The present study addressed international publication trends in JABA authorship between 1970 and 1999. First, we analyzed authorship patterns to identify trends in the appearance of new first authors, unfamiliar authors, and frequent contributors. Second, articles were assigned to either a North American or an international category. The data show a decline in the number of articles by new authors and an increase in the publications of frequent contributors from North America. Trends are shown in comparison to those from the American Journal on Mental Retardation.
Seek and you shall find? A content analysis on the diversity of five search engines' results on political queriesSearch engines are important political news sources and should thus provide users with diverse political information -an important precondition of a well-informed citizenry. The search engines' algorithmic content selection strongly influences the diversity of the content received by the users -particularly since most users highly trust search engines and often click on only the first result. A widespread concern is that users are not informed diversely by search engines, but how far this concern applies has hardly been investigated. Our study is the first to investigate content diversity provided by five search engines on ten current political issues in Germany. The findings show that sometimes even the first result is highly diverse, but in most cases, more results must be considered to be informed diversely. This unreliability presents a serious challenge when using search engines as political news sources. Our findings call for media policy measures, for example in terms of algorithmic transparency.possible, but by no means guaranteed -particularly if a user simply clicks on the first result, as most users do (Pan et al., 2007).Below, we first describe how the filtering and sorting of search engines can affect content diversity, give an overview of the few existing empirical studies thereon, and derive our innovative measurement of content diversity. Afterwards, we present our findings and discuss their implications as well as our study's limitations. Conceptual framework How search engines influence content diversityDiversity is considered a precondition of healthy democracies (Napoli, 1999) since it is assumed to guarantee a public debate with opposing viewpoints and a well-informed citizenry, as illustrated by the "marketplace of ideas" -an idealized metaphor of public discourse (Karppinen, 2006): citizens shall freely exchange diverse ideas and viewpoints to ensure well-informed decision-making, tolerance toward other viewpoints (Jandura & Friedrich, 2014), and the stimulation of "popular wisdom" (Donohue & Glasser, 1978, p. 592). The media should contribute to it by providing diverse content (Jandura & Friedrich, 2014), stressing the importance of diversity in media policy (Just, 2009) and in communication research.Originally, the debate focused on human, journalistic gatekeepers, often revitalized by developments considered as potential threats to content diversity (e.g., concentration processes in the newspaper market (Donohue & Glasser, 1978), the introduction of commercial broadcasting in European countrues (Aslama, Hellman, & Sauri, 2004)). The rise of the Internet brought along the hope of unlimited content diversity online (European Commission, 2010, p. 30), but it quickly turned out that the processing capacities of the users limit diversity: in the information flood, they rely on gatekeepers to identify relevant information more than ever. Search engines were invented exactly for ...
The purpose of this study was to examine the status of experimental research on interventions intended to improve the responding of children and youth with behavioral disorders and developmental disabilities. The data pool consisted of all the articles published between 1980 and 1997 in 10 selected journals. Articles that met the criteria for intervention research were identified and scored on a number of descriptive dimensions (e.g., participant characteristics, settings, dependent measures, independent variables, ecological validity). The data revealed few notable trends over the 18-year period; however, there seemed to be some tendencies toward younger participant populations, general education settings, and studies of interventions in more typical contexts. Moreover, an increasing proportion of interventions are based on preliminary assessments. The discussion considers the general status of intervention research and its value in understanding and helping to guide practice.
The current media environment is primarily characterised by a large amount of information and, in contrast, rather fragmented audience attention. This is especially true for social media, particularly Facebook, which have become important news sources for many people. Journalists cannot help but publish content on Facebook if they want to reach the part of their audience that mainly—or even only—consumes news there. On Facebook, journalists are at the mercy of the algorithm that determines the visibility of their content. Because user engagement is a crucial factor in the algorithm, concerns have been raised that journalists are abandoning their normative quality standards to make the news as attractive as possible to the audience—at the expense of media performance. A softened presentation of the news, particularly in Facebook posts, may help achieve this aim, but research on this subject is lacking. The present study analyses this practice of softening the news in four German media outlets’ (<em>BILD</em>,<em> FAZ</em>,<em> Der Spiegel</em>,<em> Tagesschau</em>) political Facebook posts. The results show that the overall level of news softening is low to medium. Furthermore, comparing them to website teasers reveals that news softening is only slightly higher on Facebook (mainly <em>BILD</em> and <em>Der Spiegel</em>), and that there are no converging trends between quality or public service media and tabloid media. Exaggerated fears about news softening are therefore unnecessary. Continued analysis of news softening, as well as ongoing adaption of the concept according to dynamic developments, is nevertheless important.
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