Fresher with flavour : young women smokers' constructions and experiences of menthol capsule cigarettes and regular cigarettes

Background: Flavour capsule cigarettes are one of the fastest growing segments of the tobacco market, and there is evidence that Australian young people are increasingly using menthol flavoured capsule cigarettes. This qualitative research examines how young women construct and experience menthol flavour capsule cigarettes as part of their smoking practices, and explores the perceived differences between menthol capsule cigarettes and regular cigarettes. Semi-structured face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with 41 Australian young women smokers, using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Results: Findings reveal that the perceived fresh and improved taste of menthol and the ability to customise the smoking process positively contributed to young women’s experiences of smoking menthol capsule cigarettes. In particular, menthol capsule flavour cigarettes were constructed by the young women as “fresh”, “light” and “minty”, and “popping” the menthol capsule allowed the young women to personalise their smoking experience. Conclusion: These results indicate that specific public health campaigns and legislation should be developed to counter the powerfully alluring effects and the innovative appeal of menthol capsule cigarettes

Negotiating Mothering and Academic Work: A Mixed Methods Intersectional Feminist Study

This Report details the results of focus group research carried out with academic mothers at WSU, as well as survey research from a national sample of academic mothers across Australian Universities. The results show that many of our most stubbornly entrenched inequalities do not simply follow gendered fault lines, but rather care fault lines; with mothers doubly disadvantaged in academia by their gender and caring role

Gender equality mainstreaming and the Australian academy : paradoxical effects?

Australian Universities consistently rank highly on lists that celebrate the most gender equal higher education institutions in the world. Despite participation in institutional frameworks for gender equity accreditation, what often lies beneath the outward display of gender equality is a lived experience of inequality. Whilst there is relative gender equality amongst academics employed at universities overall, men continue to dominate appointments at the professorial or senior executive levels. At the same time, gender asymmetries make women’s access to the opportunities and resources that are highly valued by the sector difficult. Women who experience intersections with care, mothering, race, sexual identity, class, and ability face additional obstacles. In this paper, three women in Australian academia attempt to disrupt the dominant masculine ideology and value system by sharing our lived experience of gender (in)equality in the academy

Unmet needs of Australians in endometriosis research : a qualitative study of research priorities, drivers, and barriers to participation in people with endometriosis

Background and Objectives: Endometriosis causes significant personal and societal burden. Despite this, research funding lags behind other chronic conditions. Determining where to prioritise these limited funds is therefore vital. Research priorities may also differ between individuals with endometriosis and clinicians/researchers. The aim of this research project is to explore research priorities and factors shaping participation in endometriosis research from the perspective of people with endometriosis in Australia. Materials and Methods: Four focus groups involving 30 people with endometriosis were conducted and analysed using qualitative inductive content analysis. Results: Two categories were developed from the data: unmet research needs and motivators and barriers to participation in endometriosis research. Participants expressed interest in developing non-invasive diagnostic tools and a more multidisciplinary or holistic approach to treatment. Participants urgently desired research on treatment options for symptom management, with many prioritising non-hormonal treatments, including medicinal cannabis and complementary medicine. Others prioritised research on the causes of endometriosis over research on treatments to assist with prevention and eventual cure of the disease. The main drivers for participating in endometriosis research were hope for symptom improvement and a reduction in time to diagnosis. Research design features that were important in supporting participation included ease of access to testing centres (e.g., for blood tests) and sharing test results and automated data collection reminders, with simple strategies to record data measurements. Research incentives for younger people with endometriosis and a broad dissemination of information about research projects was considered likely to increase participant numbers. Barriers included time commitments, a lack of flexibility around research appointments for data collection, travel or work commitments, concerns about the safety of some products, and trying to conceive a child. Conclusions: People with endometriosis were open to participating in research they felt aligned with their needs, with a significant focus on diagnostic tools and symptom relief. However, researchers must co-design approaches to ensure convenience and flexibility for research participation

Suitability of vocabulary assessments : comparing child scores and parent perspectives on communicative inventories for Aboriginal families in Western Sydney

Purpose: Standardised testing tools within an Aboriginal Australian context have been found to produce inaccurate results due to language and cultural differences. The primary aim of the study is to compare Aboriginal children’s scores in urban NSW across two language assessment tools: the Early Language Inventory (ERLI) and the Australian English Communicative Development Inventory, short form (OZI-SF). These tools are vocabulary checklists for children aged approximately 12–30 months. OZI-SF is an Australian tool for mainstream use and ERLI has been developed with and for Aboriginal families, but not in urban contexts, so its suitability there is unknown, given the great cultural and linguistic diversity among Aboriginal people across Australia. The second aim is to identify which tool is more culturally appropriate for urban Aboriginal families through parent perspectives. Method: Overall, 30 parents (of 31 children) participated in the study to complete the ERLI, and 14 parents from this sample completed both the ERLI and OZI-SF and interviews to explore child scores and parent perspectives, in a mixed methods approach. Result: Aboriginal children (N = 14) scored higher on the ERLI than the OZI-SF. Gender and age were significant contributors to the scores as scores were higher for older children and higher for girls than boys. In answer to the second aim, four themes emerged to explain parental perspectives and their preference for the ERLI, which supported connection to culture and language. Conclusion: Findings have implications for paediatric language assessments with urban Aboriginal families in clinical, educational and research settings

Contextualising the medical risks of cigarette smoking : Australian young women's perceptions of anti-smoking campaigns

This paper presents results from a qualitative analysis of the perceptions Australian young women cigarette smokers have of the medical health messages espoused through anti-smoking campaigns. The study aims to show that the deployment of medico-scientific knowledges in the most recent series of anti-smoking campaigns disseminated in New South Wales Australia (those which emerged in the 1990s under the auspices of the National Tobacco Campaign (NTC)), means that for a number of reasons, the anti-smoking message becomes detached from the everyday life circumstances and smoking choices of the young women. Semi-structured face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 20 Australian young women smokers aged 18 to 24. The sample was purposively selected according to gender, age, and smoking status. Interviewees were drawn from the Sydney metropolitan and surrounding Sydney area, the Newcastle area and the Hunter Valley area. The interviews were one-off and took place from May to December 2002. The study found that there are a range of important issues which flow from the tendency of the anti-smoking discourse to characterise and profile smoking as a 'risky' health behaviour. For young women who smoke for the positive benefits associated with the activity (such as stress relief and enhanced social interactions), the risks may be justified as part of a risk profiling, where the smoker sees the risk as a risk they are willing to take in an inherently uncertain and risky world. For anti-smoking campaigns to impact on young people, they must adopt strategies which increase the awareness of young people regarding their own particular health risks, and do so in ways which are non-judgemental and even optimistic, without tacitly endorsing risky behaviour

Performing femininity : young women's gendered practice of cigarette smoking

Throughout the last 20 years in Australia, young women have started smoking at a higher rate than young men, and they seem less inclined to quit. Moreover, smoking has dire health consequences that are unique to women, and smoking is now seen as a ‘woman’s issue’. The research reported in this article explores what cigarette smoking means to young women, to see if smoking forms part of their performative gender identity. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with a volunteer sample of 20 women smokers aged 18–24 to explore subjective interpretations of cigarette smoking and the gendered meanings associated with smoking. Grounded theory was used in the analysis of the data, and to generate a theory around the shared phenomenon of smoking. The analysis indicates that the concept of femininity is important both to the accounts that young women give about smoking and to their gender identity. For example, they choose cigarettes branded as feminine, and hold and ash their cigarettes in ‘gender-appropriate’ ways. Drawing upon the notion of gender performance, I argue that smoking is a gender act that can be internalised and which, when repeatedly performed by women in gender-appropriate ways, constructs a ‘feminine’ gender identity

The art of governing smoking : discourse analysis of Australian anti-smoking campaigns

During the last 20 years, anti-smoking campaigns have been developed in Australia in an effort to reduce the prevalence of smoking. Existing research indicates that these campaigns have provoked an increase in the negative attitudes towards smoking, and messages encouraging people to quit have reached increasing numbers of men and women. While existing research shows that anti-smoking campaigns are ‘effective’ at reducing rates of smoking, there is a distinct lack of research that theorizes about why anti-smoking campaigns are ‘effective’. In this paper, Foucauldian discourse analysis is employed to examine a recent series of television anti-smoking campaigns in New South Wales Australia, and to explore the knowledges and techniques used to construct and disseminate an anti-smoking message. The aim of this paper is to use a number of examples from this series of anti-smoking campaigns to show that the medical knowledge, imagery, and language dominantly used, legitimates and confirms the ‘expert’ status of medicine in regard to smoking conduct, and normalizes health conduct according to the medical dichotomy of healthy/non-smoking individuals and unhealthy/smoking individuals. I argue that the anti-smoking discourse disseminated in these campaigns is underpinned by some of the key features of neo-liberalism, and passively coerces individuals into making ‘healthy’ choices. The paper concludes by problematizing both the universal applicability of these anti-smoking campaigns, and the notion of self-governance, specifically in relation to young people who smoke

Viewpoint : Visibilising care in the academy : (re)performing academic mothering in the transformative moment of COVID-19

The effects of COVID-19 have been profoundly felt across higher education as across broader society. In particular, the pandemic has revealed that many of our most stubbornly entrenched inequalities do not simply follow gendered fault lines, but rather care fault lines. In this article, we adopt a maternal epistemology and collaborative witnessing to outline the disruption that academic mothers have experienced during the pandemic. However, we argue that this disruption is not simply obstructive to academic mothers and other caregivers. Rather, COVID-19 has provided a potentially transformative moment for the visibility and normalisation of care in the academy. It has forced the complex negotiation of paid work and care work that academic mothers must constantly manage into the spotlight. The pandemic has provoked an opportunity for a different performance of mothering in the academy; one that does not require us to invisibilise our care to be valued. This (re)performance and revaluation has the potential to reform the cultural landscapes of the academy, towards spaces in which care is reimagined as not simply an encumberment but also an enrichment

"You get past the packaging" : young women smokers' resistance to standardized cigarette packaging

We examined how young women construct and experience plain tobacco packaging. Forty-one Australian young women who are current smokers took part in this qualitative interview research. Data was analyzed using constructivist grounded theory, with the core category about the strategic ways young women resist plain tobacco packaging. The majority of women reported that plain packaging was unappealing and that the larger health warnings were shocking and offensive. However, almost all reported being desensitized to the graphic health warnings. The graphic warnings were seen as “fake” or lacking in credibility, and irrelevant to the women’s life stage. Importantly, the majority of women engaged in practices to strategically resist and avoid health warnings on the packs as a way to continue smoking. Our findings point to the need to develop health warnings on tobacco products that are gender specific and focus on proximal social consequences to increase salience for young women smokers