpretation of LD symptoms, suspicions of having LD prior to seeing the General Practitioner (GP), and preferences for precautionary actions during future countryside visits. Chi-square tests and logistic regression were used to identify key predictors of awareness of having been bitten by ticks and of having LD. t-tests assessed differences between groups of participants on suspicions of having LD and preferences for future precautions. Pearson correlations examined relationships between measures of preferences for precautions and frequency of countryside use, knowledge of ticks and LD, and intentions to avoid the countryside in the future.
Results: 73.8% of participants (n = 96) reported a skin rash as the reason for seeking medical help, and 44.1% (n = 64) suspected they had LD before seeing the GP. Participants reporting a direct event in realizing they had been bitten by ticks (seeing a tick on skin or seeing a skin rash and linking it to tick bites) were more likely to suspect they had LD before seeing the doctor. Participants distinguished between taking precautions against tick bites during vs. after countryside visits, largely preferring the latter. Also, the more frequently participants visited the countryside, the less likely they were to endorse during-visit precautions.
Conclusions: The results suggest that the risk of LD is set in the context of the restorative benefits of countryside practices, and that it may be counterproductive to overemphasize pre- or during-visit precautions. Simultaneously, having experienced LD is not associated with any withdrawal from countryside.Economic and Social Research Counci
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