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The purpose of this paper is to provide an observational examination of the recent Scottish elections, within which an e‐counting system was employed to manage the increased complexity of the Scottish electoral system for the first time.

Observations of an ethnographic nature, supplemented by written documentation used for both training and public consumption during the Scottish election process.

It was found that the voting system for the Scottish elections had not received sufficient review or testing prior to the election; further that the design choices imposed by the DRS software did not support the actions of its users efficiently enough, or justify confidence in the dependability of the system.

That the deployment of e‐counting systems requires careful consideration; many of the issues raised in this paper are similar to those of the official Scottish Elections Review, to which our team provided input.

The Scottish elections were the first to allow members of the public to register as election observers, accredited by the Electoral Commission. As such, the Scottish elections represented the first large‐scale opportunity to observe such processes for the academic community.

Looks at the trend in the UK towards workplace health promotion (WHP) and, in particular, with one facet of WHP, namely workplace fitness provision (WFP). Contends that the state, organisations and individuals each fail to maximise their benefits from provision. Draws attention to inherent tensions between governmental policy rhetoric and the organisational and individual reality within the workplace. Concludes that WFP currently represents a missed opportunity. Governmental aims for improved public health are misguided given the instrumental approach taken by organisations towards WFP, especially as WFP has tended to reinforce inequalities found in the public leisure sector with regard to user profiles. If there is indirect discrimination in employment because of non‐participation in such initiatives then the achievement of public health objectives, reductions in employee absence rates or the achievement of healthy workforces will remain a pipedream.

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the tenuous relationship between medical sociology and disability studies, particularly as it relates to the work of Irving Zola.

Many attribute the division between these disciplines to their starkly different and oft competing approaches to disability; however, I argue that a closer examination reveals a number of commonalities between the two.

I use Irving K. Zola’s extensive body of scholarship to demonstrate the connections between these divergent approaches to disability, and imagine what his legacy has to offer to the advancement of a diverse sociology of disability.

Neither focus is more correct than the other, as considering these bodies of work together presents a number of opportunities to advance a more comprehensive sociological theory – not just of disability – but of ableism and its intersections with other forms of oppression as well.

Purpose – To explore the ideological effects and social control potential of diagnostic biopsychiatry and encourage the sociology of diagnosis to retain key insights of early medicalization scholarship.

Methodology – As the sociology of diagnosis emerges from medicalization, it is imperative that the new sub-specialty retains the critical edge of the early scholarship. With this in mind the paper reviews key aspects of the medicalization thesis, emphasizing the links between medical definitions and social control processes (e.g. Conrad, 1992; Conrad & Schneider, 1992; Zola, 1972). Based on this review scholars are urged to be mindful of the “diagnostic imaginary” -- a way of thinking that conceals the presence of the social in diagnoses, and which closes off critical analysis of the existential-connectedness and political nature of diagnoses.

Findings – The paradigm shift from dynamic to diagnostic psychiatry in DSM-III opened the door to a new biomedical model that has enhanced American psychiatry's scientific aura and prestige. With the increased presence and ordinariness of diagnoses in everyday life, an illusory view of diagnoses as scientific entities free of cultural ties has emerged, intensifying the dangers of medical social control.

Social implications – By illustrating that diagnoses are cultural objects imbued with political meaning, the ideological effects and social control potential of diagnostic biopsychiatry may be mitigated.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how parents and caregivers describe their concerns about the HPV vaccine for their children on open Internet websites. The study examines what the discourse among parents reveals about their concerns regarding the HPV vaccine.

Our exploratory study utilized a grounded theory approach as a method of collecting data and simultaneously formulating research questions based on emerging themes from the data. We used purposeful sampling to select sets of comments posted on websites that provided news, scientific information, or parental support regarding HPV and its vaccine.

Findings suggest support for Bond and Nolan’s (2011) theory that familiarity with a disease is central to parents’ assessment of risk, and that dread of a serious disease such as cervical cancer is weaker than dread of unknown possible side effects in parents’ motivation to give or withhold the vaccine for their children.

Research limitations include our usage of a purposeful convenience sample of websites. The limitation of this sampling technique is that the comments made by website “users” and used in the analysis may not be representative of the wider population, and may include Americans as well as non-Americans.

Our research fills an important gap in the literature by looking at the ways in which parents share their concerns about the HPV vaccine on Internet websites as they consider whether to reject, delay, or consent to the vaccine.

This paper aims to discuss what it means to consider the information experience of academic information management from a constructivist grounded theory perspective. Using a doctoral study in progress as a case illustration, the authors demonstrate how information experience research applies a wide lens to achieve a holistic view of information management phenomena. By unifying a range of elements, and understanding information and its management to be inseparable from the totality of human experience, an information experience perspective offers a fresh approach to answering today's research questions.

The case illustration is a constructivist grounded theory study using interactive interviews, an original form of semi-structured qualitative interviews combined with card-sorting exercises (Conrad and Tucker, 2019), to deepen reflections by participants and externalize their information experiences. The constructivist variant of grounded theory offers an inductive, exploratory approach to address the highly contextualized information experiences of student-researchers in managing academic information.

Preliminary results are reported in the form of three interpretative categories that outline the key aspects of the information experience for student-researchers. By presenting these initial results, the study demonstrates how the constructivist grounded theory methodology can illuminate multiple truths and bring a focus on interpretive practices to the understanding of information management experiences.

This new approach offers holistic insights into academic information management phenomena as contextual, fluid and informed by meaning-making and adaptive practices. Limitations include the small sample size customary to qualitative research, within one situated perspective on the academic information management experience.

The study demonstrates the theoretical and methodological contributions of the constructivist information experience research to illuminate information management in an academic setting.

This study sought to distinguish characteristics of cognitive processes while using information technology. In particular, it identifies similarities and differences between mind wandering and cognitive absorption in technology-related settings in an effort to develop a deeper understanding of the role that mind wandering plays when using information technology.

Data was gathered using an online survey including responses from 619 English-speaking adults in 2019. We applied a confirmatory factor analysis and used a robust variant of maximum likelihood estimator with robust standard errors and a Satorra–Bentler scaled test statistic. The data analysis procedure was conducted with the R environment using the psych package for descriptive analysis, and lavaan to investigate the factorial structure and the underlying correlations.

We discuss the benefits of carefully differentiating between cognitive processes in Information Systems research and depict avenues how future research can address current shortcomings with a careful investigation of neurophysiological antecedents.

To date, mind wandering has been explored as a single phenomenon, though research in reference disciplines has begun to distinguish varieties and how they distinctly impact behavior. We demonstrate that this distinction is also important for our discipline by showing how two specific types of mind wandering (i.e. deliberate and spontaneous mind wandering) are differently correlated with sub-dimensions of cognitive absorption, a well-studied construct.

This chapter explores processes of stratification in reproductive healthcare and considers the ways in which mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion shape reproductive opportunities and experiences. First, I consider the process of “selective inclusion” among sexual minority women. This examination questions the schisms that exist within the sexual minority population in regard to their visibility and legibility in medical, scientific, and public health discourses and constructions of reproductive health. The second process I examine is that of “exclusionary inclusion” among substance using pregnant women who have been collectively deemed “bad breeders” by medical and state authorities and whose reproduction is explicitly monitored, regulated, and criminalized. The final process I discuss is “side-stepping inclusion” which describes the healthcare and consumer decisions of women who circumvent medicalized childbirth experiences by employing the services of a midwife for their pregnancy and birth care. This chapter examines how medicalization, biomedicalization, and de-medicalization dynamically work together to expand and delimit inclusionary processes, emphasizing the spectral and interconnected quality of these processes. By exploring various processes of inclusion that shape reproductive experiences of these disparate and differentially marginalized populations, this chapter provides a conceptual and critical meditation on the ways in which “respectable reproduction” is deployed in reproductive care. In considering these processes of inclusion and the ways in which they are co-produced by medical discourses and practices, scholars may more clearly grasp some fundamental mechanisms of stratification in reproductive healthcare and knowledge production.