Participation in health-related online support communities plays an important role in the psychological empowerment of people who are faced with health problems. Research has suggested that important differences exist in terms of psychological empowerment depending on the form and intensity of participation in such domains by showing that users who contribute to health-related online support communities by posting messages (posters) generally experience greater benefits in terms of intrapersonal empowerment, compared to participants who only read messages (lurkers). However, as yet, very little is known about how the often-neglected interactional aspect of psychological empowerment is associated with participation in these online domains. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore how different forms and intensity of participation in health-related online support communities are associated with both dimensions of psychological empowerment. Drawing on a nonprobability sample of 616 participants in two health-related online support communities, the analysis of the data, obtained with an online questionnaire, revealed that posters scored significantly higher in degree of interactional empowerment than lurkers, whereas no difference was observed in terms of intrapersonal empowerment. In addition, high posting frequency was significantly associated with a high level of interactional empowerment but not intrapersonal empowerment. The study suggests that to better understand the empowering potential of participation for users of health-related online support communities, it is important to distinguish not only between various forms of participation but also between different aspects of psychological empowerment.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32550237
Conversations among online community members as a form of everyday, unconstrained, flexible, and spontaneous communication are important for developing a sense of community, sustainability of online communities, construction of identity, public sphere, and for creating and maintaining offline taken-for-granted basic structures of everyday life. While the lack of qualities of online conversations in online communities is often discussed and researched, we argue that its positive sides should also be conceptualized and become the subject of quantitative empirical research. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept and scale of perceived quality of online conversations and inspect the psychometric properties of the proposed scale in terms of content and convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity and reliability. The paper presents a five-factor structure of the quality of conversation scale, which is tested for its quality on a sample of 1,276 online community participants. Confirmatory factor analysis supports the proposed multidimensional structure, while correlational and regression analyses demonstrate good levels of convergent, discriminant and criterion validity. The paper suggests several refinements of the measurement instrument, and concludes with the usefulness of the introduced scale for the research and understanding of the online community phenomenon.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32641117
Public participation in decision-making has in the last decades become a common refrain in political and scientific discourse, yet it does not often truly come to fruition. The present study focuses on the underlying issue, that of the construction of the difference between scientific and public knowledge and its consequences. Through discourse analysis of scientific texts on sustainable development three distinct groups of Slovenian social scientists were discerned that differed in their views on the relationship between scientific and public knowledge and consequently the role and nature of public participation in decision-making processes. With a rise in participatory practices the preponderance of the deficit model found in this study remains problematic.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32770141
The study indicates that political, economic and social faces of Slovenia have changed substantially during the half-decade of the crisis. While the ability of citizens to influence important political decisions has been curtailed on both the national and transnational level, instability has become endemic and social solidarity has been eroded. By using quantitative and qualitative content analysis the study analyses how the unfolding crisis has been communicated in the media in the 2008-2013 period with respect to the dynamics between structure and agency as well as regarding the key (inter)national features and contours of the crisis. The study indicates Slovenian news media hardly served as an integrative force and a common forum for an inclusive and open debate. Namely, results of the quantitative content analysis indicate that journalism communicated the "causes" for the crisis by portraying it as something purely accidental, while rarely pointing at the possibility of its systemic nature. Similarly, "solutions" have been predominantly portrayed within the prevailing paradigms or through the neoliberal prism favoured by holders of political and economic power. Qualitative content analysis of how Slovenian news media communicated the decisive breaks and formative moments of the unfolding crisis shows they mostly relied on event orientation, simplistic juxtapositions and naturalisation of the established power divisions on national as well as international levels.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33098333
The article analyses how Slovenian media reported on commercial diplomacy from January to June, 2011. The authors present the main features of media reporting on the subject, such as the presence of commercial diplomacy in the media, key journalistic sources, and the attitudes of dominant journalistic sources and media to commercial diplomacy. Commercial diplomacy is not the main subject of public debate in Slovenian media; reporting on the subject represents only 2.3% of the total number of items on foreign policy. Key journalistic sources debating the commercial policy pertain to political elites, in particular the representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs, who happen to be also its core actors. Sources representing economic interests are increasingly less present in the media; their attitudes towards commercial diplomacy, however, are equally positive, with the Chamber of Commerce as the only exception. In most cases, media reports on commercial diplomacy are indigent, event-related, and without additional commentary, whereas actors involved in commercial diplomacy usually tend to take a positive stance towards it.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30996829