22 research outputs found
COVID-19 Booster Vaccine Acceptance in Ethnic Minority Individuals in the United Kingdom: a mixed-methods study using Protection Motivation Theory
Background: Uptake of the COVID-19 booster vaccine among ethnic minority individuals has been lower than in the general population. However, there is little research examining the psychosocial factors that contribute to COVID-19 booster vaccine hesitancy in this population.Aim: Our study aimed to determine which factors predicted COVID-19 vaccination intention in minority ethnic individuals in Middlesbrough, using Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, in addition to demographic variables.Method: We used a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative data were collected using an online survey. Qualitative data were collected using semi-structured interviews. 64 minority ethnic individuals (33 females, 31 males; mage = 31.06, SD = 8.36) completed the survey assessing PMT constructs, COVID-19conspiracy beliefs and demographic factors. 42.2% had received the booster vaccine, 57.6% had not. 16 survey respondents were interviewed online to gain further insight into factors affecting booster vaccineacceptance.Results: Multiple regression analysis showed that perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 was a significant predictor of booster vaccination intention, with higher perceived susceptibility being associated with higher intention to get the booster. Additionally, COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs significantly predictedintention to get the booster vaccine, with higher conspiracy beliefs being associated with lower intention to get the booster dose. Thematic analysis of the interview data showed that barriers to COVID-19 booster vaccination included time constraints and a perceived lack of practical support in the event ofexperiencing side effects. Furthermore, there was a lack of confidence in the vaccine, with individuals seeing it as lacking sufficient research. Participants also spoke of medical mistrust due to historical events involving medical experimentation on minority ethnic individuals.Conclusion: PMT and conspiracy beliefs predict COVID-19 booster vaccination in minority ethnic individuals. To help increase vaccine uptake, community leaders need to be involved in addressing peopleâs concerns, misassumptions, and lack of confidence in COVID-19 vaccination
Great team play: A study of computational trust in a team of agents
Teams have arguably been the most essential organisational form in human society. During the pursuit of better team performance, several factors have attracted consistent attentions; among which, trust has been widely recognised as especially important. Trust directly impacts team performance as it plays a crucial and pivotal role in the decisions that each team member (each agent) makes with regard to its own actions and its interactions with fellow team members (other agents). However, there is no systematic and generic modelling of trust aiming at improving team performance by enabling each agent in the team to conduct trust-based interactions through accurate trust evaluation and prescribing the appropriate actions in response to that trust evaluation.
This thesis addresses this absence of such a framework in three steps. Firstly, objective interaction records (past one-to-one interactions between pairs of agents) are considered the most reliable source of information pertaining to trustworthiness. Thus, to obtain accurate trust evaluations in a team of agents, a Determination of Trust Model (DoTM) is proposed. This DoTM models trust by establishing the relationship between interaction data and the trust values through a machine learner. Secondly, a Novel Trust Architecture (NoTA) is proposed to address the appropriate transition from trust to practical actions for an agent conducting an interactive team task. A team task may involve multiple sub-tasks and different types of interactions, so determining the appropriate interactions according to trust is challenging as it requires the differentiation of the trust (of the agent being interacted with's capacity) in performing different sub-tasks and the association between trust and designated interactions. The NoTA is a nuanced framework determining an agent's appropriate actions during the task through the application of differentiated trust and matched response strategies. Finally, an integrated trust model is proposed on the basis of the DoTM and the NoTA, which enables an agent the full autonomy of trust-based interactions.
Experimental demonstration is conducted in two selected domains, i.e. a food foraging task (FFT) and a coverage task. In each domain, agents are differentiated as reliable agents and flawed agents in terms of their trustworthiness; with the assumption that each scenario only involve one type of flawed agent, experiments are conducted in scenarios possessing agents with different types of flaws and ratios between flawed and reliable agents within a team. The DoTM shows an average evaluation accuracy (ACC) of at least 94% in the FFT domain, and 80% for 14 types of flawed agents (out of 15) in the coverage task. It is also shown that with a priori knowledge about trust, by applying the NoTA, average team performance is improved by at least 5% (and up to 331%) for 7 types of flawed agents (out of 12) in the FFT domain compared with the baseline team performance. In the coverage task, the improvement is at least 17% (with a maximum of 431%) for 7 types of flawed agents (out of 15). By applying the integrated trust model, when agents possess no a priori knowledge about each other's trustworthiness, it is shown that in the FFT domain, with regard to 5 of the types of flaws (out of 12), average team performance is improved by at least 6%. In the coverage domain, in presence of 7 types of flaws (out of 15), team performance is improved by at least 13%.
Based on experimental investigations, it can be concluded that (1) the proposed DoTM enables high trust evaluation accuracy in a team with agents possessing different trustworthiness; (2) the proposed NoTA is capable of obtaining the optimal strategy which determines the appropriate actions during interactive teamwork according to trust for optimised team performance; (3) without a priori knowledge about trust, the proposed integrated trust model facilitates improvement to team performance in various scenarios with agents having different trustworthiness. The proposed computational trust models can be applied to or used as an important tool to improve the performance of a team of intelligent agents conducting a variety of cooperative/collaborative tasks
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Economics
The most fundamental questions of economics are often philosophical in nature, and philosophers have, since the very beginning of Western philosophy, asked many questions that current observers would identify as economic. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Economics is an outstanding reference source for the key topics, problems, and debates at the intersection of philosophical and economic inquiry. It captures this field of countless exciting interconnections, affinities, and opportunities for cross-fertilization. Comprising 35 chapters by a diverse team of contributors from all over the globe, the Handbook is divided into eight sections: I. Rationality II. Cooperation and Interaction III. Methodology IV. Values V. Causality and Explanation VI. Experimentation and Simulation VII. Evidence VIII. Policy The volume is essential reading for students and researchers in economics and philosophy who are interested in exploring the interconnections between the two disciplines. It is also a valuable resource for those in related fields like political science, sociology, and the humanities.</p
Future Benefits, Future Burdens: Age, Policy Attitudes and Values in Australia
Existing redistributive policy settings tend to magnify the impact of demographic and structural economic change on young people, including children, while providing more protection for older citizens. It can no longer be assumed that todayâs young people will be relatively better off across their lives in terms of economic resources and opportunities than their grandparents. The thesis investigates the extent of this problem, public attitudes towards it, and the factors that might explain these attitudes. Fieldwork undertaken for the thesis aimed to determine whether young adult and senior Australians perceived current policy settings differently, how they formed their views and whether there was any support for policy reform. The fieldwork took a mixed methods approach comprising a survey and interviews with a sample of 55 participants across two age groups (18-24-year-olds and 60-70-year-olds). There were commonalities between the two groups, with both showing high levels of support for the welfare state and redistribution of income based on a strong commitment to egalitarianism, though tempered by endorsement of means-testing and other forms of conditionality. The fieldwork results aligned with prior research on the complexity of attitudes towards redistributive policy in highly meritocratic societies, with participants sometimes struggling to reconcile different values that were important to them. The key differences between the young adult and senior participants lay in how they resolved these tensions. The young adults were more likely to prioritise the values of freedom, individualism and personal rights. They were also more tolerant of market outcomes. Senior participants were more likely to prioritise equality, collectivism and responsibilities and they tended to expect more from government. Neither the young adults nor the seniors felt particularly strongly about reforming redistributive policy in the interests of fairness across age groups and sustainability into the future. The seniors were relatively sympathetic to the issues faced by young people, but factors mitigating against their active support for change included a relatively short-term outlook, a view that older people had earned the right to benefits in ways that young people had not and a tendency by some to associate need with a failure of individual responsibility. The young participants took a pragmatic view of the existing economic order, recognising the ways that it produced inequality but not holding any agents accountable or seeing any possibility of change. Their prioritisation of individual autonomy, relativistic approach to personal choice and comfort with consumption and market-oriented norms meant they didnât actively seek any alternatives to existing redistributive policy settings. The tendency of the young participants to acquiesce to the existing economic order despite perceiving it as unfair was an unexpected finding. A range of possible explanatory factors are considered, including how conditions of relative prosperity and the neo-liberal norms prevalent in Australia over the last three decades have influenced attitudes towards redistributive policy.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 202
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Social inequality before farming? Multidisciplinary approaches to the study of social organization in prehistoric and ethnographic hunter-gatherer-fisher societies
Archaeological investigations over the past 50 years have challenged the importance of domestication and food production in the emergence of institutionalized social inequality. Social inequality in the prehistoric human past developed through multiple historical processes that operate on a number of different scales of variability (e.g. social, economic, demographic, and environmental). However, in the theoretical and linguistic landscape of social inequality, there is no clear definition of what social inequality is. The lifeways of hunter-gathererfisher societies open a crucial intellectual space and challenge to find meaningful ways of using archaeological and ethnographic data to understand what social inequality exactly is with regard to variously negotiated or enforced cultural norms or ethoses of individual autonomy. This interdisciplinary edited volume gathers together researchers working in the fields of prehistoric archaeology and cultural and evolutionary anthropology. Spanning terminal Pleistocene to Holocene archaeological and ethnographic contexts from across the globe, the nineteen chapters in this volume cover a variety of topics organized around three major themes, which structure the book: 1) social inequality and egalitarianism in extant hunter-gatherer societies; 2) social inequality in Upper Palaeolithic Europe (c. 45,000â11,500 years ago); 3) social inequality in prehistoric Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher societies globally. Most chapters in this volume provide empirical content with considerations of subsistence ecology, demography, mobility, social networks, technology, childrenâs enculturation, ritual practice, rock art, dogs, warfare, lethal weaponry, and mortuary behaviour. In addition to providing new data from multiple contexts through space and time, and exploring social diversity and evolution from novel perspectives, the collection of essays in this volume will have a considerable impact on how archaeologists define and theorize pathways both towards and away from inequality within diverse social contexts
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Unsettling Times: land, political economy and protest in the Bedouin villages of central Jordan
This thesis is a study of discourses of contemporary Bedouin identity and political economy in central Jordan. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows the experiences of young, mostly male, interlocutors living in small villages around the town of Madaba, from two largely settled but still discursively Bedouin âashÄâir (socio-political categories normally glossed in English as âtribesâ); the Bani Sakhr and the Bani Hamida. I explore the ways in which these interlocutors imagine and anticipate their futures, considering the dilemmas they face in seeking meaningful social reproduction, and their entanglement with various modes of everyday politics, in order to understand how and why political forms and identity categories are adapted and reproduced, especially in the context of new rural protest movements. This provides a new approach to wider processes of nation-building, identity-formation, and state encompassment of marginal areas, in the face of mass forced migration, structural adjustment, the rise of new social forums (on- and off-line), and widespread protests. It considers questions of land settlement, sovereignty and the politics of everyday life in a rural region from which the protest movement dubbed Jordan's 'Arab Spring' emerged among supposedly traditionalist and loyalist Bedouin.
I examine the historical context behind the current social, political and economic position of my interlocutors via histories of land settlement, sedenterisation initiatives, and changing political institutions through Ottoman rule and the British Mandate, examining various processes of frontier governmentality that sought to pacify and settle, but also define and repurpose Bedouin as a conceptual category. Making an intervention in the long-standing anthropological debate around the nature and analytical usage of tribalism and the role of colonial effect in its construction in the region, I consider âashaâÄ«r as political modalities existing in a relationship of co-(re)production with the nation-state, within a political and moral economy of hospitality, protection and encompassment, which has also come to be used to symbolise the nation of Jordan itself.
In the face of postcolonial critiques and challenges over representation and Orientalism, anthropologists have rightly called for greater reflexivity and attention to positionality. Yet, more problematically, they have largely withdrawn from examinations of non-state political forms and non-national identity categories. Concepts of Bedouin and tribe, aside from their contested and critiqued construction, continue to have conceptual and political power in Jordan and elsewhere, and anthropology is at risk of leaving them to development practitioners and policy-makers. Anthropologists might formerly have explained the social setting I study as one generated by agnatic kinship and segmentary lineage. I instead reconsider âashÄâir as historically contingent political responses centred on certain limited projects of representational sovereignty.Cambridge Trust, Fitzwilliam College, Trinity College, CBRL
Pyramidal deliberative democracy
This dissertation has two main objectives. First, to outline an ICT-facilitated model of democracy called âpyramidal democracyâ that reconciles deliberative democracy with mass engagement. Second, to suggest how this model of democracy might engender the democratisation of the global economy and thus the provision of a basic level of economic security for all global citizens. At the core of the model is the pyramidal deliberative network, a means of organising citizens into small online deliberative groups and linking these groups together by means of an iterative process of delegate-selection and group-formation. The pyramidal network enables citizens to aggregate their preferences in a deliberative manner, and then project social power by authorizing the delegates at the top-tier of the pyramidal network to communicate their social demands to elected officials or to other points of authority. The envisioned outcome is the democratisation of the public sphere by means of the proliferation of deliberative networks in the government, market, and civil society spheres. Transnational pyramidal networks may make it feasible to instantiate a new citizen-based schema of global governance and, thereby, facilitate the reform of the United Nations and enable a transition towards global peace, sustainability, and distributive justice. Distributive justice might be achieved by means of implementing the six components of a democratised economy: participatory budgeting, fee-and-dividend taxes, a basic income, monetary reform, workplace democracy, and the sharing economy. Taken together, these components might enable the universal provision of a social minimum â a universal basic income sufficient for basic security and real freedom. Taken to its logical conclusion, a democratised economy may also enable a transition towards a post-scarcity economic order characterised by a maximal stock of humanmade and natural capital that would not exceed the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth
The Incarcerated Pregnancy: an Ethnographic Study of Perinatal Women in English Prisons
The UK has the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe, with pregnant women making up around 6% of the female prison population. There are limited qualitative studies published that document the experiences of pregnancy whilst serving a prison sentence. This doctoral thesis presents a qualitative, ethnographic interpretation of the pregnancy experience in three English prisons. The study took place during 2015-2016 and involved semi-structured interviews with 28 female prisoners in England who were pregnant, or had recently given birth whilst imprisoned, ten members of staff, and ten months of non-participant observation. Follow-up interviews with five women were undertaken as their pregnancies progressed to birth and the post-natal phase. Using a sociological framework of Sykesâ (1958) âpains of imprisonmentâ, this study builds upon existing knowledge and highlights the institutional responses to the pregnant prisoner. My original contribution to knowledge focuses on the fact that pregnancy is an anomaly within the patriarchal prison system. The main findings of the study can be divided into four broad concepts, namely: (a) âinstitutional thoughtlessnessâ, whereby prison life continues with little thought for those with unique physical needs, such as pregnant women; and (b) âinstitutional ignominyâ where the women experience âshamingâ as a result of institutional practices which entail their being displayed in public and characterised with institutional symbols of imprisonment. The study also reveals new information about the (c) coping strategies adopted by pregnant prisoners; and (d) elucidates how the women navigate the system to negotiate entitlements and seek information about their rights. Additionally, a new typology of prison officer has emerged from this study: the âmaternalâ is a member of prison staff who accompanies pregnant, labouring women to hospital where the role of âbed watch officerâ can become that of a birth supporter. This research has tried to give voice to pregnant imprisoned women and to highlight gaps in existing policy guidelines and occasional blatant disregard for them. In this sense, the study has the potential to springboard future inquiry and to be a vehicle for positive reform for pregnant women across the prison estate
On Measuring and Explaining Neighbourhood Success:
This study combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to explain which factors contribute to a problem-free or problematic functioning of neighbourhoods in general and especially of Dutch neighbourhoods that were built in the first years after World War II. An important part of the book is about the development of measuring instruments. Special attention is given to the development of a risk scale that offers researchers and policymakers the opportunity to distinguish on a metric level between problematic and successful neighbourhoods.
This book brings together key insights from Urban Studies and central elements of Behavioural Game Theory. The author applies the notions of strong reciprocity and altruistic punishment in Prisonerâs Dilemmas and Assurance Games to describe and explain the interdependent choices that residents make when they act as producers and maintainers of the social climate in the daily living environment of a problem-free early post-Second World War neighbourhood.