Coverage of the Third World by the media in the developed Western nations has been a subject of intense debate among scholars since the 1970s. Some of the outspoken media critics have pointed to certain imbalances in Western media reporting on some parts of the world, including African countries. Such imbalances range from inadequate coverage to emphasis on crisis news events. Other critics argue, however, that Western news reporting on African countries, for example, is crisis-oriented because that is the kind of news those countries offer to the media given the recurrence of various forms of crises there. The 1984-85 Ethiopian famine was one such crisis that received extensive coverage in the Western media. Criticisms of this coverage served to fuel a growing concern among African and other intellectuals, particularly about one aspect of Western media reporting: the failure of those media to put into adequate context African events on which they report. Some critics have pointed out, for example, that although environmental decline is a major underlying cause of famine in Africa, it does not receive attention in Western media coverage of this recurring crisis. This is in spite of the pioneering role of the latter in the promotion of environmental issues in the West as a major social and political concern. From a much broader perspective, however, it appears that the case of imbalanced reporting on Africa in the Western media is not an isolated one. A number of studies on news reporting suggests that the criticism of imbalances in Western news reporting may have more to do with the nature of Western news values than with a wilful attempt on the part of the Western media to report on particular countries in those terms. Thus reporting on African countries by the Western media could be one typical example in which standard Western news practices come into full play. Against this background, the present study sought to investigate Western media coverage of Africa as viewed in terms of the application of Western news values. First, using qualitative analyses of relevant literature, the study undertook a contextualisation of crisis events in African countries, with special reference to famines, by identifying environmental degradation as a crucial factor in the unfolding of such crises. This included explanations for the apparent neglect of African environmental issues by Western media. Discussion on the environment was set in a wider context of a global environmental crisis. The qualitative analyses also examined the issue of imbalances, such as the focus on crisis and the lack of context, in Western media coverage of Africa. This was explored within a theoretical framework that encapsulates aspects of the political economy of the mass media, political ideological differences, and culture as some of the theoretical propositions used by some media researchers to explain imbalances in international news flow. Second, the study used the quantitative research technique of content analysis to carry out a longitudinal investigation of reporting on African countries in general during 1982-87 as well as a case study of the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine by three Western dailies: The Times of London, the New York Times, and the Sydney Morning Herald. An IAMCR (International Association for Mass Communication Research) coding scheme was adopted for this purpose. With regard to the qualitative analyses, the study found that even though environmental decline is a major underlying cause of many of Africa's ongoing and recurring crises such as famines, it may not receive attention in Western media reporting on those crises. This appears to be because the nature of Africa's environmental problems does not meet Western news value criteria. As regards the content analyses, the study found, in both the longitudinal and case studies, a dearth of reporting in all three dailies on African environmental issues and an orientation towards reporting events as discrete events, with little or no attention to underlying or contextual information. Crisis and non-crisis events in Africa were found to be, however, equally reported in most of the sample years studied in two of the three dailies. The focus of reporting on the Ethiopian famine was found to be on Western relief activities and on the bizarre or sensational side of the disaster - aspects of reporting that fit into standard Western news practices.

Western societies are increasingly becoming aware of the many problems facing boys and men. In Australia these problems include one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world, a high divorce rate, with most divorces being instigated by women, the breakdown of the family, and conflicting messages about what it is to be 'a man'. This study examines and describes how a group of 15-17 year old young men, who attend a private single sex school in Canberra, describe their beliefs and attitudes about becoming adult men. Participants were asked to respond to questions posed in a survey designed specifically for this research. These questions looked at relationships, gender roles, family, fatherhood, work and leisure and whether impending manhood appeared confusing. The context in which participants are situated is one of cultural and social flux; it was the current discourse and debate in Australia about how to be a man, men's issues, and the perception of men in crisis, which gave this study its broad contextual frame. Contrary to the conventional wisdom about boys/young men who attend elite private schools, the participants in this study emerged as egalitarian and flexible in their attitudes with regard to relationships, gender roles, parenting and work. This study therefore in part refutes the stereotypes, which surround students at private boys' schools, including those that purport that these students will hold predominantly hegemonic, traditional views about masculinity and their role as men. This thesis presents the voices of some three hundred young men, adding to an area of research, which is contested and vigorous in its development. By exploring the beliefs and attitudes of a group of Australians who are on the brink of manhood tentative insights have been offered, and, believe, some illumination gained. The dilemmas posed for meaningful adulthood for young men in Australia are very real. We need to listen to what young men have to say.

This thesis is concerned with the contribution of practising planners, working in town or urban planning departments, to social wellbeing. It is concerned with what planners do, how they conceptualise the application of town or urban planning practice to social issues, and what they think about their role in achieving social outcomes in a place. The general question is initially addressed through an introductory story and then via a content analysis of recent regional strategic plans. This is followed by a review of town planning literature on social issues, particularly literature concerned with small areas such as villages and neighbourhoods and which treat urban areas as a series of villages or neighbourhoods. The work is further advanced by a discourse analysis of the use of the word community, as a noun and as an adjective, in a series of planning reports. Recent literature on community development, community consultation and sustainability principles is also reviewed for its contribution to the way in which planners address social issues. On the basis of findings from this work, five research propositions are developed. These are explored through a survey of practising planners. The research propositions are explored in a number of questions so as to search for consistency and establish the reliability of the results. The same questionnaire is also administered to a class of fourth year student planners as a control. Four of the five research propositions are demonstrated by the survey results. The results suggest that practising planners have a knowledge and skill shortfall in the area of applying planning practice to achieving social outcomes. However, the results also demonstrate that most planners think that community building is part of their role, they have a realistic appreciation of their skills and are open to new ideas and learning opportunities. The concluding section of the thesis makes a series of suggestions for responding to the shortfall and developing planners� knowledge and skills relevant to community building.

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>Liljestrand, Johan (2002): Klassrummet som diskussionsarena. (The classroom as an arena for discussions)</p><p>The aim of the dissertation is to study whole class discussions in the Swedish upper secondary school, concerning issues subjected to controversy in the public debate. The empirical study is related to a wider question: the possibilities for the school to educate democratic citizens. </p><p>By using discourse analysis,14 videotaped lessons from social- and religious studies where analysed, with the ambition to investigate recurrent patterns of participation and meaning making. Five teachers and six classes participated in the study.</p><p>The analysis shows that the teachers have two concurrent goals: to focus on the students’ contributions on issues in the public debate, and introduce the students to different questions in the public debate. A consequence of these goals is that the role of the teacher often becomes complex. By acting on the basis of having responsibility for the students’ development of knowledge, and sometimes also calling attention to certain values, the teacher attempts to guide the students as not yet ready for the public debate. Features from other kinds of teacher-centred education are thereby present in the discussions. However, students can also act as more autonomous participants in relation to the teacher. When they are not answering the teacher’s questions in an expected way, and in particular, in situations in which they are interacting with each other, the students may discuss the public issues without being teacher-guided to the same extent as in other situations. </p><p>The last chapter concludes that the authority of the teacher is partly given by the official steering-documents. It is still possible to ask if the guiding role of the teacher itself could be subjected to discussion. This suggestion is made from the point that teacher authority is considered as more or less limited for developing a critical attitude among the students. One may also ask if the students’ could be offered possibilities to choose the topic for discussion themselves. This latter point is made against the background that classroom-discussion presupposes student’s viewpoints in order to be accomplished. </p><p>Key words: discussion, democracy, public issues, education, participation, meaning making.</p>

<p>Sustainable development includes environmental, social and economic dimension, which has become an accepted concept at all levels of society. There is also a need for these dimensions to integrate with each other. To attain a sustainable development it has to be seen as a whole. The environmental objectives were established by Swedish parliament in 1999; however these objectives are only one of the steps in achieving a sustainable society. Swedish municipality are forced to use the environmental objectives for guidance in planning society. Municipalities have a responsibility to integrate environmental issues into political processes and at the same time contribute to an increase of the awareness about these issues. There is no guidance in the work with the environmental objectives and municipality have to work on the basis of their own environment and conditions.</p><p>The aim of this essay was to study the work of implementing environmental objectives in one municipality, with the focus on the objectives four and fifteen; towards an ecological sustainable development with support of the environmental work of another municipality. The focus of the work lays on the formulation of environmental objectives four and fifteen in order for them to be achieved without difficulty.</p><p>One conclusion is that none of the chosen environmental objectives are reached. The theoretical discussion highlights the importance of a communicative work between different participants and also information about the environmental issues on the individual level.      </p><p>This work was considered to contribute to future research concerning municipalities work with environmental objectives. </p>

Over the past decade, the business sector has come under increasing pressure to improve their environmental, safety, and health (ESH) performance. This pressure has stemmed from both external and internal sources with the organization. Public image, legislative and regulatory requirements, stakeholder awareness of environmental performance, sustainable development, and changing corporate values are driving forces that are leading companies to take a serious look at their ESH function. The increased focus on the business and sustainable aspects of ESH issues has created a demand by management to assess the current organizational strategy related to ESH. Strategy, in this respect, can be thought of as the manner in which issues are approached and handled. Unfortunately, a comprehensive approach does not exist for assessing the ESH and sustainable development strategies of an organization and linking it to the overall competitive strategy of the organization. Developing a framework for assessing the ESH strategies in an organization was the focus of this study. The major portion of the research was the development of profiles for each of the four strategy developmental levels under the elements of an ESH management system. Six elements were identified from the literature that comprise an ESH function's strategy: 1) Strategic plan, 2) structure, 3) finance, 4) technical, 5) evaluation, and 6) information management. Within each of these elements, profiles were created for each of the strategy developmental levels that these elements may utilize: Resistive, adaptive, proactive, and sustainable. The study went beyond previous research by including safety and health aspects into the environmental strategy typologies, looking at ESH elements other than the strategic plan and structure, and providing a more detailed and comprehensive explanation of the strategy levels. These profiles were peer reviewed then transformed into a series of questions that qualitatively assess the ESH strategies used within an organization. A pilot study was completed of a large high-tech manufacturing organization in Portland, OR. The pilot study demonstrated the usefulness of the tool to identify areas of improvement in an ESH function. Use of this assessment tool is the first step an organization needs to take to understand where they exist in the scale of ESH strategies, and if this is the ideal strategy to follow. / Graduation date: 2002

This thesis aims at analysing the attitudes of youngsters in Brussels towards sociological minorities. The term “minorities” is used to refer to the main social groups that suffer from subordination and misrecognition by the wider society according to the philosophical theory of recognition: women, lesbians and gay men, and ethnic minorities. Our dataset is composed of a sample of seventy schools in the Brussels Capital Region. In total, three thousand one hundred and twenty one pupils attending in 2007 the last grade of secondary education participated in the study. About half of the sample consists of pupils with a migrant background originating from about 100 different countries. This cultural diversity, reflecting one of the main characteristics of the population of the Brussels Capital Region, is at the centre of the thesis. Because of the hierarchical structure of the sample (pupils aggregated within schools), the culturally diverse population of our sample and the multidimensionality of prejudice, multilevel multivariate linear responses models were performed. In brief, these models allowed us to interpret items regrouped according to their common variation across social (and ethnic) groups and not according to their a priori content similarities. Furthermore, these models allowed us to integrate three different research traditions on prejudice: social psychology on the dimensionality of prejudice, sociology on the impact of socio demographic characteristics on prejudice and school effectiveness research on the role schools may play in reducing pupils’ prejudice. With these models, we could demonstrate the capacity of multilevel techniques to encompass the complexity of prejudice and norms, and to provide an interdisciplinary approach of social processes. Besides the impact of gender and socio economic differences on prejudice, the association between ethnic origin and prejudice was the focus of the analysis at the individual level. Hence, the empirical literature showed that respondents of foreign descent and respondents from the receiving society do not hold similar attitudes towards minorities. This association was investigated in a twofold strategy: after having assessed ethnic differences on the different kinds of prejudice, the explanatory power of possible mediators -such as the experience of group-level institutional discrimination or the bidimensional identification- on this association was tested. The choice of these mediators was influenced by different disciplines of the social sciences. Hence, besides the empirical literature specific to the topic of prejudice, these mediators are derived from theories of political sciences, of sociology of immigration, of social psychology and of cross-cultural psychology. The results showed that these mediators could indeed explain to a large extent ethnic differences on prejudice towards minorities. On the school level, we have shown that the impact schools may have on pupils’ prejudice is a differentiated one. Hence, this impact varies according to both the targets and the dimensions of prejudice. Moreover, besides school institutional characteristics, several contextual characteristics were investigated such as the cultural and social diversity within a school. Our results showed that the impact on prejudice of social and cultural diversity within schools was non-significant. This is, however, most probably related to a masking effect by the specificities of the education landscape in Brussels: differences between schools are huge and homogeneity within schools is important, given that the educational field is highly segregated both in social and in cultural terms. The implications of these results based on an interdisciplinary approach for future research and for policymakers are discussed.

Sustainable development includes environmental, social and economic dimension, which has become an accepted concept at all levels of society. There is also a need for these dimensions to integrate with each other. To attain a sustainable development it has to be seen as a whole. The environmental objectives were established by Swedish parliament in 1999; however these objectives are only one of the steps in achieving a sustainable society. Swedish municipality are forced to use the environmental objectives for guidance in planning society. Municipalities have a responsibility to integrate environmental issues into political processes and at the same time contribute to an increase of the awareness about these issues. There is no guidance in the work with the environmental objectives and municipality have to work on the basis of their own environment and conditions. The aim of this essay was to study the work of implementing environmental objectives in one municipality, with the focus on the objectives four and fifteen; towards an ecological sustainable development with support of the environmental work of another municipality. The focus of the work lays on the formulation of environmental objectives four and fifteen in order for them to be achieved without difficulty. One conclusion is that none of the chosen environmental objectives are reached. The theoretical discussion highlights the importance of a communicative work between different participants and also information about the environmental issues on the individual level.       This work was considered to contribute to future research concerning municipalities work with environmental objectives.

School is assumed to equip students with subject knowledge and contribute to their development as human beings and democratic citizens as well. In this article, the democratic dimension of the teaching assignment is brought to the fore, and an analysis tool for investigating students’ conversations on socioscientific issues that emphasises democratic aspects is presented. The DEQUAL-tool, where the acronyms stand for DEliberative QUALities, comprises both the content-related and formal aspects of the conversations, with a specific emphasis on the collective expressions of democratic qualities like questioning, consideration for others and conveying different dimensions and arguments. DEQUAL is based on an intersubjective and communicative understanding of democracy and meaning-making, and is theoretically inspired by John Dewey’s and Jürgen Habermas’ views on these matters. The development and function of DEQUAL is clarified using excerpts from upper secondary school students talking about how living in a certain place influences the greenhouse effect. By pointing out characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of students’ group-conversations, this methodological proposal can provide further guidance for an integrative understanding of the teacher’s assignment in science education.

One in nine North American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime and most will receive chemotherapy as part of their treatment. Although advances in treatment have increased survivorship, some research suggests chemotherapy results in cognitive deficits in a subset of recipients, a condition known as chemo-fog, thereby compromising quality of life. However, inconsistencies in methodology and neuropsychological assessment have complicated comparison of findings. The first objective of this thesis was to review the methodological issues with an emphasis on the quantitative techniques typically employed. A comparison of group and individual based analyses found negligible effects for both univariate and multivariate approaches while individual based analyses identified severe declines in function in a subset of participants. A standardized-regression based (SRB) approach was recommended as the method of choice. Furthermore, it was recommended that the number of tests be limited since comprehensive batteries can complicate identification due to increased risk of misclassification. Therefore, the second goal of the thesis was to evaluate the sensitivity of a reduced battery to the declines associated with chemo-fog. A comprehensive neuropsychological battery comprising 23 tests was compared to a subset of nine tests. SRB analyses demonstrated that a more selective battery was equally useful and may be appropriate for identification of chemo-fog. Given the variability in the composition of neuropsychological test batteries, the final aim of this thesis was to compare the structure of the theoretical cognitive domains with ones identified through exploratory factor analyses (principle axis factoring) to evaluate the convergence between the two. The results demonstrated there is statistical support for the conceptual framework that underlies the composition of the domains. The contributions of this thesis include providing methodological guidelines for those conducting future research in this area to ensure that results are comparable across studies and are meaningful, and evaluating the utility of a screening battery to facilitate identification of chemo-fog. In addition, it was demonstrated that despite the lack of professional guidelines informing the selection and construction of neuropsychological test batteries, there is statistical evidence to support the practice of grouping tests into domains based on theoretical grounds.