ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, countries such as France, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Latvia, and Bulgaria have banned face-coverings from public spaces. These bans are popularly known as 'burqa bans' as they seem to have been drafted with the aim of preventing people from wearing burqas and niqabs specifically. The scholarly response to these bans has been overwhelmingly negative, with several lawyers and philosophers arguing that they violate the human right to freedom of religion. While this article shares some of the concerns that have been raised, it argues that banning face-coverings in public is morally justified under certain conditions with the exception of facemasks that are necessary for the containment of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. The reason for this is that those who publicly cover their face make it very difficult for other members of society to socially interact with them, especially for those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, which is problematic in an age where many people are chronically lonely or at risk of becoming chronically lonely. As such, this article can be understood as a more elaborate, and arguably more sophisticated, defence of the justification that France offered for its face-covering ban before the European Court of Human Rights, namely that covering one's face undermines the conditions for 'living together'.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures applied in most countries have disrupted the everyday life of millions of people around the world. These conditions have affected two main aspects: sociability and mental health. This article analyzes the relation-ship between these two variables during a critical period of life: adolescence. In this stage of the life course social relations and peer interactions outside the inner family circle are essential for the person ' s psychosocial development. Our findings suggest that restric-tions on adolescent sociability due to lockdown, as temporary school closure, intensified family life, and limited urban mobility, have severe impacts on adolescent socioemotional wellbeing. This emotional distress stems from a sense of a lost "adolescence experience" since sociability is a constitutive part of adolescence. The conclusion highlights the core importance of sociability, face-to-face encounters, and corporality in social life and emotional wellbeing, and the insufficient capacity of the modern Information and Com-munication Technologies to replace them. The empirical data for this article come from a qualitative and participatory research with low-income adolescents in Mexico. Fieldwork was carried out in the middle of the lockdown period, from october 2020 to august 2021, and 61 high school students were the main participants in this project.
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The move to online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic has led students in high schools to experience new issues because of their constant use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the consequences of constant ICT use is emotional exhaustion, which is raised or limited by different factors. The teachers' sociability is one of the factors that might decrease emotional exhaustion in students during online classes, while technostress could further it. Moreover, technostress creators could act as moderators on the effect of sociability on emotional exhaustion. These effects are tested with the help of a study with 592 participants, discovering that the sociability in online classes has an effect on how emotionally exhausted the students are. The antecedent technostress also has an effect on emotional exhaustion, thus furthering it. This paper contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by showing how students are affected by constant ICT use. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures applied in most countries have disrupted the everyday life of millions of people around the world. These conditions have affected two main aspects: sociability and mental health. This article analyzes the relationship between these two variables during a critical period of life: adolescence. In this stage of the life course social relations and peer interactions outside the inner family circle are essential for the person's psychosocial development. Our findings suggest that restrictions on adolescent sociability due to lockdown, as temporary school closure, intensified family life, and limited urban mobility, have severe impacts on adolescent socioemotional wellbeing. This emotional distress stems from a sense of a lost "adolescence experience” since sociability is a constitutive part of adolescence. The conclusion highlights the core importance of sociability, face-to-face encounters, and corporality in social life and emotional wellbeing, and the insufficient capacity of the modern Information and Communication Technologies to replace them. The empirical data for this article come from a qualitative and participatory research with low-income adolescents in Mexico. Fieldwork was carried out in the middle of the lockdown period, from october 2020 to august 2021, and 61 high school students were the main participants in this project © 2023, Revista Colombiana de Sociologia.All Rights Reserved.
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This study was conducted to identify factors affecting professionalism of nursing students. This data is meant to be used as a starting point for identifying the educational methods required to build nursing professionalism. From March 18 through April 8, 2022, the subjects of this study were surveyed online through Google. With this, 194 questionnaires were collected from fourth-year students of the nursing department at a university. The analysis revealed a positive correlation between sociability, service, and nursing professionalism, with service having the greatest impact on nursing professionalism (p˂.001). Therefore, it is urgent to prepare a non-regular curriculum program that can cultivate the service of nursing students. Furthermore, it is important to create an educational program that may help nursing students become professionals in the field through a variety of volunteer activities, such as non-face-to-face programs, encouraging voluntary participation, and continuous management © 2022,Journal for ReAttach Therapy and Developmental Diversities. All Rights Reserved.
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En esta entrega utilizamos los conceptos de convivencia, sociabilidad e intimidad, para analizar el trastorno intempestivo de las rutinas y la percepción de la vida cotidiana obligados por el alejamiento social decretado durante la pandemia del coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 en México. Al calificar a esta coyuntura como sacrificio, destacamos que una de las pérdidas notables de la emergencia sanitaria ha sido la tranquilidad socioemocional resultante del acotamiento de la calidez que produce el contacto personal y el encuentro cara a cara. Desde aquel que se relaciona con la acción pública o institucional, hasta el que deriva de las relaciones más estrechas.Alternate :In this installment we use the concepts of coexistence, sociability, and intimacy, to analyze the untimely disruption of routines and the perception of daily life forced by the social distancing decreed during the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic in Mexico. By qualifying this situation as a sacrifice, we highlight that one of the notable losses of the health emergency has been the socio-emotional tranquility resulting from the limitation of the warmth produced by personal contact and face-to-face encounters. From the one that is related to public or institutional action, to the one that derives from the closest relationships.
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The reliance on the use of virtual learning environments, particularly computer-supported collaborative learning environments, is increasing in higher education institutions. This paper explores the perceived sociability of a virtual learning environment after it was implemented in an interdisciplinary project-based course in a higher education institute in Norway due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes the validation of a sociability scale in a sample of 1,611 students. The paper also reports on differences in perceived sociability according to gender, field of study and personality and the extent to which perceptions of sociability relate to the experience of a sudden change from a real-life learning environment to a virtual one. The results of this large-scale study suggest that the Norwegian version of the sociability scale can be used as a valid and reliable instrument to measure the perceived sociability of a virtual learning environment in the context of self-organized student project teams. [ FROM AUTHOR]
ABSTRACT
This study seeks to granularly document the fundamental aspects of the pandemic and its effect on the global scale and environmental steadiness. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is therefore utilized to analyze these constructs. The study results show that the pathway coefficient for the parameters, such as health awareness, naturalism, mediation, personal development, sustainability, sociability, empathy, and cooperation, illustrates that the parameters directly impact pandemic control and management. At the same time, the lockdown and social distance rules attain dire consequences on the “conventional” retail property sector. It might speed up the evolution procedure of different conduits retail plus the channel coupling performance of physical stores and, hence, cause changes in urban areas–retail sector. The pandemic isn’t necessarily leading to the shutdown of retail stores. Nonetheless, it might have a meaningful effect on the retail estate enterprise business. The results show a requirement for the rapid physical shop repositioning performance of different channels firms. The study presents a meaningful understanding and demonstrates many consequences for the retailers, Landlords, and equally policy crafting components tackling urban regeneration plus local economic advancement within the post-covid phase.
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Recent years have seen an increase in online activity by young adults, mainly in two broad areas: online interactions on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.and online gaming. More so, with the onset of the COVID- 19 pandemics and the subsequent social distancing and restrictions, social activities have shifted online even more.In this chapter we investigate the relation between online activity (social activities versus gaming) and social phobia and sociability in young adults, aged between 18 and 25 yrs.We monitored the online activity of 78 young adults (41 males, 37 females), all volunteers,during one month, via the Quality Time app for Android. The participants were divided in two groups, one group (N = 40) with high activity on social platforms (at least 2 hrs/day) and the other group (N = 38) with high gaming activity (at least 2 hrs/ day). Social phobia was assessed using the homonymous scale from the Psychiatric Diagnostic and Screening Questionnaire (PDSQ), while Sociability was measured with the homonymous scale from the Zuckerman- Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire (ZKPQ). Our results show that individuals with high gaming activity have higher levels of social phobia compared to individuals with high activity on social media platforms. Sociability is a good predictor of time spent online: highly sociable people tend to spend less time online than those with lower sociability levels even in the current social context. We conclude that, given the present social environment favoring online activities, increase in social online activities and decrease in gaming could reduce social phobia and boost psychological wellbeing. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2022. All rights reserved.
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This article asks how Covid-19 should affect historical research, especially into local and parish history. It does so by addressing a number of key themes, such as the conduct of welfare history, and how Covid might influence historical medical research and ideas of locality. The effects of Covid on religion and the parish are examined, with an eye to historical precedent. The pandemic raises salient issues about the history of community and loneliness, discussed here. Covid, it is argued, has accentuated personal isolation and loneliness in society, highlighting many points and sources of historical comparison. It prompts important questions about historical sociability and human isolation. It has raised issues of local xenophobia and related emotions that have many echoes in our past. One needs to ask how far its restrictions on movement and issues of vaccine documentation were historically precedented. The article outlines these and related matters as an re-directive agenda for Covid-influenced research into parish and community history.
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A plethora of studies stress students' self-regulated learning (SRL) skills to be conditional for successful learning in school and beyond. In general, self-regulated learners are actively engaged in constructing their own understanding also including the regulation of contextual features in the environment. Within the contextual features, the regulation of peer interaction is necessary, because college courses increasingly require peer learning. This goes along with the increasing interest for online learning settings, due in no small part to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In the present study we explore how social presence (i.e., the degree to which the other person is perceived as physical "real"), social space (i.e., trust building between peers) and sociability (i.e., the degree to which the virtual learning environment supports social presence and social space) are essential elements in the regulation of online peer interaction. To shed light in this matter, higher education students were qualitatively followed for 1 year in an online academic writing course by using retrospective interviews (n = 7) and reflective questions (n = 62). Additionally, for social presence, students' perceptions were quantitatively measured with a validated questionnaire (n = 41). The results show that the planning phase is the most important phase for supporting students' social presence because that is where the regulation of peer interaction becomes important. The sociability has an important role here as well becoming less prominent further on in the self-regulation process. In the SRL follow-up phases, students look for other ways to increase their social presence and social space in order to shape the regulation of peer interaction from a position of trust. In the evaluation phase, students are aware of the importance of social presence but less of social space for the regulation of peer interaction. We conclude with some design principles to facilitate students' regulation of peer interaction in online settings.
ABSTRACT
Online collaboration is becoming increasingly more common in work life and education, a development that is accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is thus imperative that students learn to work in and as teams in online settings, and that teachers and educational researchers and policymakers understand how online environments enable and constrain student collaboration. However, what has been missing in research on online student collaboration is a focus on students as agents rather than passive learners as well as a lack of focus on student teams as self-organizing teams. This paper reports on a study that investigated the experiences of 1611 graduate students in 315 teams enrolled in an interdisciplinary project-based course during their (forced) transition from face-to-face to online collaboration due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We explored how the transition to online learning affected social interaction and how teams changed their practices to support and sustain social interaction in the online environment. The findings show that the changed conditions of the learning environment influenced social interaction in negative ways, but also that team reflection seemed to enable the students to reverse some of the adverse effects and develop practices that supported both the cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions of social interaction. Theoretically, this study suggests possible causes for why social interaction was reduced and provides in-depth knowledge about the relationships between social interaction, social presence, and social space. The study also provides support for theories of learning that emphasize the need to consider students as active agents rather than merely users of the affordances of a virtual learning environment or guided by the teacher's interventions. It makes a unique contribution to the scarce empirical literature on virtual self-organizing student teams in higher education and provides practical implications for teachers and educational researchers and policy makers.
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The questionable wisdom of Musk aside, the truth in these words tweeted at 8 a.m. to his 36.6 M followers is undeniable. The power memes can wield is both a tool and a toolbox. They have the potential to both depict and construct, and their value has been underestimated in sociology.A new breed of sociologists has risen, one who does not teach but tweet. They’re capturing, defining, and challenging a world no textbook prepared us for. Memes have become a language that socially constructs, rapidly evolves, responsively maintains, and reflexively challenges within social worlds that have adapted during the pandemic as people went online because they were not allowed to go out. In the chaos of the pandemic, these voices have offered insight, distillation, critique, relief, and, most importantly, meaning. Responding to our fundamental need for sociability, association, and imitation (Simmel and Hughes, 1949), memes have shown us modes of understanding that were relatable and imitative enough to foster a sense of camaraderie and certainty, at times even encouraging critical thinking, while everything else seemed liminal and adrift without a paddle.The purpose of this piece, however, is not to sing the praises of the language of my people. Instead, it aims to enlighten about how rich and powerful this toolbox can be to sociologists in understanding life during COVID. It also hopes to show how memers are stealing your jobs by becoming sociologists themselves. #truthbomb
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Purpose>This article examines aspects of information communication technology (ICT) connectivity among the understudied population of low-income older adults living in rural and peri-urban subsidized housing. We aim to investigate if variations exist in access and connectivity when economic and housing conditions are constant and use data from northern New England.Design/methodology/approach>The multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approach involved administering structured surveys using iPads with senior residents (n = 91) from five housing sites, qualitative observations by field researchers and an ecological assessment of ICT resources at housing, community and state levels.Findings>All subsidized housing sites were broadband accessible and nearby libraries. Fewer sites had Wi-Fi freely available to residents, and individual residents disparately accessed the Internet. Age and education demonstrably influenced ICT use of social media and email. Technology in the form of iPads used for surveys posed functional challenges for some older adults, but these technology-mediated interactions were also perceived as important sites of sociability.Originality/value>Older adults disparately access and use ICT relative to socioeconomic status even as housing conditions remain constant, and access and use influences frequency of social connections with friends and family. The findings reveal factors that contribute to the existing digital divide facing older adults and broader lack of digital equity.
ABSTRACT
Be it in normal times or in a crisis, exchanges of services between neighbours are subject to the same laws of sociability. People in higher-level occupations make up for the geographical dispersion of their family through more frequent relations with neighbours and feel less isolated than other social categories. During the lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19, the proportion of individuals exchanging services with neighbours remained stable, but attention focused on the over-75s at the expense of families. People aged 60–74, habitually the most neighbourly age group, exchanged even more services during the crisis. In one respect, however, the lockdown produced a radical change: the exchange of services did nothing to prevent a sharp increase in the sense of isolation. © I.N.E.D. All rights reserved for all countries
ABSTRACT
Lambert et al describe the services given and received before and during lockdown, and the variations across ages and social categories drawing on data from the Colonel survey. The exchange of services is an integral part of neighborly sociability in France. Giving and receiving are asymmetrical, however, and unequally distributed across the population, as was shown by the first major survey on relations between neighbors in France. Social practices of this kind were not greatly affected by the lockdown, except for the provision of help to older adults and the decrease of help to families, as the Coconel survey reveals. The French are active in the exchange of services, but by no means equal.
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Purpose This study aims to explore the impact of spatial configuration on behavioral patterns of visitors in the ground floor of health-care spaces. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the Space Syntax analysis was used to combine visibility graph analysis and axial line analysis with empirical observation of visitors' activities. Two types of observation methods on visitors were conducted to discover the behavioral patterns of individuals, respectively, named "gate counts" and "people following." Findings The outcomes of this research revealed that the spatial arrangements of pathways, public areas, vertical circulations, entrance space, lobby, emergency department, reception desk and pharmacy have a significant influence on the way that visitors perceive the health-care environment. Research limitations/implications The current research is limited to two aspects of effective wayfinding (configuration of health care and geometry). Future work can investigate the other potential factors coupled with the current factor as an integrated research for enhancing wayfinding and sustaining accessibility. Another limitation is that the observation results for this study had been conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic and future studies can compare these results with the current COVID-19 situation within health care environments. Originality/value A large amount of research has focused on the needs of populations in developed countries. This topic has not been investigated thoroughly by professionals in developing countries such as Iran. Accordingly, this study benefits environmental psychologists and architects by revealing the effective characteristics of legible spaces in health-care environments.
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The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has fostered the digital turn, which has resulted in the transformation of different areas of daily life. The goal of this work is to identify new digital practices and their social impact in this context of progressive digitization. By means of a methodology based on a bibliographical and secondary data sources review, the work stresses some of the consequences of these digital habits, such as self-exploitation due to the difficulty of dissociating between leisure time and teleworking, videodysmorfia and exhaustion caused by the permanent videoconferences, the excess of misinformation or the lack of digital privacy and security. To prevent these undesirable effects of a hyperconnected, hyperactive and unequal society, the adoption of digital hygiene measures is proposed to minimize risks and turn them into opportunities. The improvement of digital skills becomes essential to achieve this aim.
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Due to the COVID pandemic, school teachers – like many other educators –needed to become vastly more digitally capable almost overnight. The results have ranged from the modest to the extraordinary. Teachers turned to content production at previously unseen levels. While recent years has seen increasing interest in the engagement of teachers with social media as a pedagogical tool and how it can advance their personal and professional capability, little attention has been paid to why and how they invest in creating and distributing pedagogical content via YouTube. This paper explores that question. First, we put forward a theoretical framework to allow better understanding of the issue. This draws from several lines of literature to set out a comprehensive framework to interrogate and contextualize the reasons teachers invest in creating and distributing YouTube content. The second part of our paper presents findings from an ongoing study of 115 teacher-produced YouTube video channels. Initial analysis suggests that the participants place strong value on gifting their knowledge and believe that sharing, contributing and creating new understandings are hallmarks of a more professional digital pedagogy. But the reasons they do so are not heterogeneous. Rather they are complex and in some ways surprising.
ABSTRACT
The current COVID-19 pandemic has had a wide impact on the global economic sector. Restaurants are one of the sectors affected by the regulation of distance restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study looks at what factors can encourage people to visit restaurants when government regulations have allowed consumers to make food purchases offline. This study looks at five factors;disease denial, perceived safety, perceived fair price, sociability and affect regulation. The sample in this study were 133 respondents. Furthermore, the data is processed using SEM-PLS using SmartPLS 3.0. The study results indicate that perceived safety, sociability and affect regulation have a significant positive impact on a person's intention to visit a restaurant. This research contributes to both improving the theory of a person's intention to visit a restaurant during the Covid-19 pandemic and helping restaurant service providers decide on an effective strategy in encouraging someone to have the intention to visit a restaurant.