The Medium Shapes the Message: McLuhan and Grice Revisited in Race Talk Online

Compared with the wealth of research accumulated on face‐to‐face social interactions, relatively little research has examined race talk within anonymous Web 2.0 mediums. We investigated online threaded comments on YouTube video clips of two race‐related incidents involving New Zealand television presenter Paul Henry. Through thematic content analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis, it was found that characteristics unique to Web 2.0 were associated with the appearance of old‐fashioned racism and high‐levels of obscenity (together with modern racism/symbolic racism). The hyper‐low context of communication led to interpretive ambiguity; conversation sequences failed to follow Gricean maxims for cooperative communication, with most comments attracting no replies and the modal sequence being two turns. There was almost never resolution to a disagreement online: rather there was points‐scoring against opposing opinions and a tangential style of dialogue influenced by the asynchronous and anonymous nature of communication. The YouTube medium shaped but did not determine the message, as obscenity and racist content in the target video from the eliciting public figure influenced the subsequent degree of obscenity and hostility in the responses. A third corpus that examined responses to our own research on race talk presented on a news website (stuff.co.nz) underlined this point by engendering a dramatically different response to the same subject, retaining the tangential style of communication, but with little to no obscenity. A framework to understand race talk as a function of both medium and context effects is proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of social support on health status and life satisfaction in people with a spinal cord injury

Abstract

Purpose: Assessment of the impact of received social support on functional health status and life satisfaction in people with spinal cord injury (SCI). Design: Respondents were 176 people with SCI between 18 and 65 years of age and living in the community. Mean time after injury was 3.6 years. Problem-oriented and emotion-oriented support, received from family members, friends and relatives, and professionals were assessed with the Sources of Social Support Inventory. Health status was assessed with the Sickness Impact Profile 68 and life satisfaction with the Life Satisfaction Questionnaire. Structural equation modelling with LISREL V8 was used to study relationships of different types and sources of social support with health status and life satisfaction.Results: Emotion-oriented support led to better psychological functioning and to greater life satisfaction. In addition, emotion-oriented support from the family led to greater satisfaction with relationships and emotion-oriented support from friends and acquaintances led to less satisfaction with social life. Problem-oriented support was not clearly related to health status and life satisfaction; there was only a negative relation between problem-oriented support and satisfaction with social life. Support, problem-oriented or emotion-oriented, from health-care professionals showed no relationships with health status or life satisfaction.Conclusions: Emotion-oriented support from family members and friends was most important for people with SCI. Greater problem-oriented support appears to be related to poorer life satisfaction.     

Perceptions of Violence and Crime as Aggression by Turkish—Islamic Families in Johannesburg

This study explored perceptions of aggression of Turkish-Islamic families with adolescent children in a large South African city. Participants were from four Turkish families with adolescent children (father = 4, mothers = 4; children = 5). Data were collected via interviews and analyzed. The families considered aggression to comprise crime and violence. They also considered it a universal phenomenon.     

On the logic of psychoanalytic theory

Psychoanalytic theory shows some specific features and problems. It exists in a number of variations, according to different schools as well as cultural and subcultural conditions, with different understandings even of core concepts. Instead of producing definite knowledge, results remain uncertain. They vary in use and imply a permanent reworking of ideas and conceptions. This is the effect of the kind of theory psychoanalysis has to use. Since psychodynamics are a special kind of heterogeneous, changing, always different, emergent-in a word, autopoietic-reality, psychoanalysis cannot use the methods of a denotative theory (algorithmic reduction leading to strictly defined and formulated calculations) but has to use connotative theories. Connotative theories use open concepts which provide an active and flexible access to autopoietic reality. They are able to cope with the difference between singularities as well as with the distance between general logic and empirical reality. Problems tied to this possibility are structural fuzziness, a dependence on forms of use, multiple paradigms and difficulties in legitimation and balance of theories. This causes problems of institutionalisation. These problems are not a sign of immaturity but the normal way in which connotative theories appear and develop. They can therefore not be eliminated but only be treated in a better way.     

A model relating transfer of learning and correlation

The theoretical and practical importance of a double undertaking is discussed: the development of learning and transfer taxonomies with psychometric relevance and the building of psychometric classificatory systems with implications for learning and instruction. Psychometric classifications of human performances are most often based on the covariation of individual differences. The model presented justifies the expectation that the transfer from learning one task to learning another is linearly dependent on the coefficient of intercorrelation between the two tasks when the coefficient is corrected for attenuation. Two studies so far have explicitly confirmed the main deductions from this model. Contrary to the predictions, however, the regression curves yielded negative intercepts. Two empirically testable explanations are offered, one of which would be in full accordance with the model, while the other would call for a further assumption.     

Causal implications of Jaśkowski

Part 1 describes Stanis?aw Ja?kowski's concept of defining some often used con ditionals, namely, factorial, ewfficient and definitive implications. Part 2 contains the results strictly connected with the theory of the above implications.     

The effect of manipulated success ratios on task preference

The hypothesis that success influences task preferences was tested by subjecting 230 Ss to three different success-failure reinforcement schedules and observing subsequent preferences for the tasks concerned. Success ratios of 85-15%, 70-30%, and 50-50% in tasks dealing with unpreferred stimuli were used. Results supported the hypothesis: the probability of change in task preference was greatest under high success reinforcement ratio conditions.     

the role of opportunity structures in older women workers' careers

This article describes contextual factors that exert influence on whether, when, and how people retire. The authors use opportunity structures as a framework for describing these processes. Interview data were gathered from 21 late‐career women; 2 illustrative cases depict differing career circumstances. Several important contextual factors were identified, including organizational membership, occupational membership, work peers, and the history of opportunities. Depending on the circumstances, these factors can enhance or limit the range of retirement‐related options. Employment counselors can help expand this range by advocating training and job placement centers, examining norms and combating stereotypes, and encouraging job redesign.