HIV/AIDS‐related stigma and information behaviour: an ethnographic study in the UK

This feature explores the information behaviour of people infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS. It investigates specifically the difficult issue of stigma and how this shapes the ways in which people interact with vital information. The study adopted an ethnographic whereby the researcher worked as a part‐time volunteer at an HIV support centre in the North of England for over a year. This is the first time that such an approach has been reported in this feature and is interesting from this perspective alone. The very rich data which was gathered as a result of the approach is also instructive. The study formed part of a PhD thesis, which Robinah Kalemeera Namuleme completed at the University of Sheffield in March 2013.     

Engaging the Audience in a Digitised Television Production Process

This article discusses producer practices and the reasons why they engage their audience in the production process. In a digitised media context, audiences have become more visible, mainly through social media, and have more means to participate. Our research deconstructs the production process of a particular television programme by means of the “hierarchy of influences” model, which separates micro and macro levels that influence production. It draws on in-depth interviews with all editors of Flemish current affairs programme De Afspraak (The Appointment) and on a three-month participatory observation. We conclude that immersive ways of engaging the audience are applied in our specific case. More broadly, we argue that although practices change, pre-existing norms and values about the television audience remain central to how producers engage their audience through digital and social media.     

Monologisation as a Quoting Practice

This paper explores a particular aspect of journalistic quoting, monologisation. During monologisation, the interactive turn exchange between the journalist and the interviewee is simplified in the resulting article. This simplification process mainly takes the form of obscuring the role of the journalist in the original spoken discourse. As a result, the quotations appear to be unprompted, continuous utterances by the interviewee, and this in turn has seminal consequences for the interpretation of the quotation. This paper will demonstrate that monologisation is an effective means for journalists to steer the reading of the article and to include their own points of view without breaking the professional rule that journalism must separate facts from opinions. The results of this study are based on a comparison between two types of empirical data; recordings of journalistic interviews, on the one hand, and published articles, on the other. This study will focus on one particular type of journalistic interview that has been largely neglected in prior research along with its specific quoting practices, namely the interviews were conducted by the journalists in order to collect raw material for written journalistic items, published either in print or electronic form. This paper will show that interviews of this type involve highly diverse and mutually adaptive interaction, contrary to the clearly structured question–answer interviews that are used as sound bites in television news items and have thus far remained the primary focus of research on both journalistic interviews and quoting processes. The notion of monologisation could be applied in various domains where an interview is converted into a written account, such as research interviewing and police interrogations.     

Effects of performance visualization on employment interviews

Two studies were undertaken to assess the value of exposing people to performance visualization in order to help them cope with communication apprehension (CA) in employment interviews. The first study, which took place in a laboratory, employed a pre/post‐test experimental design. Seniors who were preparing to enter the job market took part in mock interviews, completed a state communication apprehension (CA) measure, a trait CA measure, and a scale designed to measure negative thinking. Participants were then assigned to performance visualization, placebo, or control conditions. After exposure to the requisite treatment, they participated in another mock interview and completed the same battery of measures. The second study took place in the field. In this study, participants, who were about to undergo a screening interview for a job, completed state and trait CA measures, were exposed to performance visualization, and completed the state and trait CA measures the second time. These studies indicated that exposure to performance visualization related negatively to CA and negative thoughts, as well as positively to being offered a job. It showed no relationship to being asked back for a second interview. The implications of these findings are discussed in the conclusion of this report.     

National monitoring in social studies: the reliability of assessment interviews

The National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) is responsible in New Zealand for the national assessment of primary school children's achievement in the essential learning areas, one of which is social studies. Individual interviews are one of the approaches used to assess students' understanding. The assessors are registered teachers, selected by NEMP, who attend a training week where they learn how to conduct the standardised assessment tasks and associated interviews. This study examines the reliability of the assessment interviews used in the 2005 round of social studies monitoring, in particular the variations between teacher administrators (TAs) in their use of prompts and probes. The extent of variation observed in the use of three kinds of prompt was sufficient to raise questions about the reliability of the assessment process. A surprising outcome was the consistent failure of TAs to clarify and elucidate students' social studies understandings through the judicious use of probes. The prompt-related variations between TAs and their failure fully to ‘tap into’ understandings assessed by interview-based tasks are serious threats to the validity of claims regarding students' achievement in social studies. This is particularly concerning as NEMP data are used as the basis for identifying and reporting national patterns and trends in educational performance and making recommendations to policy-makers, curriculum planners and educators.     

An exploration of future trends in environmental education research

This article describes future trends in environmental education (EE) research based on a mixed-methods study where data were collected through a content analysis of peer-reviewed articles published in EE journals between 2005 and 2010; interviews with experts engaged in EE research and sustainability-related fields; surveys with current EE researchers; and convenings with EE researchers and practitioners. We discuss four core thematic findings: (1) EE researchers are highlighting the importance of collective and community learning and action; (2) EE researchers are placing increased emphasis on the intersection of learning within the context of social–ecological communities (e.g. links between environmental quality and human well-being); (3) a pressing need exists for research conducted with urban and diverse populations; and (4) research around social media and other information technologies is of great interest, yet currently is sparse.     

Discovering Credit Where Credit is Due: Using autobiographical writing as a tool for voicing growth

This paper starts from the observation that particularly rewarding parts of a set of research interviews were all accompanied by laughter. The interviews in question inquired into organizational practice as sites for individual and collective ‘becoming’, conceived as a set of ongoing authoring acts situated in everyday work. The research interview should be considered amongst those events where such authoring takes place. Interviews constitute events of understanding within the hermeneutics of becoming. Based on two exemplifying strips of dialogues from my interviews, I identify and discuss three kinds of laughter. ‘Positioning laughter’ has the function of affirming authoring acts, welcoming elaboration and creating a general atmosphere of trust. ‘Resonating laughter’ addresses a form of pattern recognition that I suggest amounts to the tuning‐in to an unutterable ‘we’. The function of resonating laughter is that it marks and celebrates this emerging understanding and plants the seeds of a prolonged interpretive effort. ‘Liberating laughter’ addresses and potentially releases from constraints in the event of understanding: whether that be in patterns of the interview as a social event, in prior understanding or in investments into self‐conceptions. The overall function of laughter is that it may enhance implicit interpretation and maintain an open dialectic in understanding; both qualities of particular relevance in becoming interviews.