1,720,973 research outputs found
The effects of modal value and imperative mood on self-predicted compliance to health guidance: the case of COVID-19
Full text linkHealth messaging is effective if it achieves audience adherence to guidance. Through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics, we examine the expression of obligation in poster-based health campaigns (4 posters) employed during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK by considering whether differences in grammatical mood and modality values impact on public compliance toward the message content. Effects of mood and modality variations are examined through a quantitative-cum-qualitative analysis of results from a representative survey (N = 1,089), which included closed questions on self-predicted compliance to health guidance and open questions on the respondents’ understanding of messaging. The quantitative results favour medium values of obligation (“should” vis-à-vis “must”) and directives in declarative mood for self-efficacy messages, and expressions of certainty when the need to take action to prevent negative outcomes is conveyed. The qualitative results show that, communication context and linguistic features being equal, message types (i.e., self-efficacy, moralising, fear appeals) and visual cues prevail in conditioning public reception. Moreover, since directives employing modality allow for speakers’ inclusion among the targeted addressees, they appear to offer more favourable outcomes than those in the imperative mood. This study provides empirical insights into the effects of modality and mood on health guidance compliance
The language of vaccination campaigns during COVID-19
Full text linkUnderstanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to vaccine hesitancy and dispel any myth or misinformation. This paper explores the ways in which the governments of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) promoted COVID-19 vaccination as a first-line strategy and studies health message effectiveness by examining the language of official vaccination campaigns, vaccine uptake across the different nations and the health message preferences of unvaccinated and vaccine sceptic individuals. The study considers communications beginning at the first lockdown until the point when daily COVID-19 updates ended for each nation. A corpus linguistic analysis of official government COVID-19 updates is combined with a qualitative examination of the expression of evaluation in governmental discourses, feedback from a Public Involvement Panel and insights from a nationally representative survey of adults in Great Britain to explore message production and reception. Fully vaccinated, unvaccinated and sceptic respondents showed similar health messaging preferences and perceptions of health communication efficacy, but unvaccinated and sceptic participants reported lower levels of compliance for all health messages considered. These results suggest that issues in health communication are not limited to vaccination hesitancy, and that in the future, successful vaccination campaigns need to address the determining factors of public attitudes and beliefs besides communication strategies
Using online news comments to gather fast feedback on issues with public health messaging: The Guardian as a case study
Full text linkThis study uses corpus linguistics to analyse opinions on messaging and public health measures from one resource—comments posted in response to articles containing references to borders from The Guardian online. Overall, commenters made international, national, and regional comparisons between the and other places, which they considered to be better models for pub health (e.g., Scotland, Germany, and New Zealand). They used criticism of public health measures and guidance as a means to politicise the pandemic; some ironically adapted campaign slogans to comment on leadership and its political decisions. Commenters did not extend lenience to others, who did not follow guidance, despite otherwise finding the messaging confusing. They expressed concern over socio-economic inequalities (class, financial, and regional) resulting from, or exacerbated by, the implementation of COVID-19 measures. Finally, they offered little support for the measures or leadership but did offer recommendations for changes to measures. These results will inform a wider investigation into the reception and evaluation of public health messaging and related measures, and how these change over time following interventions such as the introduction of new messaging campaigns
Privacy Preserving Corpus Linguistics: Investigating the Trajectories of Public Health Messaging Online
Full text linkThe Coronavirus Discourses project supports public health partners Public Health Wales, Public Health England, and NHS Education for Scotland in addressing key challenges that the coronavirus pandemic presents in terms of understanding the flow and impact of public health messages in public and private communications.In this report, we outline a set of guiding principles for privacy- preserving research for researchers and professionals, which applies to a new approach we have developed, mainly relating to the development of PriPA (Privacy Preserving Analytics).Next, we introduce the PriPA (Privacy Preserving Analytics) Extension. The PriPA extension is a digital tool designed for anyone to use on their personal devices. It safely retrieves information about individual language use for analysis. The advantage of this browser extension is that users have full control over what information they want to share
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
Communicating health threats: Linguistic evidence for effective public health messaging during the Covid-19 pandemic
Full text linkThe Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance
of effective and timely public health messaging. As a
health threat, the global outbreak of Covid-19 required
communication that targeted the entire population
while also raising special awareness among segments
of the population at higher risk of infection and poor
outcomes. At the same time, public health messaging
had to be adapted at pace as new evidence about the
nature of the virus and the impact of different types of
intervention emerged.
More than three years into the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic,
we are able to take stock of the challenges that have surrounded,
and continue to affect, effective public health messaging, especially
in relation to the notion of risk and at-risk populations, and the
different measures that have been implemented to curtail the
spread and impact of the virus.
In this report we present the findings of the AHRC/UKRI-funded
project ‘Coronavirus Discourses: linguistic evidence for effective
public health messaging’, which ran from January 2021 to July 2022.
The project brought together a multidisciplinary team of linguists,
computer scientists and experts in human factors research working
in partnership with the UK Health Security Agency, Public Health
Wales and NHS Education for Scotland to investigate the trajectories
and impact of public health messages during the Covid-19
pandemic. The research team used a wide range of methods,
including corpus linguistics (the study of language patterns in large
amounts of digitised text), public surveys, and a Public Involvement
Panel (PIP) to analyse real-world public health discourse
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
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