The study aimed to understand how coping strategies in general and humor-based coping strategies in particular modulate the perception of pandemic-related stress in a sample of Italian healthcare workers during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Italy. A total of 625 healthcare workers anonymously and voluntarily completed a 10-min questionnaire, which included psychometrically valid measurements preceded by a set of questions aimed at determining workers’ exposure to COVID-19. The Perceived Stress Scale was used to measure healthcare workers’ stress levels, and the Brief COPE Scale and Coping Humor Scale were used to assess participants’ avoidant or approach coping style and verify the degree to which they relied on humor to cope with stress. The results show that (1) levels of perceived stress were higher in healthcare workers who were more exposed to COVID-19 (i.e., who came into contact with COVID-19 patients or worked in wards dedicated to COVID-19) in comparison to less-exposed workers; (2) participants who reported a higher use of avoidant coping strategies perceived the situation as more stressful than those who used them less; and (3) healthcare workers who reported higher use of humor-based coping strategies perceived the situation as less stressful in comparison with those who reported less use of coping humor. Such findings expanded other research studies by including coping humor as a potential factor to mitigate the perceived stress related to COVID-19. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for future research and limitations of the study.
]]>BackgroundThe manner in which bad news is communicated in oncological contexts can affect patients' engagement, their coping strategies and therapeutic compliance. Although this topic has been broadly investigated since the nineties, to the best of our knowledge, little has been written about Italian patients' experiences and preferences concerning what the oncologists should disclose and how they should intimate patients about their health conditions in different stages of oncological disease.MethodsIn an attempt to fill this gap, an online self-report questionnaire was administered to a sample of Italian onco-haematological patients. Data were analysed both qualitatively (by a content analysis) and quantitatively (by descriptive analysis and Generalized Linear Mixed Model).ResultsWhile the majority of patients elected to know the truth during their clinical course, a polarisation between those arguing that the truth be fully disclosed and those claiming that the truth be communicated in a personalised way was observed at the attitude level. Among demographic variables accounted for, age seems to most affect patients' preferences. Indeed, younger Italian patients decidedly reject concealment of the truth, even when justified by the beneficence principle. This result could be a reaction to some protective and paternalistic behaviours, but it could even reflect a relation according to which the more the age increases the more the fear of knowing rises, or an intergenerational change due to different ways of accessing the information. The qualitative analysis of the final open-ended question revealed three main sources of problems in doctor-patient encounters: scarcity of time, absence of empathy and use of not-understandable language that makes it difficult for patients to assume a more active role.ConclusionsThe results of the present study, which represents a preliminary step in the subject investigation, will be deployed for the construction and validation of a more sophisticated questionnaire. Better awareness of the Italian onco-haematological patients' preferences concerning bad news communication and truth-telling could be useful in adopting more suitable medical practices and improving doctor-patient relationships.
]]>Rather than providing a unifying framework for its diverse theoretical and methodological applications, this paper attempts to explore the territory of narrative by tracking the routes of a number of germinal core-constructs that have spread across disciplines and fields of activity. Taking migration and migration policy models as our “air-view map”, the first leg of the journey follows along the paths of multiculturalism, interculturality and transculturality, discussing the socio-political implications of these conceptual approaches and their repercussions on the provision of translation and interpreting services. Subsequently, the epistemological construct of narrative is observed from the vantage point of socio-narrative theory as applied to translation and interpreting studies, with a specific focus on the identity-contruction dynamics that emerge when mediating migrants’ personal stories that clash with public (institutionally acceptable) narratives.
]]>]]>
This article argues that in Italy there is a new problematic relationship among journalism, politics, and public sector organizations due to the permanence of some traditional features in the informative context as well as to the success of infotainment logic and to the pervasive use of social media. In the new hybrid digi-tal ecosystem, a redefinition of the social role of information is necessary to un-derstand the perspectives for journalism and public sector communication. Info-tainment and politainment enhance the hybridization of Italian public sector communication formats and styles mainly on social media platforms. This process has consequences on interactions and overplays between information and com-munication areas in public organizations, redefining the evolution of professional roles.
]]>
Since sexual health education (SHE) is not mandatory in Italian schools, we conducted a survey on freshmen of four Italian university campuses in 2012 to investigate the respective level of sexual health knowledge (SHK) in relation to birth control, with the aim to inform public health policy makers. A convenience strategy was employed to sample 4,552 freshmen registered with various undergraduate courses at four Italian universities: Padua university (Veneto Region); university of Milan (Lombardy Region); university of Bergamo (Lombardy Region); university of Palermo (Sicily Region). We investigated the level of SHK on birth control using 6 proxy indicators: (1) the average length of a woman’s period; (2) the most fertile interval within a woman’s period; (3) the event between the end of a period and the beginning of the next cycle; (4) the average survival of spermatozoa in the womb; (5) the concept of contraception; (6) the efficacy of various contraceptives to prevent unintended pregnancies. The level of SHK of freshmen sampled was rather low, as 60% interviewees did not know the average length of a woman’s period, the average survival of spermatozoa in the womb and the concept of contraception, whilst the most fertile interval within a woman’s period was known only to 55% of interviewees. The mean score of SHK on the efficacy of various contraceptive methods was only 5 (scale 0–17). Some categories of students were consistently and signifcantly less knowledgeable on birth control: students from the university of Palermo; those with vocational secondary school education and those not in a romantic relationship at the time the survey was conducted. The results of this survey clearly call for the introduction of SHE programs in Italian schools, as already done in several European countries. School SHE should start as early as possible, ideally even before secondary school.
]]>Durante la Conferenza annuale della Società Italiana di Marketing, tenutasi alla LIUC - Università Cattaneo di Castellanza nei gironi 28-30 ottobre 2020, è stato assegnato al Prof. Giacomo Gistri il premio come miglior referee del 2019 per la rivista Mercati e Competitività.
]]>Il presente contributo intende offrire alcune riflessioni sulle tendenze evolutive della comunicazione pubblica in Italia, focalizzando in particolare l'attenzione sull'adozione pionieristica da parte di alcune amministrazioni italiane, di nuove tecniche e strumenti di comunicazione digitale caratterizzati prevalentemente dalla componente visiva, fra cui il visual storytelling.
La ricerca è stata condotta attraverso l'analisi delle pagine social istituzionali e lo svolgimento di interviste in profondità ai responsabili delle attività di informazione e comunicazione istituzionale di alcuni amministrazioni comunali, al fine di cogliere il loro punto di vista sul significato dello storytelling in ambito pubblico, sul ricorso a video e immagini per sviluppare un maggiore engagement dei cittadini, sulle opportunità ma anche i limiti e i vincoli che emergono nell'affrontare questa nuova sfida comunicativa per le istituzioni. Il frame teorico in cui la ricerca si inscrive comprende riferimenti alla letteratura nazionale e internazionale che ha affrontato alcuni aspetti cruciali della comunicazione pubblica, la sua evoluzione in senso digitale e il concetto di storytelling, con specifico riferimento al visual storytelling e al suo possibile impiego nel settore pubblico.
]]>needs and expectations, and to maintain responsible relationships with media, varied strategic publics, and a rapidly changing global community.
]]>Cultus: the Journal of intercultural mediation and communication (ISSN: 2035 - 2948 e 2035 - 3111) is an international refereed journal focussing on the role of culture in constructing, perceiving and translating reality. The Journal aims to develop an awareness of the interplay between language and culture in communication, by investigating language, languages, cultural models, conflict, mediation and interculturality.
]]>Journal IF 1.014 (2019)
In a previous study, we manually identified seven categories (verbs, non- verbs, modal verbs in the simple present, modal verbs in the conditional mood, if, uncertain questions, and epistemic future) of Uncertainty Markers (UMs) in a corpus of 80 articles from the British Medical Journal randomly sampled from a 167-year period (1840–2007). The UMs detected on the base of an epistemic stance approach were those referring only to the authors of the articles and only in the present. We also performed preliminary experiments to assess the manual annotated corpus and to establish a baseline for the UMs automatic detection. The results of the experiments showed that most UMs could be recognized with good accuracy, except for the if-category, which includes four subcategories: if-clauses in a narrow sense; if-less clauses; as if/as though; if and whether introducing embedded questions. The unsatisfactory results concerning the if-category were probably due to both its complexity and the inadequacy of the detection rules, which were only lexical, not grammatical. In the current article, we describe a different approach, which combines grammatical and syntactic rules. The performed experiments show that the identification of uncertainty in the if-category has been largely double improved compared to our previous results. The complex overall process of uncertainty detection can greatly profit from a hybrid approach which should combine supervised Machine learning techniques with a knowledge-based approach constituted by a rule-based inference engine devoted to the if-clause case and designed on the basis of the above mentioned epistemic stance approach.
Although much research has been carried out on uncertainty markers detection in the biomedical field by the NLP community, as far as we know, no study has been conducted specifically on a morphosyntactic structure, such as the if-category.
]]>