‘Fractured communities’: uncertainty,stress, and (a lack of) communal coping in Palestinian refugee camps

This study examined how communal coping reveals itself in Palestinian refugee camps and the conditions that promote or prevent its occurrence. Individual and dyadic interviews were conducted with 40 mothers and one of their adolescent children living in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The results revealed that communal coping existed within the mother–adolescent dyad to a certain extent, but was rare within the larger context of the refugee camps. While families and neighbors did not typically verbalize their hardships and actively cope with them as a group, there was often an implicit recognition that they were all experiencing the same uncertainty and stress. Acting upon their uncertainty as a collective, however, was greatly hampered by mistrust within and outside the camps, due to widespread violence, privacy violations, vying for scarce resources, and disloyalty. Parents and adolescents also engaged in protective buffering whereby they attempted to reduce the stress of the family by keeping stress and fears to themselves rather than communicating about them. Even though protective buffering helped the refugees cope with chronic uncertainty and maintain a sense of normalcy, it prevented them from acting upon the problem as a group. Finally, parents emphasized that the child’s education provided hope for the future. Practical implications are discussed.     

All Stressed Out,But Does Anyone Notice? Stressors Affecting Public Libraries

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to identify some of the most common stressors affecting public librarians. Current public librarians were recruited from across the country to sort and rank a provided set of 25 stressors affecting public librarians. The stressors were developed from a review of the literature and anecdotal discussions with public librarians. Participants sorted the stressors according to the extent to which each affected them personally in their workplace. They could also give information about other sources of stress they experienced at work, or which they see other public librarians experiencing.     

Therapy Dogs in Academic Libraries: A Way to Foster Student Engagement and Mitigate Self-Reported Stress during Finals

More and more modern academic libraries are turning to student engagement activities designed to welcome students into Academia, join a community of scholars, and avail themselves of the full range of resources and services that a university library can provide. One unusual, but inexpensive and highly effective method of engaging students is bringing therapy dogs into the library. This article begins by explaining how therapy dogs differ from other types of dogs and how to counter objections to library engagement activities involving canines. It then offers a research-based rationale for human-canine interaction that is consistent with an academic library's mission. Next, the article addresses the planning/implementation phase a student engagement event involving handler/therapy dog teams, reviews the literature on successful programs at various institutions, and offers guidance to others seeking to initiate a similar program. A project of this type depends upon collaboration among faculty members, college students, support staff, volunteers, and the larger community. Finally, the article highlights results from a questionnaire administered to 449 students during a sequence of three “de-stress during exam week” events. Overall, the survey data suggest that: (1) social media was the most effective means of advertising, (2) students strongly supported the continuation of the event, and (3) 95% of the student participants considered interaction with the therapy dogs to be a means of stress reduction.     

The Effects of Labyrinth Walking in an Academic Library

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to determine if labyrinth walking in an academic library would reduce library user stress and promote relaxation. A non- equivalent control group design was employed. Systolic blood pressure was significant for time effect (effect size of.136, and power.721). Pulse rate was significant for time effect (effect size 0.93, and power.507). Satisfaction survey results demonstrated increased satisfaction after labyrinth walking. Data from this pilot will form the basis of a larger scale study to determine the effect of labyrinth walking on stress particularly in high-stress learning environments.     

Telenovelas and politics in the 1994 Brazilian presidential election*

Brazilian telenovelas (soap operas) have been playing a growing and important role in the discussion of political and social problems in Brazil. This specific role of melodrama in Brazilian culture imposes the necessity of exploring its influence upon the political process, avoiding the prejudice and indifference of the traditional approach to this problem on the part of political scientists. The objective of this article is to stress the importance of telenovelas for the interpretation of the Brazilian political process and to show their role as a key public forum in the discussion of political and social issues. A content analysis of three telenovelas that preceded the 1994 Brazilian presidential election is developed to identify the constitutive elements of the “scenario of representation of politics” (SR‐P) within which the electoral process took place. The identification of the SR‐P's constitutive elements is made on the basis of three telenovelas produced by TV Globo: Renascer (Revival), Fera Ferida (Wounded Beast) and Pátria Minha (My Homeland). The implications of the study for the analysis of political and electoral processes are discussed.     

Team formation and team impact: The balance between team freshness and repeat collaboration

Incorporating fresh members into teams is considered a pathway to team creativity. However, whether freshness improves team performance or not remains unclear, as well as the optimal involvement of fresh members for team performance. Focusing on team impact, one important dimension of team performance, this study uses a group of authors on the byline of a publication as a proxy for a scientific team and quantifies team impact by citations of a paper authored by this team, i.e., article team impact. We extend an indicator, i.e., article team freshness, to measure the extent to which a scientific team incorporates new members, by calculating the fraction of new collaboration relations established within the team. Based on more than 43 million scientific publications covering more than a half-century of research from Microsoft Academic Graph, this study provides a holistic picture of the current development of article team freshness by outlining the temporal evolution of freshness, and its disciplinary distribution. Subsequently, using a multivariable regression approach, we examine the association between article team freshness and papers’ short-term and long-term citations. The major findings are as follows: (1) article team freshness in scientific teams has been increasing in the past half-century; (2) there exists an inverted-U-shaped association between article team freshness and papers’ citations in all the disciplines and different periods; (3) article team impact is hampered by article team freshness in small-sized teams, while medium-sized and large-sized teams can benefit more from article team freshness before the fraction of new collaboration reaches its turning point. The findings of this study provide implications for the practice of team formation and team management in science.     

All in a Day's Work

Summary

Although reference librarians today have much in common with yesterday's counterparts, their days are much more hectic. Technological advances, changes in law and society, demands from a diverse group of library users, and an increased workload make time and stress management important issues to explore. This article examines reference librarianship in the academic environment, discusses how reference librarianship has changed, and offers suggestions on coping with the stresses those changes have caused.     

How computer and Internet use influences mental health: a five-wave latent growth model

The study used a five-wave latent growth model to compare two sets of competing hypotheses about the influence of overall computer and Internet use on mental health. The secondary data set from the Korean Youth Panel Survey (KYPS) with a valid sample size of 2,003 respondents was used for the analysis. The mediating role of friendship–closeness was examined to compare the social augmentation hypothesis with the social displacement hypothesis. The mediating role of academic stress was tested to compare the mood enhancement hypothesis with the problematic Internet use (PIU) model. The study was consistent with the social displacement hypothesis, where a higher initial computer and Internet use predicted a lower initial friendship–closeness, which, in turn, resulted in a faster decrease in mental health. The study provided reconciliation for the mood enhancement hypothesis and the PIU model. Although a higher initial computer and Internet use predicted lower initial mental health levels through academic stress, schoolchildren and adolescents with more computer and Internet use experienced a slower decrease in mental health because of the mediating role of academic stress.     

图书馆员工作压力及其应对策略

分析了图书馆员工作压力的外在表现及其对工作的影响,剖析了工作压力的成因,提出了要从图书馆和馆员两个方面缓解工作压力,减少工作压力的危害,提高馆员工作的主动性、能动性和创新性。     

Personal and Organizational Predictors of Compassion Fatigue Symptoms in Local Television Journalists

Compassion fatigue is a form of traumatic stress that results from repeated encounters with victims of trauma and traumatic situations. Most often studied in counselors, nurses, and first responders, this study applies the concept to journalists who often encounter the same victims and traumatic scenes. Seventy reporters from different television markets were measured for the personal and professional factors that contribute to compassion fatigue symptoms and its components of secondary traumatic stress and burnout. Results showed personal traumatic events and perceived peer support were the strongest predictors of compassion fatigue symptoms in television reporters. Implications for reporter self-care and newsroom protocols are discussed.     

Analyzing Socialist Press Photographs: A Contribution to Critical Visual Methodology

The article aims to present a possible research design for analyzing historical press photographs published during the socialist regime. It introduces a design structure that comprises an epistemological basis (interpretivism), theoretical perspective (constructivism and poststructuralism), methodological approach (social semiotics and multimodality), and method of analysis (social semiotic analysis). The aim of this study is to demonstrate that it is possible to apply a postmodern approach to historical photographs and to prove that concepts that are applied within the research on liberal societies can be used within the research on socialist societies if some specific conditions are taken into account. Such an assumption is documented by a case study that presents an analysis of a photograph published in the Czechoslovak press in 1968.     

Post-Industrial Cultural Criticism

Integrating perspectives from research into cultural and post-industrial journalism, this article presents a pilot study of websites with reviews of arts and culture conducted by amateurs. Such websites constitute a popular space for cultural criticism, and one that challenges traditional hierarchies within journalism. The article maps which Danish websites conduct arts and culture reviews, asks what features these websites have that facilitate public discourse, and measures the actual discussion on the websites. While academic diagnoses of the state of the online public sphere have generally been discouraging, this article argues that this is partly due to a strong focus on politics rather than on culture and illustrates how the cultural public sphere of online reviews constitutes a heterogeneous space for a public discussion about arts and culture. Furthermore, it shows that some amateur reviewers have highly specialized knowledge of culture and, on that basis, argues that the emergence of this type of critic might represent a qualitative strengthening of cultural criticism.     

Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.     

The Relevance of Journalism

The media-saturated nature of everyday life is well acknowledged in current audience research, but the role of journalism for people living in this digitalised environment remains less clear. To provide a better understanding of the role of journalism and news in everyday life, this article states the case for combining two complementary analytical perspectives in cultural audience research that draw on the framework of practice theory. We need to focus on both interpersonal communication practices within social networks and on discursive practices and patterns of how people use the media. Empirically, this article draws on an extensive audience study conducted in Finland, whose findings provide a cause for moderate optimism regarding the sustaining relevance of journalism in people's everyday life in the digital era. Firstly, social networks—both offline and online—constitute a vital structure within which the output of journalism is rendered meaningful by users. Secondly, the discursive practices applied by the participants emphasise the importance of news as a central means of orientation to society and making sense of the political nature of the public world. However, much of this potential remains unknown to journalists because users' activities occur at a distance from journalism and political institutions, which poses a challenge to digital journalism.     

THE DIDACTIC CHALLENGE

The training of journalists in a university context must fulfil a twofold requirement, as it unavoidably has to integrate theory and practice, academic study and practical application—this is the central didactic challenge. There is no doubt, however, that the concepts of theory and practice are employed in a diffuse way in the current debates both within the relevant academic fields and elsewhere. The present article seeks to sketch out the difficulties, which will inescapably arise in any attempt to integrate academic study and practical application within a university, and it relates these difficulties to specific fundamental problems (the problem of definition, the problem of reputation and recognition, the problem of concretisation, etc.). In addition, the author demonstrates by results from his own project work how this integration of theory and practice may be successfully accomplished. The essential purpose of the article is to initiate a didactic debate that meets the demands of the university as well as the requirements of professional practice in equal measure.     

基于主题的SE-TextRank 情感摘要方法

文本情感摘要技术的目的是以简洁的形式准确表达文章的核心情感内容。为解决不同的文档结构及内容特征等问题对摘要结果的影响,提出了一种基于主题的SE-TextRank 情感摘要方法。通过LDA 模型自动获取收敛后的文本主题,利用余弦距离算法进行主题句子分组,使用传统多特征融合以及SE-TextRank 情感摘要算法对组内中心句抽取,最终获取目的摘要。实验表明,采用此方法能够更为高效的获取新闻文本摘要结果。     

‘You see a baby die and you’re not fine:’ a case study of stress and coping strategies in volunteer emergency medical technicians

This study investigates the experiences of volunteer Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) with respect to stress and coping strategies they employ. Research has shown negative implications of work stress in high-reliability organizations, like paid Emergency Medical Services (EMS). While most first responders in the United States are volunteers, little research has examined how their work stress experiences may differ from their paid counterparts. Twenty-five EMTs working in volunteer fire departments participated in one-on-one interviews. Using an inductive approach, four stressors were identified: types of calls, extensive sense of duty, competency concerns, and knowing the patient. Theory of Conversationally Induced Reappraisals explains the effectiveness of the Formal, Informal, and Escape Coping Strategies identified by participants that mitigated stress. This study concludes with recommendations for volunteer EMS organizations: (a) financial assistance for Employee Assistance Programs, (b) social events that encourage communication and interaction; (c) recommended/sanctioned time off, and (d) a clear recruitment/retention plan.     

新时期图书馆员压力管理初探

分析了新时期图书馆员的压力现状及其产生的原因,论述了图书馆员压力管理的措施。     

Assessing library topics using sentiment analysis in R: a discussion and code sample

Abstract

This article discusses the use of R programing language for executing a sentiment analysis of tweets pertaining to library topics. This discussion is situated within the literature of marketing and management sciences, which is employing methods of machine learning and business intelligence to make informed decision-making, and library administration, which has expressed great interest in social media engagement within its literature but has yet to adopt these types of analysis. Presented in this article is a sample code with instructions on how users may execute it within R to retrieve and analyze tweets relevant to library services. Two examples created using the code (analysis of top librarians’ tweets and analysis of posts about major book publishers) are used to demonstrate the functionality of the code. The code presented in this article may be used by libraries to analyze tweets about their library and library-related topics, which, in turn, may inform management and marketing design.