A drop in the bucket: Collective efficacy perceptions affect waste minimising behaviours

The goal of this thesis was to inform a social marketing effort designed to increase environmentally friendly behaviours in an effort to ensure a more sustainable future. This study attempted to gain a better understanding of the discrepancy that exists between pro-environmental concerns and pro-environmental actions by exploring efficacy perceptions. Efficacy beliefs were compared for three groups of individuals: 1) environmentally active/members of an environmental group; 2) environmentally active/not members of an environmental group; 3) environmentally inactive and not members of an environmental group. Six focus groups were conducted and interviewees were recruited from the Earth Carers\u27 organisation and the suburb of Subiaco in Western Australia. The results indicated that having confidence in one\u27s ability to perform waste minimising activities (self-efficacy) and believing that one\u27s own actions are effective in reducing waste (solution efficacy) were related to being environmentally active and belonging to a defined environmental group

Communication on a health-related website offering therapeutic support: Phase 1 of the HeartNET website

This paper investigates the usefulness of a modest-budget website set up to support people recovering from heart-related incidents through a combination of all or some of the following: surgery, drugs, and lifestyle change. Online communities have been shown to offer support for their members. Ideally, the members of this experimental site would eventually constitute an online community. Effective interaction and personal communication indicate that an online community is developing. The opposite is also true: declining and aborted exchanges might indicate a failure to establish community. This paper reports on the first eight weeks of the experimental website HeartNET. As a result of findings during phase one, researchers are radically rethinking the second phase of the research project. Even so, the early findings include some evidence of effective communication and hint that phase two may see the emergence of online community

Finding a New Kind of Knowledge on the HeartNET Website

Background: A website developed by the National Heart Foundation (WA Division) and Edith Cowan University, with the help of an Australian Research Council–Linkage grant, provides insight into the sense of isolation experienced by many heart patients which prompts them to engage in a relentless search to answer the fundamental question: why me? Objective: To discover whether an online community for people with heart conditions may help instil a sense of sharing a journey with others, and to assess the impact of this shared experience. Methods: The qualitative data constituted 50 in-depth interviews with heart patients using the HeartNET website. This website, with its 600+ membership, also provides Discussion Board data to add depth to the analysis. Results: Patients describe how their unsatisfactory search for information in one ‘place’ (the Internet) led them to discover a new ‘place’ (an online community) where they could ‘ask difficult questions’, and ‘gain support and wisdom’ from others. Conclusion: This paper suggests that, when anxious patients seek health related information, for example in a library, they may benefit from being given contact points to communicate with others who find themselves in similar situations. Internet-based social software (Web 2.0) can provide this kind of communication

Another Way of Saying Enough: Environmental Concern and Popular Mobilization in Kyrgyzstan

This article is a foray into the understudied issue of environmental protest politics in Central Asia. Specifically, it uses Kyrgyzstan as a case study to test the argument that environmental concerns mobilized people to engage in protest and in ways different from other kinds of protest. This essay presents the first systematic study of public opinion about the environment in Kyrgyzstan. It includes results from a 2009 nationwide survey, over 100 expert and elite interviews, and newspaper content analysis. Furthermore, it spatially analyzes these results to identify geographical variation in public perception and political event occurrence patterns. Protest engagement is a complex process determined by the interaction of several factors, and is not explained solely by affluence, rationality, or grievances. Eco-mobilization - collective political action about the environment - represents a class of protest events that offers a different view into mass discontent in the former Soviet Union and neo-patrimonial societies. The study finds that these political actions about the environment are not necessarily elite driven; there is a basic foundation of national concern and salience of these issues, and demonstrated environmental beliefs do help to explain protest behavior