Journal articles on the topic 'Ethnic attitudes Victoria Case studies'

AbstractThe political representation of minority groups in Bulgaria is analyzed from three perspectives. The first relates to political socialization: the mechanisms of minority political preference, and their materialization into political behavior, mostly during elections or through party membership. The second relates to political actors' conduct towards minorities: their attitudes toward minority identities and the significance of minority representation in their practice. The third perspective relates to the institutional framework that politically regulates minority status. This third perspective raises questions of minimum representation, and the legal formalization of minority political parties. Bulgarian ethnic politics is analyzed regarding both the ethnic factors in constructing the political scene and the political factors in structuring the ethnic model. The present article questions the applicability of the distinction between the 'politics of ideas' and the 'politics of identities' to Southeastern Europe in general, and to Bulgaria in particular. This theoretical question is addressed through two empirical comparative analyses: the similarities and divergences of the minority management model in the Bulgarian Constitution and the one applied in the political practice, and the differences between minority representation in Bulgaria and in neighboring countries such as Romania.

The war-related process of disintegration of a highly integrated and multi-ethnic community is described using a series of studies done in the city of Vukovar (Croatia) as a case example. After analyzing the key points of the community social breakdown , the three roots of ongoing ethnic division are explored: the feelings of being betrayed by important others at life-important situations; massive suffering and traumatization; and lack of compassion and acknowledgment of the victimhood. These also influence the inner dynamic of the divided community in which the strong social norm is not to cross the ethnic lines in public. When the schools became divided after the war so that the Serb and Croat children started going to separate schools, opportunity to meet each other across the ethnic lines became and remained severely limited. The implications for children that grow up in an ethnically divided community are documented in a study of children's and parental inter-ethnic attitudes and behaviors. The study included 1,671 students aged 12 to 16 and their parents. It showed that the children had more out-group biases and negative attitudes, and were more likely to choose discriminative behaviors towards their peers from the ether ethnic group. Consequences for the future community inter-ethnic relations in the post-war societies and life limitations the children face are discussed.

High degrees of ethnocentrism indicate intolerance towards that which is not one's own. When displayed by teachers towards learners, such attitudes may have detrimental effects on learner performance and hinder transformation in South African classrooms. Using Vygotskian sociocultural theory of human learning as a theoretical framework, this quantitative case study reports on the outcome of the electronically administered Generalised Ethnocentrism survey that measured 1,164 preservice teachers' ethnocentrism at a private higher education institution. Apart from providing biographical data, respondents answered 22 statements on a 5-point Likert-type scale about their beliefs pertaining to their own and others' culture, customs, and values. Results showed that preservice teachers manifest varying degrees of ethnocentrism but that those who attended multicultural schools scored significantly lower on the ethnocentrism scale than those who attended mono-ethnic schools. Respondents in the last stretch of their studies also obtained lower scores on the GENE scale than first and second years. This would suggest that greater exposure to social diversity and interaction across cultures plays a fundamental role in shaping ethnocentric beliefs and attitudes. An unexpected finding was that the instrument did not provide similar results as found in several studies, thus creating misgivings about its applicability in a context in which a minority ethnic grouping no longer held power. Policy makers and teacher educators should consider interventions to create more explicit and purposeful opportunities for preservice teachers to gain multicultural exposure and develop cultural competence. Assisting prospective teachers to identify their own ethnocentrism and knowing how to counter the many prevailing ideologies that promote, however inadvertently, ethnocentrism would prepare them for the realities of their future classroom and equip them to act as agents of change.

This paper examines three case studies on volunteering by Korean immigrants as a lens to explore how immigrants balance integrating into their host society while expressing their ethnic identities. Immigrants continue to face challenges including negative attitudes and discriminatory policies which shape their everyday experiences, pointing to a need for further understanding of their own priorities and perspectives on social integration. This can be informed by anthropological frameworks by thinkers such as Frederik Barth and Edmund Leach, which highlight ethnicity as a process of social organization dependent on human agents and situations. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, I analyze findings from sociological studies through such anthropological frameworks to provide unique insights on how Korean immigrants experience social integration and ethnic maintenance through volunteering in the United States.

This paper presents and analyses results deriving from the research on the attitudes of criminal investigation officers in five police departments in Serbia: Belgrade, Novi Sad, Novi Pazar, Subotica and Vranje. The case studies examined the attitudes of members of criminal investigation police and their perception(s) of discrimination towards vulnerable groups. The study aimed to determine the level of animosity exhibited in speech, to analyse socio-ethnic distance, to observe reactions towards measures designed to improve the situation of vulnerable groups, to consider the relationship among institutions regarding their responsibility for the occurrence of discrimination and its impact on the reduction of it, to discuss personal experiences of discrimination and to analyse attitudes regarding certain claims of a stereotypical character. Moreover, the paper also presents a comparative analysis of similar surveys on the perception of citizens towards discrimination that have thus far been conducted in Serbia. The results demonstrated that the police in Serbia did not exhibit a particularly discriminatory attitude towards citizens. It is important to note that the most prominent socio-ethnic distances were exhibited in relation to Roma and members of the LGBT community.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the inconsistency of explicit and implicit domestic country bias (DCB) across different types of products and in the context of two countries. Design/methodology/approach Two studies in two countries are conducted to examine the inconsistencies in implicit and explicit DCB. The first study collected data through mall intercept survey method in Taiwan and identified 189 valid respondents. The second study applied a mixed (within and between subjects) factorial experiment in China using 200 subjects. Findings Results show that explicit and implicit attitudes are moderately related to each other. The results also confirm that ethnic product typicality can explain inconsistencies in both explicit and implicit DCB. For ethnically typical products, DCB is more pronounced in consumers’ explicit attitudes than in consumers’ implicit attitudes. On the contrary, for ethnically atypical goods, DCB makes itself present in both explicit and implicit attitudes. Originality/value The results shed new light on DCB and confirm that the bias could divaricate between explicit and implicit attitudes in the case of ethnically typical products.

This paper presents the perceptions of silence in two Romani (Gipsy) cultures in Europe – Bulgaria and Finland. On the basis of field studies and two in-depth interviews, conducted in the towns of Mikkeli (Finland) and Ihtiman (Bulgaria), it outlines the attitudes of the European Roma people towards “being marginalised” and “silenced”. Silence is perceived by them in terms of “being different” and “being sometimes ashamed”. In the Romani culture there is a special relationship between “silence”, “pride” and “shame” as a specific worldview and a mechanism of constructing of both the personal and the collective ethnic identities. The paper also studies the phenomenon of self-silencing as a strategy of coping with undesirable situations that seem to disturb the mental wellbeing of two individuals. It underlines the need for raising the awareness of education within the Roma community in Europe and concludes that it is necessary to differentiate between “cultural” and “non-cultural” practices in the educational system.

Previous research on teaching the Holocaust, notably case studies in the primary or the secondary sectors, suggests that Holocaust education can make a significant contribution to citizenship by developing pupils’ understandings of justice, tolerance, human rights issues, and the many forms of racism and discrimination. Yet, there have been no longitudinal studies into its impact on primary pupils. This paper, reports on the first stages of ongoing longitudinal research (sponsored by the Scottish Executive Education Department), and concentrates on the relevance of Holocaust education to citizenship, by comparing the attitudes of primary 7 pupils before and after Holocaust teaching using data from questionnaires. Results show an improvement in pupils’ values and attitudes after learning about the Holocaust in almost every category related to minority groups, ethnic or otherwise. One significant finding was a deep anti-English feeling and this in itself the need for further investigation.

Very little research has been done specifically on the condition of the Gypsy slaves in Wallachia. Most general histories ignore them, and few contemporary observers studied them. This is just one more sign of their discrimination and neglect. This study draws on the exhaustive nominal lists of the Romani population from the database MapRom which draws on the first preserved count of the population of Danubian principalities (1838). Many aspects of the rob-slave condition have been analysed, the household size, the socio-professional and juridical categories and the Gypsy owners, the degree to which the Gypsies in Wallachia were integrated into the majority population and the ethnic attitudes of the surrounding population, and a case study of formation of a Gypsy settlement.

Abstract In recent years, an international debate has erupted over whether and how interculturalism differs from multiculturalism as a response to cultural diversity. An influential argument in this debate is that multiculturalism itself militates against intercultural dialogue. This article scrutinises this argument and challenge its applicability in the Australian context. I examine two case studies of fraught intercultural dialogue: the 2006 clash between the Howard government and the Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria over the proposed introduction of a citizenship test; and the Abbott government’s proposed reform of the anti-vilification provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) during 2013–14. The cases suggest that far from undermining intercultural dialogue, respecting the terms of Australian multiculturalism would help to make it possible. Moreover, the cases suggest that if pursued genuinely, intercultural dialogue could contribute improved policy outcomes.

Research shows that news media around the world tend to represent ethnic minorities in ways which nurture distorted views and invite negative attitudes. Scholars have also emphasised that, in contemporary societies, a political climate has emerged which has made overt racism unacceptable and social taboos leading to racist statements are increasingly being managed and disguised in order to avoid direct accusations. In this paper we use Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to carry out an in-depth analysis of a Romanian television news report—selected from a larger corpus—which addressed the situation of the Roma migrants in Norway. We show how this medium, with editing techniques, voice-overs, sound effects and captions, has its own subtleties for communicating racism in ways that are less obvious at a casual viewing. The case we analyse reports on a Norwegian/EU project to build a factory in Romania, so that Roma migrants can return home to work rather than live and beg on the streets of Oslo.

In the past two decades, many studies have warned of the role the popular media might play in the stigmatisation of the poor. Media reports about poverty often include references to antisocial behaviour, which make the principle of deservingness particularly conspicuous and could also strengthen the effects of ethnic stereotypes. We argue, however, that it could be misleading to place all the blame for stigmatisation on direct references to ‘undeserving’ behaviour. Media images of extreme distress themselves could have a selective stigmatising effect. Thus, even benevolent portrayal of the poor could erode sympathy. This paper presents the results of a video-vignette experiment on a sample of Hungarian students. The subjects watched one of four versions of a video interview with a poor person (none of them contained any references to antisocial behaviour) and then expressed their attitudes towards welfare payments. We found that support for welfare was higher where a version highlighted signs of extreme distress. But this was only the case if there were no mention of ethnic minorities. If the video report emphasized that Roma (Gypsies), the largest disadvantaged minority group in Hungary, lived in the neighbourhood, signs of their extreme hardship lowered the support for welfare payments.

This paper argues that Mexican American views of democracy differ significantly from those of Mexicans because of their exposure to the political institutions and culture of the United States. Our results vindicate Diamond's claim that there is no better way of developing the values, skills, and commitments of democratic citizenship than through direct experience with democracy (Diamond 1999). Equally significant is that the study demonstrates that ethnic ties do not determine political attitudes. That is, despite a shared historical background and contemporary cultural commonalities, Mexican views of democracy differ from those of Mexican Americans. Este artíículo arguye que las visiones de la democracia de los mexicano-americanos difieren significativamente de las de los mexicanos debido a su exposicióón a las instituciones de políítica y cultura de los Estados Unidos. Nuestros resultados justifican la idea de Diamond de que no hay mejor manera de desarrollar los valores, habilidades y el compromiso con una ciudadaníía democráática qua a travéés de la experiencia directa con la democracia (Diamond 1999). De igual importancia, el estudio demuestra que los lazos éétnicos no determinan las actitudes polííticas. Esto es, a pesar de compartir un trasfondo históórico y de las concordancias culturales contemporááneas, las visiones de la democracia de los mexicanos difieren de las de los mexicano-americanos.

Background Older adults from minority ethnic backgrounds are at increased risk of contracting COVID-19 and developing severe infection and have increased risk of mortality. Whilst an age-based vaccination approach prioritising older groups is being implemented worldwide, vaccine hesitancy is high amongst minority ethnic groups. Methods and findings We conducted a systematic review and convergent synthesis to systematically examine perceptions of vaccinations amongst older adults from minority ethnic backgrounds. We included studies that reported on perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes towards vaccinations in older adults aged ≥65 years from a minority ethnic background. We excluded studies of vaccinations in investigation or development, studies focused on specific medical conditions, studies where ethnic background or age group was unidentifiable, systematic reviews, editorials, and conference abstracts. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, Virtual Health Library, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, medRxiv, and PROSPERO databases from inception to 15 July 2021. Risk of bias for studies was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. The quality of evidence of collective outcomes was estimated using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation–Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research (GRADE–CERQual) framework. A total of 28 eligible studies conducted between 1997 and 2020 were included in the final analysis (17 quantitative surveys, 8 focus group or interview studies, 2 mixed methods studies, and 1 case–control study). The majority were US studies in English or Spanish, except for 6 studies set in Hong Kong, 2 studies in Japan, 1 study in Brazil, and 1 multi-centre study (including China, Indonesia, Turkey, South Korea, Greece, UK, Brazil, and Nigeria). In total, 28,262 individuals with an estimated mean age of 69.8 years were included, 63.2% of whom were female. We summarised the common concepts and themes across studies and populations using a convergent synthesis analysis. Thirteen themes categorised as barriers or facilitators were identified and grouped into structural factors—healthcare provider and system related, patient related, and policy and operational—and were analysed by minority ethnic group. The main limitation of the study was the predominance of studies from the US and East Asia. Conclusions In this systematic review, we found that factors influencing vaccination uptake involve healthcare provider and system, patient-related, and governance-level factors that are specific to the older ethnic minority community being served. The evidence included in this review is supported by high or moderate certainty and can be translated to practice and policy. A tailored, multi-level approach combining increased education, access, and culturally competent discussions with trusted healthcare professionals to address health beliefs can maximise the potential impact of widespread vaccination policies.

This article presents a comparative analysis of attitudes toward ethnic migrants in two Russian regions: the Tomsk and Vladimir Regions. Its relevance is associated with a high migration influx of foreign citizens into various Russian regions. According to the UN data (2015), our country is the third in the world in terms of the migrants’ influx. Moreover, there is no reliable and comparable sociological information both about the attitude of the local population to them and about the factors that determine it. Against the backdrop of a growing trend of interethnic tension in relations with migrants, the results of such studies acquire important social and political significance. This article relies on the results of representative questionnaires of the population of the Tomsk (in 2014, 563 respondents) and Vladimir Regions (2015, 500) using the general methodology. In the process of research, groups with different levels of tolerance towards migrants were identified in the “host community”. Subsequently, different groups of tolerance of the population were compared in these two regions. The findings show that the attitude towards migrants in the regions can vary even under similar economic conditions and within the framework of a uniform political situation. Significant differences were found in the size of groups that showed varying degrees of tolerance towards migrants. While in the Tomsk Region, the half of the sample can be attributed to the group of the tolerant people, in the Vladimir Region, their percentage is equal to the xenophobes’. The structure of attitudes towards migrants presents particular interest: for the Tomsk Region, the difference between educational and labor migrants is more significant. The obtained results actualize the issue of factors differentiating attitudes towards migrants in different regions of one country. Based on the results obtained, the authors propose a hypothesis that the specificity of the local urban social and cultural context can occupy an important place among these factors. Therefore, in Tomsk (an educational center), there is an obviously higher level of tolerance towards migrants. The authors speak for additional studies using qualitative methods to test their hypothesis.

The legacies of a racial and ethnocentric past continue to have implications for the present in South Africa and Rwanda, particularly within the realm of education. Although in both societies, the governments have addressed their repressive and violent histories through the implementation of color-blind (or nonracial/ethnic) policies that espouse national unity and reconciliation, these very same policies inadvertently reinforce old divisions. They suppress candid discussion about past and current intergroup tensions, resulting in a paradox of social inclusion. In this article, the authors interrogate how historically ascribed identities, which were used for the purposes of oppression and social divisions in South Africa and Rwanda, are reconstituted in the postapartheid and postgenocide eras. The authors draw on empirical evidence from case studies of contemporary schools in both countries and argue that the nations’ two approaches—nonracialization and nonethnicization, respectively—aim to mute explicit discourse and language about racial and ethnic differences though the spread of “color-blind” ideologies. However, everyday behaviors and attitudes of individuals—students and educators—who are inculcated with ideas of past racial/ethnic ideologies remain rigid and continue to affect micro-level and school-level interactions that undermine the legitimacy of either color-mute or color-blind ideologies and contribute to boundary maintenance.

This paper reports findings from a comparative study which investigated public attitudes to recycled water in two Australian locations both in the state of Victoria: the capital city, Melbourne, and Bendigo, an urban regional centre. Two commercial buildings were used as case studies, one at each location. These buildings will soon be using recycled water for non-potable uses. The study was facilitated by an on-line survey of future occupants of both buildings to gauge their attitudes to recycled water use. Specifically the paper reports on happiness/willingness to use recycled water for various uses and attitudinal factors which were found to influence this. The circumstances for potable water availability and recycled water use differ in Melbourne and Bendigo, making this study a significant contribution to understanding public acceptance of recycled water use in these different contexts. No significant difference in happiness to use recycled water was found between locations. However, prior experience (use) of recycled water was found to be a significant and positive factor in facilitating happiness/willingness to use recycled water, particularly for closer to personal contact uses such as showering and drinking. Various attitudinal and demographic variables were found to influence happiness to use recycled water. Results indicate it is not just the locational context of water availability that influences happiness to use recycled water, but a person's experience and particular perceptions that will facilitate greater willingness to use recycled water.

Studies on immigrants' residential concentration have reported mixed findings. Some have argued that immigrants' residential concentration is a necessary step in the process of their social integration because there the newcomers find housing and employment opportunities as well as social support. As they learn the language and improve their socioeconomic status, they move to neighborhoods where they share space with the native population. Others have argued that the ethnic neighborhood delays the process of social integration in the new society because it nurtures informal ethnic social networks that provide incomplete information and retard the process of language acquisition. The study reported here investigated the effect of motivations, perceptions of attitudes of the host society, acculturation and socioeconomic factors on immigrants' residential concentration. It also sought to expand previous research by examining the relationship between immigrants' residential concentration and social relationships with nonimmigrants. Data for the study were collected in 1999 through a survey of immigrants from the FSU who had settled in one northern city in Israel after 1989. The results show a negative relationship of socioeconomic status and fluency in Hebrew with the percentage of immigrants residing in a given neighborhood. The higher the socioeconomic status and the more fluent the immigrant in Hebrew, the lower the percentage of immigrants in his or her neighborhood. Immigrants who expressed a proactive motivation for migration resided in neighborhoods with a low percentage of immigrants. Immigrants' residential concentration was not found to be related to the development of social relationships with the local population. The implications of the findings are discussed.

The paper joins forces with the increasing literature on translation and cultural studies and places translation in the context of cross-cultural communication. It is my intention to analyse the factors that affect translation and the influence of stereotypical attitudes on the production of texts for a target culture (TC). Assuming that translations are facts of target cultures as Toury points out (1995), I will concentrate on a very specific topic: stereotypical attitudes towards Latino sexuality and its influence on the production of target texts (TTs). For this purpose, I will first introduce the topic of translation and culture; secondly, I will write about the use and functions of stereotypes in cross-cultural communication with specific reference to attitudes towards Latinos in the USA; and thirdly, I will make a case study of stereotypes on the translation and production of materials related to AIDS. In doing so, I will talk about the position and function of the translations as entities in the target culture (TC), the translating activity related to an ethnic minority within the American culture, and the form the translations have (the product). The article presents the analysis of informative brochures on AIDS originally produced in English and translated into Spanish for the Latino community in the USA.

The objective of this research is to assess the characteristics of the relationships between the cognitive and emotional components of ethnic, civic, and global identities with the emigration activity among students of Belarus (n=208), Kazakhstan (n=200), and Russia (n=250) aged 18 to 25 years. The assessment of emigration activity was carried out using six items. To measure identity types, we used the Questionnaire for assessing the positivity and uncertainty of ethnic identity by A.N. Tatarko and N.M. Lebedeva and the Identification with All Humanity Scale by S. McFarland in adaptation of T.A. Nestik. The negative assessment of one’s own ethnicity is a predictor to emigration intentions among Belarusian students. Students in Kazakhstan and Russia have emigration intentions connected with a positive attitude towards the global community of people and a negative attitude towards citizens of their countries. In addition, Russian students with a high level of emigration intentions have imprecise representations of their own ethnicity. Emigration behavior of Belarusian students have links with negative attitudes towards the citizens of their country and towards their own ethnic affiliation. In Russian students, this behavior is also associated with a negative attitude towards the citizens of their country, but combined with a positive attitude towards the global community of people. Kazakhstani students have no statistically significant links in this case. The results confirm the importance of taking into account the civic and sociocultural contexts when organizing activities to prevent the emigration behavior of youth.

In recent years, an international debate has erupted over whether and how interculturalism differs from multiculturalism as a response to cultural diversity. An influential argument in this debate is that multiculturalism itself militates against intercultural dialogue. This article scrutinises this argument and challenge its applicability in the Australian context. I examine two case studies of fraught intercultural dialogue: the 2006 clash between the Howard government and the Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria over the proposed introduction of a citizenship test; and the Abbott government’s proposed reform of the anti-vilification provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) during 2013–14. The cases suggest that far from undermining intercultural dialogue, respecting the terms of Australian multiculturalism would help to make it possible. Moreover, the cases suggest that if pursued genuinely, intercultural dialogue could contribute improved policy outcomes.1 1This article is a revised version of Geoffrey Brahm Levey (2017) ‘Intercultural dialogue under a multiculturalism regime: pitfalls and possibilities in Australia’ in Fethi Mansouri (ed) Interculturalism at the crossroads: comparative perspectives on concepts, policies and practice, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, France, pp. 103-25

This paper argues for an interdisciplinary approach within the study of religion and conflict. Using a religious studies framework, it demonstrates that tools from human geography, peace studies, and the theology of religions can be used to shed light on the intractability of conflicts where religion is not “innocent”. Within human geography, the spatial dimension of individual and communal identity, most particularly the concept of “mythical space”, can illuminate the non-empirical, affective factors that condition attitudes to religious and ethnic others. Similarly, within the theology of religions, the typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism can aid understanding of tendencies within all human communities, religious and non-religious, when faced with perceived threats from significant others. Two case studies, Sri Lanka and Israel/Palestine, are examined through this interdisciplinary approach, using illustrative “moments” within each conflict. Both highlight the affective power of primal imaginaries that are informed by narratives about religion, land, and identity. Without dismissing the importance of political and economic factors in the arising of conflict, this paper argues that it is not enough to analyse these factors alone. Other disciplines are necessary and this paper argues for two important examples: human geography and the theology of religions.

This article addresses theoretical and empirical issues concerning the emergent field of transnational entrepreneurship. We discuss issues regarding the antecedents of transnational entrepreneurship focusing specifically on the socio-cultural factors affecting this phenomenon in the Spanish context. Entrepreneurship, ethnic and transnational entrepreneurship literature is combined with institutional approach to explain what and how different socio-cultural factors influence the emergence and development of transnational entrepreneurship in Catalonia (in the north-east of Spain). We do this by looking at four case studies of transnational entrepreneurs with different ethnicity (Ecuadorian, Latin American; Moroccan, North African; Chinese, Asian; and Romanian, Eastern European). Important differences between socio-cultural factors that affect the emergence of transnational entrepreneurship (role models, immigrants’ entrepreneurial attitudes) and those that facilitate the development of transnational entrepreneurial activities (transnational networks and immigrants’ perceptions of the culture and opportunities of the host society) are found.

AbstractSamuel Huntington argues in The Clash of Civilizations that a principal cultural fault line is to be found between the Muslim world and the Western non-Muslim world. In this context it is not surprising that the Christian West often assumes Muslims to be suspicious or even hostile towards Christians. Periodic cases of anti-Christian public statements and actions support this impression and are indicative of profound inter-religious tensions. This notion also influences the relations between peoples and nations. In the South-Caucasian case, the Armenian-Turkish relations are affected most by this phenomenon. When conflicts arise, religion plays a role in the perception of the Other. What is needed, therefore, is more inter-religious understanding on all societal levels. Although politics play a key role in establishing friendly ties between nations, it is the grassroots of the population upon which fruitful relations stand and which secure a more consistent quality to the results of political efforts. When considering Turkish views on Christians, field research indicates that the average Turk harbours an overall benevolent view of Christians and, therefore, that there exists considerable potential for successful inter-religious dialogue. Christians are generally regarded with respect, and most Turkish participants showed little to no negative attitudes towards them. The Christians of Turkey, notably Armenians and Greeks, were, furthermore, perceived as part of Turkey's society. The reason for these predominantly positive attitudes may be sought in the institutional incorporation of Christians and Jews into the broader context of Islamic society or, more inherent to Turkish history, in the positive remembrance of the multi-religious and multi-ethnic face of the Ottoman Empire—and thus in the appreciation of religious diversity as an asset and historical obligation.

In our study, we explore the identity constructions of indigenous peoples living in Arctic urban environment. The choice of topic is justified by the fact that studies of indigenous peoples living in urban settings in the Arctic have focused on cities outside of the Russian Arctic. The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary overview of Arctic urban indigenous peoples in terms of their identity and language use. Important issues are urbanization processes and the position of indigenous peoples in the Arctic. Comparing the eight Arctic countries, the largest gaps in research on northern urban communities can be found in the Russian Federation. The migration of ethnic minorities to urban settlements has been particularly rapid under the conditions of globalization and industrialization. It should be emphasized that moving to the city may be one of the appropriate ways for these minorities to survive in Siberia. In the urban settlements surveyed, ethnic groups are trying to establish their own minority organizations and groups to preserve minority culture, language, and identity. The starting point of the study is the activities of the organizations, the current multifaceted language situation, patterns of language use, and the study of language attitudes specific to these urban minorities. In this article, we analyze the current situation of indigenous peoples in Dudinka in light of the research questions. The findings are based on recent literature and field research conducted in 2008, 2016, and 2019. We conclude by saying that although the language is disappearing, its value remains important to the community. We also think it is important to investigate the city in terms of language use because, contrary to previous expectations, urbanization does not simply mean the disappearance of small languages. On the one hand, new, highly efficient and independent scenes of language use are opening, and on the other hand, the decline in language use is not at all accompanied by a decline in language prestige, which can also be a justification for revitalization. In addition to language, other elements of identity become important.

The article studies the impact language attitudes have on the stereotyping of speakers in a context of ethnic conflict. We investigate the collision between the public and private language identities of Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking citizens in Ukraine. Empirically based on a public discussion on the relationship between language and patriotism in online newspapers and on Facebook, the article explores the perceived links between linguistic choices and individual, regional and national identities. The study analyses the core identity components attributed to and claimed by Ukrainian-and Russian-speaking participants inthe debate, along two axes: political vs personal language choice and national vs regional identity. Focusing on discourse about language choice, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how in conflict situations language can be conceptualised as reflecting a fundamental component of sociopolitical identity claims, which in the case of Ukraine has repercussions about who is seen as belonging to the nation.

Although the number of police officers serving in schools has escalated in recent years, few studies of student perceptions of school police have been conducted. This study presents an analysis of data on student perceptions of school police officers and school security officers which were obtained from surveys administered to a sample of predominantly Hispanic students who reside in a predominantly Hispanic community. Descriptive analyses of the data show that the majority of students view the officers favourably, but comparisons of the present findings with previously published research on adult perceptions of the police indicate that the percentage of students who view the officers favourably is lower than the percentage of adults who view the police favourably. Regression analyses of the data indicate that gender has a varying impact on different measures of attitudes toward the officers, that year in school has no impact on perceptions of the officers and that personal knowledge of crime and delinquency in the schools has a negative impact on perceptions of the officers. The regression analyses also suggest that race/ethnicity has no impact on student perceptions of the officers; a finding which is consistent with prior research on perceptions of the police conducted in areas with sizeable racial/ethnic minority populations.

Vaccination is not only a medical term rather it is framed under socio-cultural perspectives and debates as well. Human history is full of illnesses caused bacteria and viruses killing millions of people including children and adults. Technological development in the health sector enabled to combat pathogenic illnesses through different methods whereby vaccination is one of them. However, it is a dilemma that vaccination has faced many barriers including logistical but most importantly sociocultural and religious. In 2019, WHO revealed vaccine hesitancy as a leading threat to health throughout the globe even in the top 10. This study looks to analyze peer reviewed literature to explore barriers to vaccination. Methodologically, this is desk research and systematic review. Numerous databases were searched with key words and purposively studies were selected for this study. A total of 17 most relevant studies were sampled. Findings show that there are four major factors hindering vaccination. 1st cultural and ethnic background matters whereby religion and the belief system are predominant factors. 2nd awareness and educational variables are also there, for instance, it is noted that many people are not aware of vaccination process specifically in case of HPV vaccination. 3rd social media plays a pivotal role whereby misinformation internalizes negative attitudes and misperceptions about vaccines. 4th social media is a key dimension whereby disinformation and misinformation are communicated through platforms whereby some are intentionally circulated. It is suggested that culturally relativism perspective can be helpful in increasing vaccination percentages. It pertains to intervention through culturally approved methods, for example, sensitizing the ethnic backgrounds through their leadership. In addition, vaccination tracking, media campaigns, focus on school level education to include health related course can be helpful.

Abstract The novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has impacted the aging workforce. In addition to local data and case studies that are rapidly increasing, baseline national-level inquiries are needed for investigating relevant social inequalities. Also, the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity among older adults are critical yet understudied areas. For example, older minority women’s experience in the pandemic, compared to older men, are yet to be investigated. We analyzed the nationally representative 2020 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) COVID-19 module data. Based on the sample of 2,086 adults aged 50 years and older, employment during the pandemic as well as psychosocial measures, including social support and attitudes toward work, are examined. We used survey-weighted binary logistic regression models. Results showed that older Black women (Odds-ratio = 0.52, p = 0.02 < 0.05) were less likely to work for pay compared to White women during the pandemic. Also, older Hispanic men (Odds-ratio = 2.82, p = 0.03 < 0.05) were more likely to work for pay than older White men. Older Hispanic women (Odds-ratio = 2.41, p = 0.03 < 0.05) were more likely to worry about getting social support during the pandemic than White women. However, there was no significant differences in the changes in attitudes toward work across gender and racial/ethnic groups during the pandemic. Based on the baseline national data analysis, we discussed possible policy changes and interventions that consider the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity to help older adults re-adjust to post-pandemic work environments and labor markets.

The research examined linguocultural features of media coverage of the Great Victory anniversary the Sputnik agency (Russia Today). The purpose of the study was to determine, from the standpoint of linguistic cultural studies, the key images that formed the media. The object of the research is the materials of three editions of the Sputnik agency (Sputnik Polska, Sputnik International, Sputnik Türkiye), the geography of distribution and the composition of the audience of which reflect differentiated linguocultures. A set of methods is used: content analysis; contextual analysis, comparative analysis, case study. The empirical base was made up of publications dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, posted on the websites of the editorial offices of Sputnik Polska, Sputnik International, Sputnik Türkiye. Sample type: solid. Chronological scope of the study: April 15 — May 15, 2020. Based on the results of the study, we concluded that the nature of representation is directly related to linguocultural characteristics and is due to historical, political and sociocultural preconditions. At the same time, all editions are united by the commonality of the constructed images: Victory Day (attitudes towards victory over fascism in the international arena); nations (both winners and losers); preservation of historical memory. The presence or absence of certain stable linguistic units depends on the cultural and ethnic specifics of the audience. The greatest efficiency from the standpoint of the implementation of international broadcasting activities (transmission of cultural codes and meanings) is achieved in a situation of a common / close mentality, interaction of ethnic groups and territorial proximity.

BackgroundThe health-care commissioning cycle is an increasingly powerful determinant of the health services on offer and the care that patients receive. This study focuses on the mobilisation and use of evidence relating to ethnic diversity and inequality.ObjectiveTo describe the patterns and determinants of evidence use relating to ethnic diversity and inequality by managers within commissioning work and to identify promising routes for improvement.MethodsIn-depth semistructured interviews with 19 national key informants and documentation of good practice across England. Detailed case studies of three primary care trusts involving 70+ interviews with key strategic and operational actors, extensive observational work and detailed analysis of related documentation. A suite of commissioning resources based on findings across all elements were tested and refined through three national workshops of key stakeholders.ResultsCommissioners often lack clarity on how to access, appraise, weight or synthesise diverse sources of evidence and can limit the transformational shaping of services by a narrow conceptualisation of their role. Attention to evidence on ethnic diversity and inequality is frequently omitted at both national and local levels. Understanding of its importance is problematic and there are gaps in this evidence that create further barriers to its use within the commissioning cycle. Commissioning models provide no reward or sanction for inclusion or omission of evidence on ethnicity and commissioning teams or partners are not representative of minority ethnic populations. Neglect of this dimension within national drivers results in low demand for evidence. This organisational context can promote risk-averse attitudes that maintain the status quo. Pockets of good practice exist but they are largely dependent on individual expertise and commitment and are often not shared. Study findings suggested the need for action at three levels: creating an enabling environment; equipping health-care commissioners; and empowering wider stakeholders. Key enabling factors would be attention to ethnicity within policy drivers; senior-level commitment and resource; a diverse workforce; collaborative partnerships with relevant stakeholders; and the creation of local, regional and national infrastructure.LimitationsIt was harder to identify enablers of effective use of evidence in this area than barriers. Including a case study of an organisation that had achieved greater mainstreaming of the ethnic diversity agenda might have added to our understanding of enabling factors. The study was conducted during a period of fundamental restructuring of NHS commissioning structures. This caused some difficulties in gathering data and it is possible that widespread change and uncertainty may have produced more negative narratives from participants than would otherwise have been the case.ConclusionsKnowledge mobilisation and utilisation within the commissioning cycle occurs in the context of dynamic interactions between individual agency, organisational context and the wider health-care setting, situated within the UK sociopolitical milieu. Our findings highlight isolated pockets of good practice amidst a general picture of limited organisational engagement, low priority and inadequate skills. Findings indicate the need for specific guidance alongside incentives and resources to support commissioning for a multiethnic population. A more comprehensive infrastructure and, most importantly, greater political will is needed to promote practice that focuses on reducing ethnic health inequalities at all stages of the commissioning cycle.FundingThe National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

The article considers the theoretical aspects of the nature and mechanisms of the influence of the media and education on the formation of the individual’s worldview, in particular with regard to ethno-cultural attitudes, identifies the relationship between these social institutions, and analyzes the studies on the ethno-cultural tolerance of citizens of the Russian Federation. The intensification of the integrative interaction of representatives of various ethno-cultural communities, and the tendency to destruct the relations between individual countries are the result not only of the development of economic, political, social and other systems, but also of collisions arising on religious and international grounds, manifestations of aggression, the initiation and conduct of local wars, acts of terrorism, etc. The formation of ethno-cultural tolerance in the youth environment in this case can act as a stabilizing factor, becoming the most effective and cost-effective solution to communication problems of an ethno-cultural nature. Based on the analysis of theoretical aspects, the author proposes to develop a program to increase the ethnic tolerance of students in a multicultural world through the bilateral involvement of individuals. The project is based on the principles of reliability of the information provided, the possibility of intercultural interaction, as well as monitoring and solving related socially significant problems and tasks.

Introduction. Proverbs and sayings are a genre of oral creativity that transmits the knowledge and experience of many generations. Paroemias are of practical importance for an individual as a member of society endowed with social roles and living by certain rules. The proverbs of the Don Kalmyks recorded by Ivan I. Popov also reflect the accumulated life experiences of previous generations, the wisdom of the people to have created them, their attitudes to values with due account of lifestyles and traditions of the ethnos. In this regard, translation of proverbs is difficult. Translating what is part of the culture of one people into another language is a complex process. Goals. The article aims to study Kalmyk-to-Russian translations of samples of paroemias contained in unpublished materials from the Popov Collection at the State Archive of Rostov Oblast. The scientific novelty of the work lies in that no studies to examine translation of minor Kalmyk folklore genres have been undertaken. Results. Knowledge of ethnic history and culture, spoken and literary Kalmyk language, painstaking collecting efforts, direct communication with informants allowed the collector to do accurate translations of samples of minor genres. Manuscripts of Ivan I. Popov demonstrate that he not only understood the meaning of a translated text but also possessed the phraseological richness of language, knew the oral tradition of the Kalmyks. The strategy of Popov’s translation is based on that he gives translations of proverbs and sayings reflecting the ethnic life realities, and in separate notes draws equivalents of paroemias from Russian folklore. So, the translation of proverbs into Russian is supplemented with notes in the manuscripts. In this case, Popov gives meanings of individual lexemes, patterns of their use in speech, sometimes specific contexts of use for paroemias are depicted. Ivan I. Popov, having perfectly studied colloquial speech of the Don Kalmyks, also turned to dictionaries, in particular, to the most complete dictionary of that time — the Mongolian-Russian-French Dictionary by O. M. Kowalewski, Mongolic grammars, textbooks, sources on the history and culture of the ethnos. All the above mentioned made it possible for the collector to do adequate scientific Russian translations of samples of minor Kalmyk folklore genres.

As practising architects in Victoria, Australia, we have observed significant, systemic industry failure, impeding the development of accessible and inclusive cities. Contemporary built environment design practice and design values push ‘accessible design’ to the margins, often considered as an after-thought and only in terms of technical and regulatory compliance. Built environment practice needs to be challenged into deeper ways of thinking – ones that stimulate professional discourse and heighten industry awareness of both its control over built environment accessibility outcomes and, critically, its accountability in serving the public good.Cities invariably comprise neighbourhoods. To begin to understand built environment inaccessibility at the neighbourhood scale, the built environment mindset must change to properly engage with complex, socio-ecological, public-realm (public space) built environments. Design practice must improve its neighbourhood site analysis approach, going beyond private, contractual site boundaries and immediate physical surrounds, to understanding end-user experiences, neighbourhood journeys, and the broader scale of (in)accessibility. Industry attitudes, practice approaches and the way disability is positioned by industry must change to embrace processes that necessitate diverse actors working together across multiple disciplines and sectors with people with disability being core actors in decision-making.We believe that opportunities exist in building industry interest and capacity. Research-informed built environment practice embracing systems-thinking, human rights-based approaches, and transdisciplinarity can be effective for aggravating industry change and the way industry positions disability. This paper adopts an analytical, collaborative autoethnographic approach, examining case studies of neighbourhood-scale accessibility assessment, outputs from activities questioning why built environment practitioners believe inaccessibility exists, and self-reflection on 10 to 35+ years of working in architectural practice. Importantly, this paper argues that in working towards achieving universally accessible public spaces for all, built environment practitioners, and architects in particular, must accept accountability for the impact of their actions on people with disabilities’ lived experiences. Read the full article in accessible html-format here.

This paper considers the work of Bostonand Toronto-based architects Edward Stevens and Frederick Lee during a critical period in North American hospital expansion. Without exception, their hospitals represented state-of-the-art planning wrapped in conservative exteriors. The firm's work thus offers a rich case study from which to consider the notion of historicist design as a mechanism for coping with change. This paper focuses on five Stevens-and-Lee projects: Notre Dame Hospital and two additions to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, the Kingston General Hospital, and the Ottawa Civic Hospital. Their buildings can be considered typical of the period, since Stevens and Lee designed prominent hospitals across North America. An interpretation of the hospitals is further enriched by the prospect of comparing what was built to the architects' own words. Edward Stevens's The American Hospital of the Twentieth Century (1918) is a classic in the field of hospital architecture, and he published extensively in the architectural and medical professional presses. The study of Steven's words and his hospitals illuminates the inherent danger of regarding historicist building types as antimodern or necessarily conventional. It also reveals the paucity of stylistic interpretations of all architecture. This approach has resulted in the widespread misinterpretation of interwar hospitals as reactionary, or at best antimodern. For this reason, hospitals of the 1920s are generally omitted from studies of the building type and are seen, mistakenly, as simple reverberations of the nineteenth-century model. Generic hospital architecture of the interwar years was modern in its spatial attitudes-not necessarily its look, but rather in its structure, its endorsement of aseptic medical practice, its sanctioning of expert knowledge, its appeal to new patrons, its encouragement of new ways of working, its response to urbanization, its use of zoning, its acceptance of modern social structures, its resemblance to other modern building types, its embrace of internationalism, and its endorsement of standardization.

AbstractThe school environment of the 21st century is shaped by rapidly changing social and societal conditions that teachers need to adapt to, increasing linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity among other things. The development of attitudes to cope with these constant societal transformations is one of the main challenges of teacher professionalization today. In this chapter, we concentrate on the self-positioning and argumentation patterns of two Luxembourgish primary school teachers. We focus on the question how these teachers construct differences and homogeneity, what kind of categories and norms they rely on (e.g. performance, sociocultural background, and language) and in how far mechanisms of in- and exclusion become visible.With its trilingual tradition and school system (mainly Luxembourgish, French and German), and at the same time a highly diverse society with more than 170 nationalities, Luxembourg represents a particularly interesting case. As the recent PISA studies have repeatedly shown, the Luxembourgish school system (including its traditional trilingualism and strong orientation on language education) produces a high degree of inequality, and represents an important challenge especially for children of migration.With our study, which is based on in-depth interviews and which adopts an analytical approach combining elements of content and discourse analysis, we found a tendency towards a backward oriented idealized orientation of the past and a high degree of insecurity. We also show which ambivalences the teachers are confronted with and their efforts to deal with these ambivalences.We hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of how teachers position themselves vis a vis the existing diversity in schools, and which discourse and argumentation patterns they rely on. We see this study as part of research on teacher professionalization that will be useful for reflexive pre- and in-service teacher training.

This study examines the implementation of village funds related to the development of cross-cultural activities in Badung and Buleleng. Whether the pattern is instructive translation of sloganitic deconcentration tasks or participatory institutionalization that sets out the need for cross-cultural issues in the village. The Tamatea Study (2006), Parker (2017), and Gottowick (2010) discuss multiculturalism as the nature of local wisdom which is described as responding to people's daily problems. Another study, Kwon (2018) and Selenica (2018) looked at multiculturalism in the perspective of intercultural conflict. This research takes a different position from previous research by criticizing the construction of state control over multiculturalism that runs at the grassroots. Control construction is seen from the management of village funds for cross-cultural activities that are operationalized through guaranteed equality of ethnic and religious groups. The research paradigm is non-positive with case studies. Data collection methods utilize observation, interviews and documentation. The perspective used is interpretive with the theory of discourse. Research results show that state control is firmly embedded in the development of multiculturalism in villages. The nature of control is meaningfully driven, administrative control of budgeting has the potential to have an inhibiting effect on the development of the potential of the village concerned, including the development of multiculturalism activities in the village. Such as overlapping regulations on financial accountability, lack of socialization of regulations and assume that village human resources have understood every multicultural development program (especially the deconcentration program), injustice attitude views the potential of the village and bias behavior rules that are biased. Various attitudes are often shown by vertical government officials, such as sub-districts, offices (OPD), and ministries, which are counterproductive to oversee the development of the attitude of the development of multiculturalism in the village. Villages are forced to translate multicultural development programs that are trapped in administrative accountability which in reality compartmentalize the potential of the resources within.

The paper attempts to study how economic situation in the member countries of the European Union in 2005-2011 affected the national party systems' attitude towards the EU and the European integration (the EU cleavage). The authors made suggestion that economic decline could result in growing Euroskepticism. This hypothesis was derived from three main arguments: economic voting theory, suggesting that voters “punish” the ruling parties in case of economic decline; the role the EU plays in determining national economic policy (specifically, strict austerity requirements); the overall international context of global economic crisis. In order to measure the attitude of the national parties towards the EU, the data from the Manifesto Project Database (MPD), a large scale content analysis database of electoral promises (manifestos) of national political parties was applied. Then the authors looked at 41 elections in the EU member states in 2005-2011, for which MPD data are available, and measured the declared position of the parties participating in the elections regarding the EU. In an econometric study, the proxies of national party systems attitudes were regressed on proxies of economic situation in the EU countries, attempting to test the main hypotheses. Specifically, four proxies of attitude towards the EU were used: the share of votes obtained by euroskeptical parties; the average level of Euroskepticism in national party manifestos of all parties participating in elections; the average level of Euroskepticism of the ruling coalition emerging from elections; the average level of Euroskepticism weighted by the share of votes obtained by particular parties. The results of the estimates do not confirm that economic indicators (especially GDP and inflation) have had a significant impact on the Euroskepticism; the results are not robust and vary from specification to specification. The article shows, however, that higher unemployment levels are negatively correlated with Euroskepticism. The authors explain these findings by the predominance of expressive behavior in voting patterns in Europe. Specifically, they argue that voting was driven primarily by identity issue. However, in this case identity should be related not to ethnic or regional features, but to consumption behavior patterns. The results are also placed in a broader context, attempting to link the EU-specific findings to processes observed in other parts of the world. Acknowledgements. The authors appreciate the valuable comments by E.V. Ananyeva, N.Yu. Kaveshnikov, S.P. Peregudov, M.V. Sterzhneva, A.I. Tevdoi-Burmuli and all participants of the section “Processes of Regional Integration in Big Europe” of the 8th Congress of the Russian Association of International Studies. All mistakes and inaccuracies are the authors’ responibility.

Artikel ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis kebijakan internal sekolah yang menunjukkan inklusivitas karakter toleran pada peserta didik yang majemuk. Fokus penelitian pada kebijakan inklusif dalam arti keadilan, kesetaraan, dan sikap positif terhadap kemajemukan agama. Sekolah berperan untuk memenuhi hak peserta didik dalam keberagamaan. Menjadi masalah, jika lembaga sekolah diskriminatif atau tidak memfasilitasi pendidikan kerohanian pesesrta didiknya. Studi kasus penelitian adalah SMAN 1 Mataram dan SMAN 5 Mataram. Penelitian ini adalah field research dengan teknik penggalian data observasi kegiatan peserta didik yang mencakup: organisasi, kerohanian, aturan hari libur agama, ketersediaan tempat ibadah; dan wawancara mendalam kepada peserta didik, guru, dan pelaku kebijakan sekolah. Hasilnya, kedua sekolah tersebut menerapkan institusionalisasi ide menjadi kebijakan. Di antara kebijakan tersebut: melaksanakan kegiatan imtaq (iman dan taqwa) sesuai agama peserta didik; memberikan izin pembentukan organisasi rohani; fasilitas tempat maupun alat ibadah multi-agama; memfasilitasi guru rohani di setiap agama yang dipeluk oleh peserta didik; dan kebijakan libur fakultatif. Pemahaman masyarakat di wilayah sekolah tentang keberagaman suku, bahasa, dan agama yang praksis (tidak teoritis) menjadikan modal penting dalam kelangsungan toleransi di sana. Meskipun kedua sekolah tersebut tidak mewakili kebhinnekaan dalam hal suku dan etnis, setidaknya agama peserta didik yang berbeda-beda mewakili cerminan dari Indonesia yang beragam. Kata Kunci: sekolah kebhinnekaan, kebijakan internal sekolah, karakter toleran, Mataram This article aims to analyze the school's internal policies that show the inclusiveness of the tolerant character of diverse learners. The research focuses on inclusive policies in terms of justice, equality, and positive attitudes towards religious pluralism. Schools play a role in fulfilling the rights of students in religion. It becomes a problem if school institutions are discriminatory or do not facilitate the spiritual education of their students. The research case studies are SMAN 1 Mataram and SMAN 5 Mataram. This research is field research with data mining techniques for observing student activities which include: organization, spirituality, rules for religious holidays, availability of places of worship; and in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and school policy actors. As a result, both schools implemented the institutionalization of ideas into policies. Among these policies: carry out imtaq (faith and taqwa) activities according to the religion of the students; granting permission to form a spiritual organization; facilities for places and tools of multi-religious worship; facilitate spiritual teachers in each religion embraced by students; and facultative holiday policies. The understanding of the community in the school area about the practical (non-theoretical) ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity is an important asset in sustaining tolerance there. Although the two schools do not represent diversity in terms of ethnicity and ethnicity, at least the different religions of the students represent a reflection of the diversity of Indonesia. Keywords: diversity school, school internal policy, tolerant character, Mataram

BackgroundAdvance care planning (ACP) enables patients to consider, discuss and, if they wish, document their wishes and preferences for future care, including decisions to refuse treatment, in the event that they lose capacity to make decisions for themselves. ACP is a key component of UK health policy to improve the experience of death and dying for patients and their families. There is limited evidence about how patients and health professionals understand ACP, or when and how this is initiated. It is evident that many people find discussion of and planning for end of life care difficult, and tend to avoid the topic.AimTo investigate how patients, their relatives and health professionals initiate and experience discussion of ACP and the outcomes of advance discussions in shaping care at the end of life.Design and data collectionQualitative study with two workstreams: (1) interviews with 37 health professionals (general practitioners, specialist nurses and community nurses) about their experiences of ACP; and (2) longitudinal case studies of 21 patients with 6-month follow-up. Cases included a patient and, where possible, a nominated key relative and/or health professional as well as a review of medical records. Complete case triads were obtained for 11 patients. Four cases comprised the patient alone, where respondents were unable or unwilling to nominate either a family member or a professional carer they wished to include in the study. Patients were identified as likely to be within the last 6 months of life. Ninety-seven interviews were completed in total.SettingGeneral practices and community care settings in the East Midlands of England.FindingsThe study found ACP to be uncommon and focused primarily on specific documented tasks involving decisions about preferred place of death and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, supporting earlier research. There was no evidence of ACP in nearly half (9 of 21) of patient cases. Professionals reported ACP discussions to be challenging. It was difficult to recognise when patients had entered the last year of life, or to identify their readiness to consider future planning. Patients often did not wish to do so before they had become gravely ill. Consequently, ACP discussions tended to be reactive, rather than pre-emptive, occurring in response to critical events or evidence of marked deterioration. ACP discussions intersected two parallel strands of planning: professional organisation and co-ordination of care; and the practical and emotional preparatory work that patients and families undertook to prepare themselves for death. Reference to ACP as a means of guiding decisions for patients who had lost capacity was rare.ConclusionsAdvance care planning remains uncommon, is often limited to documentation of a few key decisions, is reported to be challenging by many health professionals, is not welcomed by a substantial number of patients and tends to be postponed until death is clearly imminent. Current implementation largely ignores the purpose of ACP as a means of extending personal autonomy in the event of lost capacity.Future workAttention should be paid to public attitudes to death and dying (including those of culturally diverse and ethnic minority groups), place of death, resuscitation and the value of anticipatory planning. In addition the experiences and needs of two under-researched groups should be explored: the frail elderly, including those who manage complex comorbid conditions, unrecognised as vulnerable cases; and those patients affected by stigmatised conditions, such as substance abuse or serious mental illness who fail to engage constructively with services and are not recognised as suitable referrals for palliative and end of life care.FundingThe National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

Background:In the US, African Americans and Latinos are underrepresented in lupus clinical trials (LCTs),1despite experiencing the greatest lupus disease burden.2,3Low participation in LCTs results in inadequate data on treatment effectiveness for minority patients, and fewer opportunities for better care and treatment options.1Only one percent of minority patients are referred to clinical trials each year.4Provider barriers to making referrals include limited time and unfamiliarity with lupus and LCT opportunities.4Using US fedral grant funds, the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) developed MIMICT, a two-part model with associated materials to address provider-side LCT referral barriers. The materials include a toolkit for clinical trial sites and an educational toolkit for providers.Objectives:Our objectives are to:•Describe the US LCTs disparities.•Discuss the research methodology to evaluate the two-part MIMICT model.•Assess the feasibility of the model to increase minority involvement in clinical trials.Methods:We designed two studies to evaluate the MIMICT model.The first study used an online, pretest/posttest, two-group evaluation approach to assess the extent to which the educational toolkit increased providers‘ knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions to refer minority patients to clinical trial. We conducted the study in 2018 with primary care providers (PCPs) and again in 2019/2020 with speciality providers. The second study used a longitudinal, mised methods, case-study approach to explore the real-world use of the toolkits with clinical trial site teams at two university medical centers.Results:In the first study,among MIMCT-exposed PCPs, mean scores indicated statistical significance at p≤0.001 with more knowledge about referring [55.84 (sd=23.51) vs 41.76 (sd=19.98)], more self-efficacy to refer [55.00 (sd=37.22) vs. 37.99 (sd=34.42)], and more intentions to refer [61.36 (43.85) vs. 33.41 (41.16)] African American patients to LCTs among the treatment group than the control group, respectively. This presentation will discuss additional data comparing the study in 2018 and the study in 2019/2020 and look comparatively at outcomes across provider type.In the second study, we found that the driver for successful engagemetn of providers and their subsequent use of the educational toolkit was the development of a trusting relationship between the clinical trial site teams and providers in the community. The development of trust took repeated and varied modes of contact, which we will discuss in-depth.Conclusion:The MIMICT educational toolkit increase knowledge, self-efficacy, and intentions to refer lupus patients to LCTs. However, building trust between LCT sites and local providers takes time and repeated outreach, but the potential benefits to medicine and minority health are substantial.References:[1]The Society for Women’s Health Research. (2011). Dialogues on diversifying clinical trials: successful strategies for engaging women and minorities in clinical trials. Washington, DC: Food and Drug Administration, Office of Women’s Health.[2]Falasinnu, T., Chaichian, Y., Bass, M. B., & Simard, J. F. (2018). The representation of gender and race/ethnic groups in randomized clinical trials of individuals with sytemic lupus erythematosus.Current Rheumatology Reports, 20(4).[3]Pons-Estel, G. J., Alarcon, G. S., Scofield, L., Reinlib, L., & Cooper, G. S. (2010). Understanding the epidemiological progression of systemic lupus erythematosus.Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism, 39(4).[4]Korieth, K. (2016). Engaging healthcare providers as research facilitators.The CenterWatch Monthly, 23,1-5.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Stigma has been recognized as a major impediment to accessing mental health care among Vietnamese and Asian Americans (Leong and Lau, 2001; Sadavoy et al., 2004; Wynaden et al., 2005; Fong and Tsuang, 2007). The underutilization of mental health care, and disparities in both access and outcomes have been attributed to a large extent to stigma and cultural characteristics of this population (Wynaden et al., 2005; Jang et al., 2009; Leung et al., 2010; Spencer et al., 2010; Jimenez et al., 2013; Augsberger et al., 2015). People with neurotic or behavioral disorders may be considered “bad” as many Vietnamese people believe it is a consequence of one’s improper behavior in a previous life, for which the person is now being punished (Nguyen, 2003). Mental disorders can also been seen as a sign of weakness, which contributes to ambivalence and avoidance of help-seeking (Fong and Tsuang, 2007). Equally important is the need to protect family reputation; having emotional problems often implies that the person has “bad blood” or is being punished for the sins of his/her ancestors (Herrick and Brown, 1998; Leong and Lau, 2001), which disgraces the entire family (Wynaden et al., 2005). In these cases, public stigma (as opposed to internal stigma) is the primary reason for delays in seeking help (Leong and Lau, 2001). Other research has also highlighted the influences of culture on how a disorder may be labeled in different settings, although the presentation of symptoms might be identical (see Angel and Thoits, 1987). In Vietnamese culture, mental disorders are often labeled điên (literally translated as “madness”). A điên person and his or her family are often severely disgraced; consequently the individuals and their family become reluctant to disclose and seek help for mental health problems for fear of rejection (Sadavoy et al., 2004). Despite the critical role of stigma in accessing mental health care, there has been little work in trying to understand how stigmatizing attitudes towards mental illness among Vietnamese Americans manifest themselves and the influences of acculturation on these attitudes. Some previous work indicated a significant level of mental illness stigma among Vietnamese Americans, and experiences of living in the United States might interact with the way stigma manifests among this population (Do et al., 2014). Stigma is a complex construct that warrants a deeper and more nuanced understanding (Castro et al., 2005). Much of the development of stigma-related concepts was based on the classic work by Goffman (1963); he defined stigma as a process by which an individual internalizes stigmatizing characteristics and develops fears and anxiety about being treated differently from others. Public stigma (defined by Corrigan, 2004) includes the general public’s negative beliefs about specific groups, in this case individuals and families with mental illness concerns, that contribute to discrimination. Public stigma toward mental illness acts not only as a major barrier to care, but can also exacerbate anxiety, depression, and adherence to treatment (Link et al., 1999; Sirey et al., 2001; Britt et al., 2008; Keyes et al., 2010). Link and Phelan (2001) conceptualized public stigma through four major components. The first component, labeling, occurs when people distinguish and label human differences that are socially relevant, for example, skin color. In the second component, stereotyping, cultural beliefs link the labeled persons to undesirable characteristics either in the mind or the body of such persons, for example people who are mentally ill are violent. The third component is separating “us” (the normal people) from “them” (the mentally ill) by the public. Finally, labeled persons experience status loss and discrimination, where they are devalued, rejected and excluded. Link and Phelan (2001) emphasized that stigmatization also depends on access to social, economic, and political power that allows these components to unfold. This study aims to answer the following research questions: (1) how does public stigma related to mental illness manifest among Vietnamese Americans? and (2) in what ways does acculturation influence stigma among this population? We investigate how the 4 components of stigma according to Link and Phelan (2001) operationalized and how they depend on the level of acculturation to the host society. Vietnamese Americans is the key ethnic minority group for this study for several reasons. Vietnamese immigration, which did not start in large numbers until the 1970s, has features that allow for a natural laboratory for comparisons of degree of acculturation. Previous research has shown significant intergenerational differences in the level of acculturation and mental health outcomes (e.g., Shapiro et al., 1999; Chung et al., 2000; Ying and Han, 2007). In this study, we used age group as a proxy indicator of acculturation, assuming that those who were born and raised in the United States (the 18–35 year olds) would be more Americanized than those who were born in Vietnam but spent a significant part of their younger years in the United States (the 36–55 year olds), and those who were born and grew up in Vietnam (the 56–75 year olds) would be most traditional Vietnamese. The language used in focus group discussions (FGDs) reflected some of the acculturation, where all FGDs with the youngest groups were done in English, and all FGDs with the oldest groups were done in Vietnamese. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Data were collected through a set of FGDs and key informant interviews (KIIs) with experts to explore the conceptualization and manifestation of mental illness public stigma among Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans. Six FGDs with a total of 51 participants were conducted. Participants were Vietnamese American men and women ages 18–75. Stratification was used to ensure representation in the following age/immigration pattern categories: (1) individuals age 56–75 who were born and grew up in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States after age 35; (2) individuals age 36–55 who were born in Vietnam but spent a significant part of their youth in the United States; and (3) individuals age 18–35 who were born and grew up in the United States. These groups likely represent different levels of acculturation, assuming that people who migrate at a younger age are more likely to assimilate to the host society than those who do at a later age. Separate FGDs were conducted with men and women. Eleven KIIS were conducted with 6 service providers and 5 community and religious leaders. In this analysis, we focused on mental illness public stigma from the FGD participants’ perspectives. FGDs were conducted in either English or Vietnamese, whichever participants felt more comfortable with, using semistructured interview guides. All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and translated into English if conducted in Vietnamese. Data coding and analysis was done using NVivo version 11 (QSR International, 2015). The analysis process utilized a Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) approach, a validated and well-established approach to collecting and analyzing qualitative data. CQR involves gathering textual data through semistructured interviews or focus groups, utilizing a data analysis process that fosters multiple perspectives, a consensus process to arrive at judgments about the meaning of data, an auditor to check the work of the research team, and the development of domains, core-ideas, and cross-analysis (Hill et al., 2005). The study was reviewed and approved by Tulane University’s Internal Review Board. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Components of public stigma related to mental illness. The 4 components of public stigma manifest to different extents within the Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans. Labeling was among the strongest stigma components, while the evidence of the other components was mixed. Across groups of participants, Vietnamese Americans agreed that it was a common belief that people with mental disorders were “crazy,” “acting crazy,” or “madness.” “Not normal,” “sad,” and “depressed” were among other words used to describe the mentally ill. However, there were clear differences between younger and older Vietnamese on how they viewed these conditions. The youngest groups of participants tended to recognize the “craziness” and “madness” as a health condition that one would need to seek help for, whereas the oldest groups often stated that these conditions were short term and likely caused by family or economic problems, such as a divorce, or a bankruptcy. The middle-aged groups were somewhere in between. The evidence supporting the second component, stereotyping, was not strong among Vietnamese Americans. Most FGD participants agreed that although those with mental disorders may act differently, they were not distinguishable. In a few extreme cases, mentally ill individuals were described as petty thefts or being violent towards their family members. Similarly to the lack of strong evidence of stereotyping, there was also no evidence of the public separating the mentally ill (“them”) from “us”. It was nearly uniformly reported that they felt sympathetic to those with mental disorders and their family, and that they all recognized that they needed help, although the type of help was perceived differently across groups. The older participants often saw that emotional and financial support was needed to help individuals and families to pass through a temporary phase, whereas younger participants often reported that professional help was necessary. The last component, status loss and discrimination, had mixed evidence. While nearly no participants reported any explicit discriminatory behaviors observed and practiced towards individuals with mental disorders and their families, words like “discrimination” and “stigma” were used in all FGDs to describe direct social consequences of having a mental disorder. Social exclusion was common. Our older participants said: “They see less of you, when they see a flaw in you they don’t talk to you or care about you. That’s one thing the Vietnamese people are bad at, spreading false rumors and discrimination” (Older women FGD). One’s loss of status seemed certain if their or their loved one’s mental health status was disclosed. Shame, embarrassment, and being “frowned upon” were direct consequences of one’s mental health status disclosure and subsequently gossiped about. Anyone with mental disorders was certain to experience this, and virtually everyone in the community would reportedly do this to such a family. “You get frowned upon. In the Vietnamese culture, that’s [a family identified as one with mental health problems] the big no-no right there. When everybody frowns upon your family and your family name, that’s when it becomes a problem” (Young men FGD). This is tied directly to what our participants described as Vietnamese culture, where pride and family reputation were such a high priority that those with mental disorders needed to go to a great extent to protect—“We all know what saving face means” as reported by our young participants. Even among young participants, despite their awareness of mental illness and the need for professional help, the desire to avoid embarrassment and save face was so strong that one would think twice about seeking help. “No, you just don’t want to get embarrassed. I don’t want to go to the damn doctor and be like ‘Oh yeah, my brother got an issue. You can help him?’ Why would I do that? That’s embarrassing to myself…” (Young men FGD). Our middle-aged participants also reported: “If I go to that clinic [mental health or counseling clinic], I am hoping and praying that I won’t bump into somebody that I know from the community” (Middle-aged women FGD). Vietnamese people were also described as being very competitive among themselves, which led to the fact that if a family was known for having any problem, gossips would start and spread quickly wherever they go, and pretty soon, the family would be looked down by the entire community. “I think for Vietnamese people, they don’t help those that are in need. They know of your situation and laugh about it, see less of you, and distant themselves from you” (Older women FGD). Culture and mental illness stigma, much of the described stigma and discrimination expressed, and consequently the reluctance to seek help, was attributed to the lack of awareness of mental health and of mental health disorders. Many study participants across groups also emphasized a belief that Vietnamese Americans were often known for their perseverance and resilience, overcoming wars and natural disasters on their own. Mental disorders were reportedly seen as conditions that individuals and families needed to overcome on their own, rather than asking for help from outsiders. This aspect of Vietnamese culture is intertwined with the need to protect one’s family’s reputation, being passed on from one generation to the next, reinforcing the beliefs that help for mental disorders should come from within oneself and one’s family only. Consequently persons with mental health problems would be “Keeping it to themselves. Holding it in and believing in the power of their friends” (Middle-aged FGD) instead of seeking help. Another dimension of culture that was apparent from FGDs (as well as KIIs) was the mistrust in Western medicine. Not understanding how counseling or medicines work made one worry about approaching service providers or staying in treatment. The habit of Vietnamese people to only go see a doctor if they are sick with physical symptoms was also a hindrance to acknowledging mental illness and seeking care for it. Challenges, including the lack of vocabulary to express mental illness and symptoms, in the Vietnamese language, exaggerated the problem, even among those who had some understanding of mental disorders. It was said in the young men FGD that: “when you classify depression as an illness, no one wants to be sick,… if you call it an illness, no one wants to have that sort of illness, and it’s not an illness that you can physically see…” (Young men FGD). Another young man summarized so well the influence of culture on mental illness stigma: “Us Southeast Asian, like, from my parents specifically has Vietnam War refugees. I think the reason why they don’t talk about it is because it’s a barrier that they have to overcome themselves, right? As refugees, as people who have been through the war… [omitted]They don’t want to believe that they need help, and so the trauma that they carry when they give birth to us is carried on us as well. But due to the language barrier and also the, like, they say with the whole health care, in Vietnam I know that they don’t really believe in Western and Eurocentric medicine. So, from their understanding of how, like from their experience with colonization or French people, and how medicine works, they don’t believe in it” (Young men FGD). One characteristic of the Vietnamese culture that was also often mentioned by our FGD participants (as well as KIIs) was the lack of sharing and openness between generations, even within a family. Grandparents, parents, and children do not usually share and discuss each other’s problems. Parents and grandparents do not talk about problems because they need to appear strong and good in front of their children; children do not talk about problems because they are supposed to do well in all aspects, particularly in school. The competitiveness of Vietnamese and high expectations of younger generations again come into play here and create a vicious cycle. Young people are expected to do well in school, which put pressure on them and may result in mental health problems, yet, they cannot talk about it with their parents because they are not supposed to feel bad about school, and sharing is not encouraged. The Asian model minority myth and the expectations of parents that their children would do well in school and become doctors and lawyers were cited by many as a cause of mental health problems among young people. “Our parents are refugees, they had nothing and our parents want us to achieve this American Dream…. [omitted] It set expectations and images for us…. It was expected for all the Asians to be in the top 10, and for, like a little quick minute I thought I wasn’t going to make it, I was crying” (Yong men FGD). As a result, the mental health problems get worse. “If you’re feeling bad about something, you don’t feel like you can talk about it with anyone else, especially your family, because it is not something that is encouraged to be talked about anyway, so if you are feeling poorly and you don’t feel like you could talk to anybody, I think that just perpetuates the bad feelings” (Middle-aged women FGD). Acculturation and mental illness stigma Acculturation, the degree of assimilation to the host society, has changed some of the understanding of mental illness and stigmatizing attitudes. Differences across generations expressed in different FGDs indicated differences in perceptions towards mental illness that could be attributed to acculturation. For example, the young generation understood that mental illness was a health problem that was prevalent but less recognized in the Vietnamese community, whereas a prominent theme among the older participants was that mental illness was a temporary condition due to psychological stress, that it was a condition that only Caucasians had. Some of the components of public stigma related to mental illness seemed to vary between generations, for example the youngest participants were less likely to put a label on a person with mental health problems, or to stereotype them, compared to the oldest and middle-aged participants. This was attributed to their education, exposure to the media and information, and to them “being more Americanized.” However, there was no evidence that acculturation played an important role in changing the other components of public stigma, including stereotyping, separating, and status loss and discrimination. For example, the need to protect the family reputation was so important that our young participants shared: “If you damage their image, they will disown you before you damage that image” (Young men FGD). Young people, more likely to recognize mental health problems, were also more likely to share within the family and to seek help, but no more likely than their older counterparts to share outside of the family—“maybe you would go to counseling or go to therapy, but you wouldn’t tell people you’re doing that” (Young women FGD). The youngest participants in our study were facing a dilemma, in which they recognized mental health problems and the need for care, yet were still reluctant to seek care or talk about it publicly because of fears of damaging the family reputation and not living up to the parents’ expectations. Many young participants reported that it actually made it very difficult for them to navigate mental health issues between the 2 cultures, despite the awareness of the resources available. “I think it actually makes it harder. Only because you know to your parents and the culture, and your own people, it’s taboo, and it’s something that you don’t talk about. Just knowing that you have the resources to go seek it… You want advice from your family also, but you can’t connect the appointment to your family because you’re afraid to express that to your parents, you know? So I think that plays a big part, and knowing that you are up and coming, but you don’t want to do something to disappoint your family because they are so traditional” (Young men FGD). Some participants felt more comfortable talking about mental health problems, like depression, if it was their friend who experienced it and confided in them, but they would not necessarily felt open if it was their problem. Subtle cultural differences like this are likely overlooked by Western service providers. One older participant summarized it well “They [the young generation] are more Americanized. They are more open to other things [but] I think that mental health is still a barrier.” DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This study investigated how different components of public stigma related to mental illness manifest among Vietnamese Americans, a major ethnic group in the United States, and how acculturation may influence such stigma. The findings highlighted important components of public stigma, including labeling and status loss, but did not provide strong evidence of the other components within our study population. Strong cultural beliefs underlined the understanding of mental health and mental illness in general, and how people viewed people with mental illness. Several findings have been highlighted in previous studies with Asian immigrants elsewhere; for example, a study from the perspectives of health care providers in Canada found that the unfamiliarity with Western biomedicine and spiritual beliefs and practices of immigrant women interacted with social stigma in preventing immigrants from accessing care (O’Mahony and Donnelly, 2007). Fancher et al. (2010) reported similar findings regarding stigma, traditional beliefs about medicine, and culture among Vietnamese Americans. Acculturation played a role in changing stigmatizing attitudes as evidenced in intergenerational differences. However, being more Americanized did not equate to being more open, having less stigmatizing attitudes, or being more willing to seek care for mental health issues. Consistent with previous studies (Pedersen and Paves, 2014), we still found some level of stigma among young people aged 18–35, although some components were lessened with an increased level of acculturation. There was also a conflict among the younger generation, in which the need for mental health care was recognized but accessing care was no easier for them than for their parent and grandparent generations. The study’s findings are useful to adapt existing instruments to measure stigma to this population. The findings also have important program implications. One, they can be directly translated into basic supports for local primary and behavioral health care providers. Two, they can also be used to guide and inform the development and evaluation of an intervention and an additional study to validate the findings in other immigrant ethnic groups in the United States. Finally, based on results of the study, we can develop a conceptual framework that describes pathways through which social, cultural, and ecological factors can influence stigma and the ways in which stigma acts as a barrier to accessing mental health care among Vietnamese Americans. The guiding framework then can be validated and applied in future programs aimed to improve mental health care utilization among ethnic minorities.

Increasing preoccupations and interest manifested for the Romanian language as a foreign language compose a focused and clear expression in the volume “Romanian as a foreign language. Methodology and cultural applicability”, launched at the Turku University publishing house, Finland (2018). The editors, Paul Nanu (Department of Romanian Language and Culture, University of Turku, Finland) and Emilia Ivancu (Department of Romanian Studies of the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland) with this volume, continue a series of activities dedicated to the promotion of the Romanian language and culture outside the country borders. This volume brings together a collection of articles, previously announced and briefly presented at a round table organized by the two Romanian lectors, as a section of the International Conference “Dialogue of cultures between tradition and modernity”, (Philological Research and Multicultural Dialogue Centre, Department of Philology, Faculty of History and Philology, “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). The thirteen authors who sign the articles are teachers of Romanian as a foreign language, either in the country or abroad. The challenge launched by the organisers pointed both at the teaching methods of Romanian as a foreign language – including the authors’ reflections upon the available textbooks (Romanian language textbooks) and the cultural implications of this perspective on the Romanian language. It is probably no accident that the first article of the aforementioned volume – “Particularities of teaching Romanian as a foreign language for the preparatory year. In quest of “the ideal textbook’’ (Cristina Sicoe, University of the West, Timișoara) – brings a strict perspective upon that what should be, from the author’s point of view, “the ideal textbook”. The fact that it does not exist, and has little chances ever to exist, could maybe be explained by the multitude of variables which appear in practice, within the didactic triangle composed by teacher – student – textbook. The character of the variables is the result of particular interactions established between the components of the triad. A concurrent direction is pointed out by the considerations that make the object of the second article, “To a new textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language’’ (Ana-Maria Radu-Pop, University of the West, Timișoara). While the previous article was about an ideal textbook for foreign students in the preparatory year of Romanian, this time, the textbook in question has another target group, namely Erasmus students and students from Centres of foreign languages. Considering that this kind of target group “forms a distinct category”, the author pleads for the necessity of editing adequate textbooks with a part made of themes, vocabulary, grammar and a part made of culture and civilization – the separation into parts belongs to the author – that should consider the needs of this target group, their short stay in Romania (three months to one year) and, last but not least, the students’ poor motivation. These distinctive notes turn the existent RFL textbooks[1] in that which the author calls “level crossings”, which she explains in a humorous manner[2]. Since the ideal manual seems to be in no hurry to appear, the administrative-logistic implications of teaching Romanian as a foreign language (for the preparatory year) should be easier to align with the standards of efficiency. This matter is addressed by Mihaela Badea and Cristina Iridon from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, in the article “Administrative/logistic difficulties of teaching RFL. Case study”. Starting from a series of practical experiences, the authors are purposing to suggest “several ideas to improve existent methodologies of admitting foreign students and to review the ARACIS criteria from March 2017, regarding external evaluation of the ‘Romanian as a foreign language’ study programme”. Among other things, an external difficulty is highlighted (common to all universities in the country), namely the permission to register foreign students until the end of the first semester of the academic year, meaning around the middle of February. The authors punctually describe the unfortunate implications of this legal aspect and the regrettable consequences upon the quality of the educational act. They suggest that the deadline for admitting foreign students not exceed the 1st of December of every academic year. The list of difficulties in teaching Romanian as a foreign language is extremely long, reaching sensitive aspects from an ethical perspective of multiculturalism. This approach belongs to Constantin Mladin from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, who writes about “The role of the ethical component in the learning process of a foreign language and culture. The Macedonian experience”. Therefore, we are moving towards the intercultural competences which, as the author states, are meant to “adequately and efficiently round the acquired language competences”. In today’s Macedonian society, that which the author refers to, a society claimed to be multiethnic, multilingual and pluriconfessional, the emotional component of an intercultural approach needs a particular attention. Thus, reconfigurations of the current didactic model are necessary. The solution proposed and successfully applied by Professor Constantin Mladin is that of shaking the natural directions in which a foreign language and culture is acquired: from the source language/culture towards the target language/culture. All this is proposed in the context in which the target group is extremely heterogeneous and its “emotional capacity of letting go of the ethnocentric attitudes and perceptions upon otherness” seem to lack. When speaking about ‘barriers’, we often mean ‘difficulty’. The article written by Silvia Kried Stoian and Loredana Netedu from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, called “Barriers in the intercultural communication of foreign students in the preparatory year”, is the result of a micro-research done upon a group of 37 foreign students from 10 different countries/cultural spaces, belonging to different religions (plus atheists), speakers of different languages. From the start, there are many differences to be reconciled in a way reasonable enough to reduce most barriers that appear in their intercultural communication. Beneficial and obstructive factors – namely communication barriers – coexist in a complex communicational environment, which supposes identifying and solving the latter, in the aim of softening the cultural shock experienced within linguistic and cultural immersion. Several solutions are recommended by the two authors. An optimistic conclusion emerges in the end, namely the possibility that the initial inconvenient of the ethnical, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity become “an advantage in learning the Romanian language and acquiring intercultural communication”. Total immersion (linguistic and cultural), as well as the advantage it represents as far as exposure to language is concerned, is the subject of the article entitled “Cultural immersion and exposure to language”, written by Adina Curta (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). Considered to be a factor of rapid progress and effectiveness of acquisition, exposure to language that arises from the force of circumstances could be extended to that what may be named orchestrated exposure to language. This phrase is consented to reunite two types of resources, “a category of statutory resources, which are the CEFRL suggestions, and a category of particular resources, which should be the activities proposed by the organizers of the preparatory year of RFL”. In this respect, we are dealing with several alternating roles of the teacher who, besides being an expert, animator, facilitator of the learning process or technician, also becomes a cultural and linguistic coach, sending to the group of immersed students a beneficial message of professional and human polyvalence. A particular experience is represented by teaching the Romanian language at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. This experience is presented by Nicoleta Neșu in the article “The Romanian language, between mother tongue and ethnic language. Case study”. The particular situation is generated by the nature of the target group, a group of students coming, on the one hand, from Romanian families, who, having lived in Italy since early childhood, have studied in the Italian language and are now studying the Romanian language (mother tongue, then ethnic language) as L1, and, on the other hand, Italian mother tongue students who study the Romanian language as a foreign language. The strategies that are used and the didactic approach are constantly in need of particularization, depending on the statute that the studied language, namely the Romanian language, has in each case. In the area of teaching methodology for Romanian as a foreign language, suggestions and analyses come from four authors, namely Eliana-Alina Popeți (West University of Timișoara), “Teaching the Romanian language to students from Romanian communities from Serbia. Vocabulary exercise”, Georgeta Orian (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) “The Romanian language in the rhythm of dance and hip-hop music”, Coralia Telea (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia), “Explanation during the class of Romanian as a foreign language” and Emilia Ivancu (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland), “Romanian (auto)biographic discourse or the effect of literature upon learning RFL”. The vocabulary exercise proposed to the students by Eliana-Alina Popeți is a didactic experiment through which the author checked the hypothesis according to which a visual didactic material eases the development of vocabulary, especially since the textual productions of the students, done through the technique that didactics calls “reading images”, were video recorded and submitted to mutual evaluation as well as to self-evaluation of grammar, coherence and pronunciation. The role of the authentic iconographic document is attested in the didactics of modern languages, as the aforementioned experiment confirms once again the high coefficient of interest and attention of the students, as well as the vitality and authenticity of interaction within the work groups. It is worth mentioning that these students come from the Serbian Republic and are registered in the preparatory year at the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology of the West University of Timișoara. Most of them are speakers of different Romanian patois, only found on the territory of Serbia. The activity consisted of elaborating written texts starting from an image (a postcard reproducing a portrait of the Egyptian artist Eman Osama), imagining a possible biography of the character. In the series of successful authentic documents in teaching-learning foreign languages, there is also the song. The activities described by Georgeta Orian were undertaken either with Erasmus students from the preparatory year at the “1 Decembrie 1989” University of Alba Iulia, or with Polish students (within the Department of Romanian Studies in Poznań), having high communication competences (B1-B2, or even more). There were five activities triggered by Romanian songs, chosen by criteria of sympathy with the interests of the target group: youngsters, late teenagers. The stake was “a more pleasant and, sometimes, a more useful learning process”, mostly through discovery, through recourse to musical language, which has the advantage of breaking linguistic barriers in the aim of creating a common space in which the target language, a language of “the other”, becomes the instrument of speaking about what connects us. The didactic approach, when it comes to Romanian as a foreign language taught to students of the preparatory year cannot avoid the extremely popular method of the explanation. Its story is told by Coralia Telea. With a use of high scope, the explanation steps in in various moments and contexts: for transmitting new information, for underlining mechanisms generating new rules, in evaluation activities (result appreciation, progress measurements). Still, the limits of this method are not left out, among which the risk of the teachers to annoy their audience if overbidding this method. Addressing (Polish) students from the Master’s Studies Program within the Romania Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Emilia Ivancu crosses, through her article, the methodological dimensions of teaching Romanian as a foreign language, entering the curricular territory of the problematics in question by proposing an optional course entitled Romanian (auto)biographic discourse”. Approaching contact with the Romanian language as a foreign language at an advanced level, the stakes of the approach and the proposed contents differ, obviously, from the ones only regarding the creation and development of the competence of communication in the Romanian Language. The studied texts have been grouped into correspondence/epistolary discourse, diaries, memoires and (auto)biography as fiction. Vasile Alecsandri, Sanda Stolojan, Paul Goma, Neagoe Basarab, Norman Manea, Mircea Eliade are just a few of the writers concerned, submitted to discussions with the help of a theoretical toolbox, offered to the students as recordings of cultural broadcasts, like Profesioniștii or Rezistența prin cultură etc. The consequences of this complex approach consisted, on the one hand, of the expansion of the readings for the students and, on the other hand, in choosing to write dissertations on these topics. A “tangible” result of Emilia Ivancu’s course is the elaboration of a volume entitled România la persoana întâi, perspective la persoana a treia (Romania in the first person, perspectives in the third person), containing seven articles written by Polish Master’s students. Master’s theses, a PhD thesis, several translations into the Polish language are also “fruits” of the initiated course. Of all these, the author extracted several conclusions supporting the merits and usefulness of her initiative. The volume ends with a review signed by Adina Curta (1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia), “The Romanian language, a modern, wanted language. Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu – Textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language”. The textbook elaborated by Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) respects the CEFRL suggestions, points at the communicative competences (linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic) described for levels A1 and A2, has a high degree of accessibility through a trilingual dictionary (Romanian-English-French) which it offers to foreign students and through the phonetic transcription of new vocabulary units.

This paper reports results from a study comparing perceived risk associated with various recycled water uses in two Australian locations, both in the state of Victoria: the capital city Melbourne, and Bendigo a regional urban centre. Both locations are experiencing ‘drought’, but Bendigo is experiencing this in a more acute manner. A case study is used in each location. Both case studies involve future use of recycled water in new commercial buildings. An on-line survey was used to measure attitudes to recycled water of the future occupants of both buildings. The study found perceived risk associated with 11 uses of recycled water increased as the use became increasingly personal. Interestingly, no difference in perceived risk associated with 11 uses of recycled water was found between locations. Prior experience (use) of recycled water was found to be a significant and positive factor in reducing risk perception. Various attitudinal variables were found to be significant influences on perceived risk. Results indicate that reducing perceived risk of recycled water use may increase satisfaction with its use.

Abstract Background General Practitioners (GPs) are the first point of contact for people from ethnic and migrant groups who have health problems. Discrimination can occur in this health care sector. Few studies, however, have investigated implicit and explicit biases in general practice against ethnic and migrant groups. This study, therefore, investigated the extent of implicit ethnic biases and willingness to adapt care to migrant patients among trainee GPs, and the factors involved therein, in order to measure explicit bias and explore a dimension of cultural competence. Methods In 2021, data were collected from 207 trainee GPs in the French-speaking part of Belgium. The respondents passed an Implicit Association Test (IAT), a validated tool used to measure implicit biases against ethnic groups. An explicit attitude of willingness to adapt care to diversity, one of the dimensions of cultural competence, was measured using the Hudelson scale. Results The overwhelming majority of trainee GPs (82.6%, 95% CI: 0.77 – 0.88) had implicit preferences for their ingroup to the detriment of ethnic and migrant groups. Overall, the majority of respondents considered it the responsibility of GPs to adapt their attitudes and practices to migrants’ needs. More than 50% of trainee GPs, however, considered it the responsibility of migrant patients to adapt to the values and habits of the host country. Conclusions This study found that the trainee GPs had high to very high levels of implicit ethnic bias and that they were not always willing to adapt care to the values of migrants. We therefore recommend that they are made aware of this bias and we recommend using the IAT and Hudelson scales as educational tools to address ethnic biases in primary care.

South Korea is slowly but steadily becoming a country of immigrants. In 1998, there were barely 300,000 foreign residents in South Korea. As of 2018, there were more than 2.3 million. The immigrant population has yet to reach 5% of the total population, but it is predicted to rise significantly in the years to come. Despite the increase in newcomers, it is not well understood who native South Koreans prefer as immigrants and why. Are immigrant attitudes motivated by co-ethnic solidarity, or are they primarily based on economic and sociotropic concerns? To isolate attitudes on these crucial questions, this research uses a conjoint experiment that simultaneously tests the influence of seven immigrant attributes in generating support for admission. Our results show that broad sociotropic concerns largely drive attitudes towards immigrants in South Korea, but an immigrant’s origin also matters. Prospective newcomers from culturally similar and higher-status countries who can speak Korean and have clear plans to work are most preferred. The research findings will be relevant to the comparative study of immigration attitudes, as well as to researchers interested in the specifics of the South Korean case.

Abstract For children in out-of-home care (OOHC) and adults who experienced OOHC as children, the records compiled by care workers, social workers and other relevant personnel present multiple ongoing problems. The records often embody deeply contested narratives that may include distortions and misinterpretations of facts, judgemental inferences, moralistic attitudes and other problematic aspects that can leave the care leaver at best ill-served and at worst profoundly distressed and traumatised. This article, an auto-ethnographic collaboration between a social work professional and two care leavers, aims to address these issues by constructing a ‘virtual archive’ consisting of several hypothetical records compiled in the style typically employed by caseworkers, which are then critiqued by the care leavers. In each case, the record is found to have significant shortcomings in terms of what is included or omitted, the tone, and implied judgements. The article concludes with a discussion that identifies a number of thematic issues and pitfalls intrinsic to the task of record-keeping in the OOHC context and makes recommendations aimed at achieving inclusive, rights-based processes and procedures in the creation and maintenance of records.

This article examines the relationship between (sub)national identity and attitudes towards immigrants in the multinational context of Belgium. We extend our previous studies by analysing a longer time period (1995–2020) and by making a strong case for the idea that measurement invariance testing and theoretical meaningfulness are closely intertwined. To examine whether and how the relationship between (sub)national identity and perceived ethnic threat has changed over time and between regions, we first test for metric invariance of the latent concepts. Using data from the Belgian National Election Studies, we illustrate that evaluating invariance of measurements is a necessary condition for comparative research, but also that measurement equivalence testing should be considered as an empirical guide showing researchers where substantial conclusions should potentially be revisited and theoretical validity rethought. Next, we verify whether the relationship between (sub)national identity and perceptions of ethnic threat across subnational units can be attributed to different conceptions of community membership -in terms of ethnic and/or civic citizenship conceptions- in Flanders and Wallonia. While we expected that a strong identification with Flanders would primarily be related to an ethnic citizenship representation, and as a result, stronger feelings of threat towards immigrants; we expected that a strong identification with Wallonia would primarily be related to a civic representation of the nation and therefore lower feelings of threat. Thanks to our thorough invariance testing strategy, the conceptualisation and measurement of (sub)national identity had to be adjusted in Wallonia, and the hypotheses had to be qualified.