Effects of Wartime Crisis Perceptions on the Effectiveness of Political Advertising: The Moderating Role of Political Involvement

This research examines how political advertising is operated in a volatile context, such as a state of war or instability. The study employed a self-completing cross-sectional survey to gather the data in the period of the 2016 Syrian elections for members of parliament. The research tested the hypothetical model and its equivalency related to political involvement through the use of structural equation modelling. The outcomes of the tests revealed the structure of belief as a four-dimensional variate. The four dimensions encapsulate information, veracity, sarcasm, and cynicism. In addition, perceptions during conflicts had a negative effect on attitude through sarcasm displayed by voters with low political involvement. The results also found that negative attitude had a link with lower degrees of veracity with regards to voters who are less involved but to greater degrees of cynicism highly politically active individuals. We found that less favourable attitudes to political advertising lowered the likelihoods for voters to watch political ads or announcements, support a runner, and be willing to go to the poll. We found no relation between the fact of paying attention to political advertising and intention of voters to use their ballot

Exploring perceptions of advertising ethics: an informant-derived approach

Whilst considerable research exists on determining consumer responses to pre-determined statements within numerous ad ethics contexts, our understanding of consumer thoughts regarding ad ethics in general remains lacking. The purpose of our study therefore is to provide a first illustration of an emic and informant-based derivation of perceived ad ethics. The authors use multi-dimensional scaling as an approach enabling the emic, or locally derived deconstruction of perceived ad ethics. Given recent calls to develop our understanding of ad ethics in different cultural contexts, and in particular within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, we use Lebanon—the most ethically charged advertising environment within MENA—as an illustrative context for our study. Results confirm the multi-faceted and pluralistic nature of ad ethics as comprising a number of dimensional themes already salient in the existing literature but in addition, we also find evidence for a bipolar relationship between individual themes. The specific pattern of inductively derived relationships is culturally bound. Implications of the findings are discussed, followed by limitations of the study and recommendations for further research

Preliminary piloting and validation of a questionnaire identifying basic clinical skills practised by research nurses

Clinical research nurses (CRNs) need to be competent in both clinical and research skills. In the past 10 years there has been increasing focus on developing the research competencies of CRNs. Employers, however, use the nurses’ registered status as a proxy measure of clinical competence to perform their duties. The true extent of what clinical skills are practised by CRNs in a large NHS trust is unclear and there is a lack of validated measures to obtain this information. By using a mixed-methods approach of questionnaire and semi-structured interview, we aimed to pilot and validate a questionnaire to identify CRNs’ self-reported confidence with clinical skills

Personalization in e-campaigning: A cross-national comparison of personalization strategies used on candidate websites of 17 countries in EP elections 2009

Contains fulltext : 116608.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Candidate websites provide politicians with opportunities to present themselves in an individual way. To a greater or lesser extent politicians share personal information in their biographies and provide options to connect with citizens by putting links on their websites to their social networking sites (SNS). In this paper, although acting on different levels, both strategies are indicated as forms of personalization strategies used by politicians in their online communication. This cross-national study explores the use of these strategies on candidate websites in 17 countries during the elections for the European Parliament (EP) in June 2009. This is a comparative study of the personalized and individualized campaigning styles used during elections. Findings show that three general dimensions of personalization can be distinguished; ‘professional’, ‘home and family’ and ‘personal preferences’. While the first two dimensions show a higher level of use among candidates, the third dimension on private information is hardly used. Results show also that countries from Central Europe inform their citizens more about their professional and personal circumstances, and Mediterranean countries use personalization strategies the least. Furthermore, the overall findings show that SNS were not frequently used during the 2009 e-campaigning. West European countries use links to SNS more frequently than countries in other regions. In general these findings suggest cross-cultural differences regarding online personalized political campaigning

Reviewing key concepts in research on political news journalism: Conceptualizations, operationalizations, and propositions for future research

Unfortunately much existing scholarly research on news performance suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity and comparability. The authors will summarize existing efforts to analyze news content in ways that is comparable across cultures and facilitates cumulative science. Using six concepts that feature prominently in Western discussions of news performance – negativity, bias/diversity, hard/soft news, game/strategy, interpretative journalism, personalization – the authors will make practical suggestions as to how a more standardized approach to operationalizing and measuring them will improve generalizability of future content analyses