Location privacy online:China, the Netherlands and South Korea

The aim of the study is to explore cross-cultural differences in users’ location privacy behaviour on LBSNs (location-based social networks) in China, the Netherlands and Korea. The study suggests evidence that Chinese, Dutch and Korean users exhibit different location privacy concerns, attitudes to social influence, perceived privacy control and willingness to share location-related information on LBSNs. The results show that in general, the more concerned users are about location privacy, the less they are willing to share and it also suggests that location privacy concern and social influence affect each other. Furthermore, the more control people perceive they have over their privacy, the more they are willing to share location information. A negative relationship between willingness to share location information and users’ actual sharing of location information was seen. In short, it is concluded that the relation between cultural values and location privacy behaviours only have a partial connection

The Effect of Facebook on Body Dissatisfaction: Ethnicity as a Possible Moderator

Eating disorders have demonstrated the most extreme rise in prevalence out of all the mental illnesses since 1990 (Lozano et al., 2012). However, research has largely neglected to investigate cross-cultural effects on disordered eating, and thus, findings may only apply to Western samples. Only two known prior studies have investigated effects of social media on disordered eating cross-culturally. This project helps fill a substantial research gap by examining social media effects on body image concerns in a culturally diverse sample of Australian undergraduate women (N= 185). The effect of a ten-minute Facebook exposure on women’s body dissatisfaction and appearance comparison tendencies will be investigated, while considering a possible moderating effect of ethnicity. Utilizing a pre-/post-exposure pseudo-experimental design, it was predicted that Asian Australian participants (n=92) would experience a ten-minute Facebook exposure differently than European Australian participants (n=93). Regression analyses revealed that, in general, the brief Facebook exposure pseudo-experimentally increased body image concerns for the European Australians, but the Asian Australians remained seemingly unaffected. Interestingly, the groups significantly differed in the amount of appearance comparisons to different groups; i.e. the European Australians reported significantly more appearance comparisons made on Facebook to celebrities than the Asian Australians. These findings reinforce and extend the central tenets of the Tripartite Influence Model, and suggest necessary future directions for research on social media and disordered eating across diverse populations

Ingroup/outgroup dynamics and agency markers in Italian parliamentary language. A gender-based socio-psychological analysis of the speeches of men and women deputies (2001 and 2006).

The most recent literature on gender differences in language use has shown that the Italian political communication enacted by men and women parliamentarians only partly reflects and reproduces the asymmetries and stereotypes widespread in society. Starting from an anti-essentialist perspective, which holds that language differences between men and women speakers are much less extensive than claimed in the past, we analysed 463 parliamentary speeches in the course of the XIVth legislature (5-2001 / 4-2006) in four parliamentarian pairs, differentiated by gender and political orientation. The general aim was to explore the socio-psychological constructs of agency and ingroup/outgroup dynamics as revealed by linguistic behaviour in men/women parliamentarians. The two constructs were detected by specific linguistic markers in the interventions of men/women parliamentarian pairs. Specifically, for agency, we detected: (1a) pronoun variations between singular and plural first person (I, we); (1b) amplitude of we as either specific or superordinate; (1c) conditional modal form of verbs. For ingroup/outgroup dynamics, we detected: (2a) pronoun variation between first and second plural person (we vs. you) and (2b) their valence. Lexicographical analysis was carried out with statistical packages TaLTaC2 and TreeTagger on a corpus of 432,671 words. Chi-square and z-test were applied to word frequencies, while Student’s t-tests were applied to gender comparisons. The results showed reduced variability between men/women parliamentarians in the use of linguistic devices, confirming the weakness of the essentialist and binary logic that has long dominated the field of studies on language and gender

Ethnicity : UK colorectal cancer screening pilot : final report

27. In summary, the overall evaluation of the UK Pilot has demonstrated that key parameters of test and programme performance observed in randomised studies of FOBt screening can be repeated in population-based pilot programmes. However, our study provides strong evidence of very low CRC screening uptake for ethnic groups in the Pilot area. This is coupled with a very low uptake of colonoscopy for individuals from ethnic groups with a positive FOBt result. 28. It has long been acknowledged that a diverse population may require diverse responses. Following the implementation of the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000, there has been a statutory duty laid upon all NHS agencies to ‘have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination’, and to make explicit consideration of the implications for racial equality of every action or policy. 29. Because the observed overall outcomes in the UK Pilot generally compare favourably with the results of previous randomised trials of FOBt screening, the main Evaluation Group has concluded that benefits observed in the trials should be repeatable in a national roll-out. 30. However, our study indicates that any national colorectal cancer screening programme would need to very carefully consider the implications of ethnicity for roll-out, and develop a strategic plan on how best to accommodate this at both a national and local level. Based on our findings, consideration will clearly need to be given to improved access and screening service provision for ethnic minorities. 31. In order to ensure adequate CRC screening provision for a diverse UK population, and to address the explicit implications for racial equality highlighted by our findings, interventions now urgently need to be evaluated to improve access for ethnic minorities. This work should be undertaken as part of the second round of CRC screening currently underway in the English Pilot

Group level influence on blog's design behaviour

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The purpose of this research is twofold. Firstly, this research aims to investigate whether the design preferences of bloggers in selected countries from different cultural backgrounds are influenced by national culture traits. The investigation involves two categories of blogs selected within a country where the bloggers share similar attributes such as language or geographical location. Secondly, simultaneously, this research intends to discover the possibility of the impact of group level influence on design preferences of bloggers who are linked together in a network through bloggers’ linkage or blogrolls. To achieve the said purposes, observations on both the global and local blogs of six selected countries are conducted using the content analysis method. This method allows this research to observe web pages and rate design preferences of bloggers via a coding system, similar to the method used to analyse documents or manuscripts to find common themes or keywords. A total of 612 blogs (306 global and 306 local) are observed for a period of nine months to identify cultural traits on design behaviour based on national culture indicators chosen from prominent literatures. To prevent a systematic error, an independent second observer was appointed and the results obtained are compared using a statistical methodology. In addition, translators were also engaged to verify that the translations are of a correct meaning and comprehension since blogs use various national languages on their web pages. The data were statistically tested using SPSS engaging in statistical analysis of frequency table, Cross-Tabulation and cluster analyses and MANOVA. Results shown that design preferences between both the global and local blogs in each country, has significant differences in most of the design indicators chosen. The findings indicate that the national culture influence on design preferences in linked networks of blogs is weakening indicating another type of influence might be in existence. The results also provide evidence that blogs in linked networks are statistically significant as a cluster or a group by themselves and are independent from one cluster to another. The research, however, studies only six countries from six different cultural dimensions. The inclusion of other countries, similar to or different from the countries under investigation, would be an added advantage. Furthermore, the use of only a single type of global blog provider (blogspot.com) in this research could be extended to other global blog providers such as wordpress.com to give fairer coverage of major and popular global blogs as well as providing a wider generalisation effect of the research findings

Discourse and Digital Practices

Discourse and Digital Practices shows how tools from discourse analysis can be used to help us understand new communication practices associated with digital media, from video gaming and social networking to apps and photo sharing. This cutting-edge book: draws together fourteen eminent scholars in the field including James Paul Gee, David Barton, Ilana Snyder, Phil Benson, Victoria Carrington, Guy Merchant, Camilla Vasquez, Neil Selwyn and Rodney Jones answers the central question: "How does discourse analysis enable us to understand digital practices?" addresses a different type of digital media in each chapter demonstrates how digital practices and the associated new technologies challenge discourse analysts to adapt traditional analytic tools and formulate new theories and methodologies examines digital practices from a wide variety of approaches including textual analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, object ethnography, geosemiotics, and critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Digital Practices will be of interest to advanced students studying courses on digital literacies or language and digital practices

Audiovisual Translation and multimodality: Character (re)design from source to target multimodal text. The Chicano gangster stereotype as a case study

The present work aims to expand the scope of research on audiovisual language and translation by taking into consideration the relationship between the audiovisual text and other modes characterising the audiovisual product. The complexity of this kind of product calls for an analytical framework that makes it possible to deal with multiple modes simultaneously. Although intuitively applicable to qualitative research, this kind of analysis has so far been difficult to achieve in larger corpora. In particular, the main focus of this thesis is character design in movies. A character is a recognizable, stereotyped diegetic device, composed of audiovisual as well as textual elements. Movies rely heavily on stereotyped characters to convey messages to the audience and fulfil a specific communicative function based on a set of shared assumptions. The analysis will take as a case study a selection of American movies released between 1988 and 1993 and dubbed into Italian, featuring the stereotypical character of the Chicano gangster. The methodology is informed by descriptive translation studies and multimodality, as well as corpus-based analysis and translation of fictional nonstandard varieties. A linguistic and historical profiling of the chosen character will serve as a toolkit in the final step, the analysis of the movies. First, the analysis will focus on identifying the linguistic variety spoken by the character, with particular attention to its prestige, with the purpose of understanding the way in which the variety of the source text was re-presented in the target text. This will allow the inference of the type of strategies used by the translators. Subsequently, the relationship between linguistic elements and non-textual elements will be analysed to understand the way that intermodal relationships are built in both texts. This will shed light on the communicative meaning conveyed by the character in the multimodal text, and the way it is preserved or transformed through the audiovisual translation process.The analysis will have an initially quantitative approach, so as to outline a general trend in the character design and re-design within the analysed corpus. The data will then be reviewed and interpreted, in order to understand how specific linguistic choices in a multimodal environment are linked to the linguacultural context that generated them

Tag disambiguation based on social network information

Within 20 years the Web has grown from a tool for scientists at CERN into a global information space. While returning to its roots as a read/write tool, its entering a more social and participatory phase. Hence a new, improved version called the Social Web where users are responsible for generating and sharing content on the global information space, they are also accountable for replicating the information. This collaborative activity can be observed in two of the most widely practised Social Web services such as social network sites and social tagging systems. Users annotate their interests and inclinations with free form keywords while they share them with their social connections. Although these keywords (tag) assist information organization and retrieval, theysuffer from polysemy.In this study we employ the effectiveness of social network sites to address the issue of ambiguity in social tagging. Moreover, we also propose that homophily in social network sites can be a useful aspect is disambiguating tags. We have extracted the ‘Likes’ of 20 Facebook users and employ them in disambiguation tags on Flickr. Classifiers are generated on the retrieved clusters from Flickr using K-Nearest-Neighbour algorithm and then their degree of similarity is calculated with user keywords. As tag disambiguation techniques lack gold standards for evaluation, we asked the users to indicate the contexts and used them as ground truth while examining the results. We analyse the performance of our approach by quantitative methods and report successful results. Our proposed method is able classify images with an accuracy of 6 out of 10 (on average). Qualitative analysis reveal some factors that affect the findings, and if addressed can produce more precise results