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The impact assessment on electronic publishing (EP) is a project conducted jointly by the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre and the Society for Mathematics and Data Processing (GMD), Darmstadt. The project is partly subsidised by the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology which has installed a project board, in that respect following the model of OTA. It can be seen in the broader context of the two German EP projects (in the publishing and patent fields), which were part of the DOCDEL programme of the EEC and were cofunded by the Ministry for Research and Technology. The publishers' project experimented with a markup language for the establishment of full text databases, thus having some resemblance with the standard generalised markup language (SGML) project of the Association of American Publishers.

The project's approach and focus as well as some results of phase I (1986) and II (1987) are reported in Part 1. Each phase of the project combined different tasks:

An increasing number of migrants and refugees seeking asylum in Germany is challenging psychiatrists and psychotherapists in multiple ways. Different cultural belief systems on the causes of mental illness and their treatment have to be taken into consideration. The purpose of this study is to explore perceived causes of depression among Farsi-speaking migrants and refugees from Afghanistan and Iran, which represent two groups with a shared cultural heritage, but originating from very different regimes of mobility. Both are among the largest migrant groups coming to Germany over the past decade.

In total, 50 Iranian and 50 Afghan migrants and refugees, who arrived in Germany in the past 10 years were interviewed, using an unlabeled vignette presenting signs and symptoms of depression. The answers were then coded through inductive content analysis.

Among Iranians, there was a more significant number of causal attribution to Western psychiatric concepts, whereas Afghans attributed depression more often to the experience of being a refugee without referring to psychological concepts. These differences in attribution did, however, not affect the desire for a social distance toward depressed people. Nonetheless, a higher number of years spent in Germany was associated with less desire for social distance toward persons with depression among Afghans, but not among Iranians.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study examining perceived causes of depression with Farsi-speaking migrants in Germany and contributes to understanding tendencies in the perception of depression in non-Western migrant groups.