Social representations of HIV/AIDS in five Central European and Eastern European countries: A multidimensional analysis

Cognitive processing models of risky sexual behaviour have proliferated in the two decades since the first reporting of HIV/AIDS, but far less attention has been paid to individual and group representations of the epidemic and the relationship between these representations and reported sexual behaviours. In this study, 494 business people and medics from Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland and Russia sorted free associations around HIV/AIDS in a matrix completion task. Exploratory factor and multidimensional scaling analyses revealed two main dimensions (labelled ‘Sex’ and ‘Deadly disease’), with significant cultural and gender variations along both dimension scores. Possible explanations for these results are discussed in the light of growing concerns over the spread of the epidemic in this region

Family composition and age at menarche: findings from the international Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children Study

This research was funded by The University of St Andrews and NHS Health Scotland.Background Early menarche has been associated with father absence, stepfather presence and adverse health consequences in later life. This article assesses the association of different family compositions with the age at menarche. Pathways are explored which may explain any association between family characteristics and pubertal timing. Methods Cross-sectional, international data on the age at menarche, family structure and covariates (age, psychosomatic complaints, media consumption, physical activity) were collected from the 2009–2010 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey. The sample focuses on 15-year old girls comprising 36,175 individuals across 40 countries in Europe and North America (N = 21,075 for age at menarche). The study examined the association of different family characteristics with age at menarche. Regression and path analyses were applied incorporating multilevel techniques to adjust for the nested nature of data within countries. Results Living with mother (Cohen’s d = .12), father (d = .08), brothers (d = .04) and sisters (d = .06) are independently associated with later age at menarche. Living in a foster home (d = −.16), with ‘someone else’ (d = −.11), stepmother (d = −.10) or stepfather (d = −.06) was associated with earlier menarche. Path models show that up to 89% of these effects can be explained through lifestyle and psychological variables. Conclusions Earlier menarche is reported amongst those with living conditions other than a family consisting of two biological parents. This can partly be explained by girls’ higher Body Mass Index in these families which is a biological determinant of early menarche. Lower physical activity and elevated psychosomatic complaints were also more often found in girls in these family environments.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Variability in the articulation and perception of a word

The words making up a speaker’s mental lexicon may be stored as abstract phonological representations or else they may be stored as detailed acoustic-phonetic representations. The speaker’s articulatory gestures intended to represent a word show relatively high variability in spontaneous speech. The aim of this paper is to explore the acoustic-phonetic patterns of the Hungarian word akkor ‘then, at that time’. Ten speakers’ recorded spontaneous speech with a total duration of 255 minutes and containing 286 occurrences of akkor were submitted to analysis. Durational and frequency patterns were measured by means of the Praat software. The results obtained show higher variability both within and across speakers than it had been expected. Both the durations of the words and those of the speech sounds, as well as the vowel formants, turned out to significantly differ across speakers. In addition, the results showed considerable within-speaker variation as well. The correspondence between variability in the objective acoustic-phonetic data and the flexibility and adaptive nature of the mental representation of a word will be discussed.For the perception experiments, two speakers of the previous experiment were selected whose 48 words were then used as speech material. The listeners had to judge the quality of the words they heard using a five-point scale. The results confirmed that the listeners used diverse strategies and representations depending on the acoustic-phonetic parameters of the series of occurrences of akkor

Kausaliteit in sociologisch onderzoek : een beoordeling van de zgn. causal modeling-technieken in het licht van verschillende wijsgerige opvattingen over kausaliteit /

Diss. doct. sociale wetenschappe