Cyber-harassment victimization of Portuguese adolescents: A lifestyle-routine activities theory approach.

Cyber-harassment refers to a pattern of repeated, intentional, and unwanted annoyances, impositions, threats, or other aggravating actions mediated by Information and Communication Technologies. Globally, substantial proportions of adolescents experience cyber-harassment, resulting in a host of deleterious health-related consequences. This study tested the empirical utility of the Lifestyle-Routine Activities Theory in accounting for adolescent cyber-victimization. A representative sample of 627 adolescents, aged 12-16, enrolled in schools from northern Portugal and Azores, were surveyed. Consistent with the theoretical assumptions, older adolescents, who used tablets, published information on social network profiles, added unknown people as friends, met face-to-face with them, and had parents with less knowledge of their online contacts were at increased risk of being cyber-victimized. Theoretical and practical implications are elaborated.

Social Network Analysis of COVID-19 Sentiments: 10 Metropolitan Cities in Italy.

The pandemic spread rapidly across Italy, putting the region's health system on the brink of collapse, and generating concern regarding the government's capacity to respond to the needs of patients considering isolation measures. This study developed a sentiment analysis using millions of Twitter data during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 10 metropolitan cities in Italy's (1) north: Milan, Venice, Turin, Bologna; (2) central: Florence, Rome; (3) south: Naples, Bari; and (4) islands: Palermo, Cagliari. Questions addressed are as follows: (1) How did tweet-related sentiments change over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, and (2) How did sentiments change when lagged with policy shifts and/or specific events? Findings show an assortment of differences and connections across Twitter sentiments (fear, anger, and joy) based on policy measures and geographies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results can be used by policy makers to quantify the satisfactory level of positive/negative acceptance of decision makers and identify important topics related to COVID-19 policy measures, which can be useful for imposing geographically varying lockdowns and protective measures using historical data.

The reliability of tweets as a supplementary method of seasonal influenza surveillance.

BACKGROUND: Existing influenza surveillance in the United States is focused on the collection of data from sentinel physicians and hospitals; however, the compilation and distribution of reports are usually delayed by up to 2 weeks. With the popularity of social media growing, the Internet is a source for syndromic surveillance due to the availability of large amounts of data. In this study, tweets, or posts of 140 characters or less, from the website Twitter were collected and analyzed for their potential as surveillance for seasonal influenza. OBJECTIVE: There were three aims: (1) to improve the correlation of tweets to sentinel-provided influenza-like illness (ILI) rates by city through filtering and a machine-learning classifier, (2) to observe correlations of tweets for emergency department ILI rates by city, and (3) to explore correlations for tweets to laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in San Diego. METHODS: Tweets containing the keyword "flu" were collected within a 17-mile radius from 11 US cities selected for population and availability of ILI data. At the end of the collection period, 159,802 tweets were used for correlation analyses with sentinel-provided ILI and emergency department ILI rates as reported by the corresponding city or county health department. Two separate methods were used to observe correlations between tweets and ILI rates: filtering the tweets by type (non-retweets, retweets, tweets with a URL, tweets without a URL), and the use of a machine-learning classifier that determined whether a tweet was "valid", or from a user who was likely ill with the flu. RESULTS: Correlations varied by city but general trends were observed. Non-retweets and tweets without a URL had higher and more significant (P<.05) correlations than retweets and tweets with a URL. Correlations of tweets to emergency department ILI rates were higher than the correlations observed for sentinel-provided ILI for most of the cities. The machine-learning classifier yielded the highest correlations for many of the cities when using the sentinel-provided or emergency department ILI as well as the number of laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in San Diego. High correlation values (r=.93) with significance at P<.001 were observed for laboratory-confirmed influenza cases for most categories and tweets determined to be valid by the classifier. CONCLUSIONS: Compared to tweet analyses in the previous influenza season, this study demonstrated increased accuracy in using Twitter as a supplementary surveillance tool for influenza as better filtering and classification methods yielded higher correlations for the 2013-2014 influenza season than those found for tweets in the previous influenza season, where emergency department ILI rates were better correlated to tweets than sentinel-provided ILI rates. Further investigations in the field would require expansion with regard to the location that the tweets are collected from, as well as the availability of more ILI data.

The complex relationship of realspace events and messages in cyberspace: case study of influenza and pertussis using tweets.

BACKGROUND: Surveillance plays a vital role in disease detection, but traditional methods of collecting patient data, reporting to health officials, and compiling reports are costly and time consuming. In recent years, syndromic surveillance tools have expanded and researchers are able to exploit the vast amount of data available in real time on the Internet at minimal cost. Many data sources for infoveillance exist, but this study focuses on status updates (tweets) from the Twitter microblogging website. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to explore the interaction between cyberspace message activity, measured by keyword-specific tweets, and real world occurrences of influenza and pertussis. Tweets were aggregated by week and compared to weekly influenza-like illness (ILI) and weekly pertussis incidence. The potential effect of tweet type was analyzed by categorizing tweets into 4 categories: nonretweets, retweets, tweets with a URL Web address, and tweets without a URL Web address. METHODS: Tweets were collected within a 17-mile radius of 11 US cities chosen on the basis of population size and the availability of disease data. Influenza analysis involved all 11 cities. Pertussis analysis was based on the 2 cities nearest to the Washington State pertussis outbreak (Seattle, WA and Portland, OR). Tweet collection resulted in 161,821 flu, 6174 influenza, 160 pertussis, and 1167 whooping cough tweets. The correlation coefficients between tweets or subgroups of tweets and disease occurrence were calculated and trends were presented graphically. RESULTS: Correlations between weekly aggregated tweets and disease occurrence varied greatly, but were relatively strong in some areas. In general, correlation coefficients were stronger in the flu analysis compared to the pertussis analysis. Within each analysis, flu tweets were more strongly correlated with ILI rates than influenza tweets, and whooping cough tweets correlated more strongly with pertussis incidence than pertussis tweets. Nonretweets correlated more with disease occurrence than retweets, and tweets without a URL Web address correlated better with actual incidence than those with a URL Web address primarily for the flu tweets. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates that not only does keyword choice play an important role in how well tweets correlate with disease occurrence, but that the subgroup of tweets used for analysis is also important. This exploratory work shows potential in the use of tweets for infoveillance, but continued efforts are needed to further refine research methods in this field.

(Re)Introducing communication competence to the health professions.

Despite the central role that communication skills play in contemporary accounts of effective health care delivery in general, and the communication of medical error specifically, there is no common or consensual core in the health professions regarding the nature of such skills. This lack of consensus reflects, in part, the tendency for disciplines to reinvent concepts and measures without first situating such development in disciplines with more cognate specialization in such concepts. In this essay, an integrative model of communication competence is introduced, along with its theoretical background and rationale. Communication competence is defined as an impression of appropriateness and effectiveness, which is functionally related to individual motivation, knowledge, skills, and contextual facilitators and constraints. Within this conceptualization, error disclosure contexts are utilized to illustrate the heuristic value of the theory, and implications for assessment are suggested. Significance for public healthModels matter, as do the presuppositions that underlie their architecture. Research indicates that judgments of competence moderate outcomes such as satisfaction, trust, understanding, and power-sharing in relationships and in individual encounters. If the outcomes of health care encounters depend on the impression of competence that patients or their family members have of health care professionals, then knowing which specific communicative behaviors contribute to such impressions is not merely important - it is essential. To pursue such a research agenda requires that competence assessment and operationalization becomes better aligned with conceptual assumptions that separate behavioral performance from the judgments of the competence of that performance.

Coping with obsessive relational intrusion and stalking: the role of social support and coping strategies.

This study investigated the extent to which social support mediates negative effects of stalking and obsessive relational intrusion (ORI) victimization. A survey of 1,068 respondents indicated that (a) ORI/stalking victimization is positively related to negative symptoms and trauma; (b) five different types of coping responses are positively related to negative symptoms; (c) four domains of social support reveal small but significant negative relationships with negative symptoms; and (d) females are more threatened by unwanted pursuit than male victims, and male pursuers are more threatening than female pursuers. Structural equation modeling indicates that the influence of ORI/stalking on negative symptoms is mediated by the use of coping strategies and the adequacy of social support. Discussion speculates on the functional theoretical value of coping and support processes in managing unwanted pursuit and stalking.

The good funeral: toward an understanding of funeral participation and satisfaction.

This study posits a model of funeral satisfaction in which religiosity predicts general funeral attitudes, which predict levels and types of funeral participation, mediating the relationship between attitudes and satisfaction in a particular bereavement context. Over a thousand respondents rated their attitudes toward funerals in general and evaluated the most recent funeral they had actually attended. The resulting model indicated that religiosity and favorable attitudes, when enacted through participation and involvement, tend to predict funeral satisfaction, in combination with favorable comparisons, and when the deceased was close and the death unexpected or tragic. Evaluations of the funeral, in turn, independently influence a person's general attitudes about funerals. Theoretical and practical implications for understanding funerals and bereavement are explored.

The personality of pursuit: personality attributions of unwanted pursuers and stalkers.

A sample of 292 college students recalled a partner who had engaged in unwanted pursuit (46%) or recalled their most recent "normal" dating relationship. Subjects rated their own level of stalking victimization and rated the partner on a series of personality characteristics and social competence. Unwanted pursuers were perceived as less socially competent, more histrionic, more borderline, and less obsessive-compulsive, with discrimination of "normals" from unwanted pursuers of approximately 75% to 80% accuracy. These attributions also significantly predicted a continuous measure of unwanted pursuit victimization (R = .406). Implications for developing more precise and practical risk profiles of unwanted pursuers are discussed.

"If I can't have you, no one can": development of a Relational Entitlement and Proprietariness Scale (REPS).

Relational proprietariness and entitlement have been theoretically related to partner violence following the threat of relationship dissolution. To date, however, no measure has been employed to verify such accounts. A multistage item pool development and refinement strategy was employed, resulting in a 32-item measure with strong construct validity. An online survey administered to 279 students resulted in an interpretable factor structure of sexual proprietariness and entitlement, consisting of social, behavioral, and information control, and a potential factor of face threat reactivity. These factors added unique variance to the prediction of instrumental and expressive aggression, were related to self-esteem and attachment, and were not contaminated by social desirability. Recommendations for bolstering the face threat reactivity factor and future studies are suggested. This measure provides a new tool that contributes to the prediction of intimate partner violence.

Reclaiming control in stalking cases.

Some common myths about stalking are debunked on the basis of research. In light of such research, stalking is examined in terms of its prevalence, the degree to which it is a gendered phenomenon, the tactics stalkers use in their pursuit, the effects of such unwanted pursuit on victims, and the tactics victims typically use to manage such pursuit. Recommendations are made regarding these strategies.