Positive contact with diverse groups can reduce belief in conspiracy theories about them

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

New research has shown that having positive contact with people from diverse groups can reduce the development of harmful intergroup conspiracy beliefs.

Experts from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology, in collaboration with the University of East Anglia, found that among British participants, positive intergroup contact interfered with the development of conspiracy theories about other groups. The findings have been published today in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

Social psychologist Dr Daniel Jolley from the University of Nottingham led the research and explains: “Intergroup conspiracy theories are common and potentially can lead to everything from misinformed voting to extreme expressions of prejudice. Seeking ways to reduce conspiracy theories is of particular importance.”

Three studies were conducted with over 1,000 people, where the team explored whether positive intergroup contact interferes with the development of conspiracy theories about other social groups.

The first two studies explored relationships, where British participants were asked about their experience of contact with immigrants (Study 1) or Jewish people (Study 2) and their belief in conspiracy theories in relation to them. In the third study, participants were asked to think about a positive contact experience with a Jewish person and then report their conspiracy beliefs held about this group. Participants also reported their feelings (prejudice) towards the target group in each study.

The research demonstrated that those people who had experienced higher quality positive contact with Jewish people or immigrants or imagined a positive contact experience were less likely to believe conspiracy theories about them. Importantly, these effects remained even when accounting for (negative) feelings towards the target group, demonstrating that the effect is not merely another prejudice reduction effect.

Dr Jolley explains: “The research findings offer a promising potential starting point for developing tools to bring diverse groups of people together who may not usually have contact and try to foster positive conversations to help reduce potentially harmful conspiracy theories from taking hold.

“Whilst the problems are often very complex, and positive contact will not solve all the issues surrounding conspiracy theories towards certain groups, the fact that this work offers a potential tool to reduce intergroup conspiracy theories is a notable breakthrough. Our work offers a framework that, along with future research, might lead to the reduction of conspiracy beliefs in the general population”.

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JOURNAL

European Journal of Social Psychology

DOI

10.1002/ejsp.2973 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

More than a prejudice reduction effect: Positive intergroup contact reduces conspiracy theory beliefs

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Jul-2023

How positive contact with diverse groups reduces conspiracy theories

Peer reviewed – survey - humans

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

Having positive interactions with people from diverse groups can reduce the amount of harmful conspiracy beliefs about those groups – according to new research from UEA.

Conspiracy theories about minority groups are common and can potentially lead to everything from misinformed voting to extreme expressions of prejudice.

But a new study published today reveals that bringing people from diverse backgrounds together can reduce the endorsement and tolerance of conspiracy theories.

The team say that their findings could help educators and policy makers create a more harmonious society.  

Dr Charles Seger, from UEA’s School of Psychology, said: “Some conspiracy beliefs are about things like the moon landing, or more seriously about things like the nature and effectiveness of vaccines. 

“We know from past research that simply being exposed to conspiracy beliefs, even without endorsing them, can have detrimental effects, such as a decreased willingness to engage in politics.

“But a lot of conspiracy beliefs are about groups of people. Specifically, people often have conspiracy beliefs about disadvantaged or minority groups such as Jewish people or immigrants.

“These beliefs can take the form of believing that these groups of people are involved in secret plots and schemes or are attempting to harm the fabric of society at large. 

“These sorts of conspiracy beliefs are associated with increased prejudice towards those groups, and it can be argued that intergroup violence and genocide are fuelled by unwarranted conspiracy beliefs.

“We wanted to find out whether friendly interactions with other groups of people can reduce conspiracy beliefs.”

The research team carried out three studies with more than 1,000 people. They explored whether positive inter-group contact helps combat conspiracy theories about other social groups.

The first two studies explored relationships, where British participants were asked about their experience of contact with immigrants or Jewish people and their belief in conspiracy theories in relation to them.

In a third study, participants were asked to think about a positive contact experience with a Jewish person and then report their conspiracy beliefs held about this group. Participants also reported their feelings of prejudice towards the target group in each study.

Dr Seger said: “We found that people who had experienced friendly interactions with Jewish people or immigrants, or even imagined a positive contact experience, were less likely to believe conspiracy theories about them.

“Importantly, these effects remained even beyond the prejudice reducing effects we know such interactions to have.  

“Conspiracy theories seem to be escalating in society, perhaps due to social media There are complex reasons for why people believe conspiracy theories about different groups, and conspiracy theories are notoriously hard to correct.

“Providing accurate information often does not work. Therefore, it is exciting that this intervention shows promise in reducing conspiracy beliefs.  

“Our research suggests that bringing people from diverse backgrounds together can reduce the endorsement and tolerance of conspiracy theories.

“This could be used as a useful tool for educators, policy makers, and those invested in promoting a more harmonious society.  

Dr Daniel Jolley, from the University of Nottingham, said: “The research findings offer a promising potential starting point for developing tools to bring diverse groups of people together who may not usually have contact and try to foster positive conversations to help reduce potentially harmful conspiracy theories from taking hold.

“Whilst the problems are often very complex, and positive contact will not solve all the issues surrounding conspiracy theories towards certain groups, the fact that this work offers a potential tool to reduce intergroup conspiracy theories is a notable breakthrough.

“Our work offers a framework that, along with future research, might lead to the reduction of conspiracy beliefs in the general population,” he added.

This research was led by the University of Nottingham in collaboration with UEA.

More than a prejudice reduction effect: Positive intergroup contact reduces conspiracy theory beliefs’ is published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

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JOURNAL

European Journal of Social Psychology

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

More than a prejudice reduction effect: Positive intergroup contact reduces conspiracy theory beliefs

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Jul-2023

 

Research group develops biodegradable film that keeps food fresh for longer

The material was designed by Brazilian researchers and includes a derivative of limonene from citrus rind, blended with chitosan, a biopolymer from exoskeletons of crustaceans.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO

 

IMAGE: THE MATERIAL WAS DESIGNED BY BRAZILIAN RESEARCHERS AND INCLUDES A DERIVATIVE OF LIMONENE FROM CITRUS RIND, BLENDED WITH CHITOSAN, A BIOPOLYMER FROM EXOSKELETONS OF CRUSTACEANS view more 

CREDIT: FEQ-UNICAMP

Indiscriminate use of packaging materials derived from petroleum has led to a huge buildup of plastic in landfills and the ocean, as these materials have low degradability and are not significantly recycled. To mitigate this problem and meet growing demand for products that are safe for human health and the environment, the food industry is investing in the development of more sustainable packaging alternatives that preserve nutritional quality as well as organoleptic traits such as color, taste, smell and texture.

An example is a film made of a compound derived from limonene, the main component of citrus fruit peel, and chitosan, a biopolymer derived from the chitin present in exoskeletons of crustaceans.

The film was developed by a research group in São Paulo state, Brazil, comprising scientists in the Department of Materials Engineering and Bioprocesses at the State University of Campinas’s School of Chemical Engineering (FEQ-UNICAMP) and the Packaging Technology Center at the Institute of Food Technology (ITAL) of the São Paulo State Department of Agriculture and Supply, also in Campinas. 

The results of the research are reported in an article published in Food Packaging and Shelf Life.

“We focused on limonene because Brazil is one of the world’s largest producers of oranges [if not the largest] and São Paulo is the leading orange-producing state,” said Roniérik Pioli Vieira, last author of the article and a professor at FEQ-UNICAMP. 

Limonene has been used before in film for food packaging to enhance conservation thanks to its antoxidant and anti-microbial action, but its performance is impaired by volatility and instability during the packaging manufacturing process, even on a laboratory scale.

This is one of the obstacles to the use of bioactive compounds in commercial packaging. It is often produced in processes that involve high temperatures and high shear rates due to cutting or shaping. Bioactive additives easily degrade in these processes.

“To solve this problem, we came up with the idea of using a derivative of limonene called poly(limonene), which isn’t volatile or particularly unstable,” Vieira said.

The researchers chose chitosan for the film matrix because it is a polymer of natural origin and has well-known antoxidant and anti-microbial properties. Their hypothesis was that combining the two materials would produce a film with enhanced bioactive properties.

In the laboratory, the scientists compared films with limonene and poly(limonene) in varying proportions to address the challenge of finding a way to combine them with chitosan, since theoretically they do not mix. The researchers opted for polymerization, a process in which polymers is made from smaller organic molecules. In this case, they used a compound with polar chemical functions to start the reaction and to increase interaction between the additive and the polymer matrix. They then analyzed the resulting film to evaluate properties such as antioxidant capacity, light and water vapor protection, and resistance to high temperatures.

The results were highly satisfactory. “The films with the poly(limonene) additive outperformed those with limonene, especially in terms of antoxidant activity, which was about twice as potent,” Vieira said. The substance also performed satisfactorily as an ultraviolet radiation blocker and was found to be non-volatile, making it suitable for large-scale production of packaging, where processing conditions are more severe.

The films are not yet available for use by manufacturers, mainly because chitosan-based plastic is not yet produced on a sufficiently large scale to be competitive, but also because the poly(limonene) production process needs to be optimized to improve yield and to be tested during the manufacturing of commercial packaging.

“Our group is working on this. We’ve investigated other applications of poly(limonene) in the biomedical field, for example. We’re trying to demonstrate the multifunctionality of this additive, whose origins are renewable,” Vieira said.

The study was funded by FAPESP via two projects (20/14837-3 and 21/04043-2).

About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)

The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.

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JOURNAL

Food Packaging and Shelf Life

DOI

10.1016/j.fpsl.2023.101085 

ARTICLE TITLE

Poly(limonene): A novel renewable oligomeric antioxidant and UV-light blocking additive for chitosan-based films

Researchers succeed in producing highly efficient, low-cost “green” hydrogen

A critical breakthrough:

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: THE RESEARCH TEAM view more 

CREDIT: TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• The research team: “Today, the production of ‘green’ hydrogen requires distilled water and precious and rare metals such as platinum, which makes the green hydrogen up to 15 times more expensive than the polluting ‘grey’ one.

 

• “We hope that in the future it will be possible to employ our method commercially, to lower the costs, and to make the switch towards using green hydrogen in industry, agriculture, and as a clean energy source.”

 

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have succeeded in producing “green” hydrogen using green electricity — The hydrogen is produced without air pollution, with a high level of efficiency, utilizing a biocatalyst. Hydrogen is a necessary raw material for both agriculture and industry, but 95 percent of the hydrogen produced in the world today is “black” or “gray” — produced from coal or natural gas and emitting 9-12 tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of hydrogen.

 

The new method was developed by doctoral student Itzhak Grinberg and Dr. Oren Ben-Zvi, under the guidance of Prof. Iftach Yacoby of the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at the Faculty of Life Sciences and Prof. Lihi Adler-Abramovich of the School of Dental Medicine and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. The promising research results were published in the prominent journal Carbon Energy, focusing on advanced materials and technology for clean energy and CO2 emission reduction.

 

“Hydrogen is very rare in the atmosphere,” explains Itzhak Grinberg, “although it is produced by enzymes in microscopic organisms, which receive the energy for this from photosynthesis processes. In the lab, we “electrify” those enzymes, that is, an electrode provides the energy instead of the sun. The result is a particularly efficient process, with no demand for extreme conditions, that can utilize electricity from renewable sources such as solar panels or wind turbine. However, the enzyme ‘runs away’ from the electric charge, so it needs to be held in place through chemical treatment. We found a simple and efficient way to attach the enzyme to the electrode and utilize it.”

 

The researchers used a hydrogel (a water-based gel) to attach the enzyme to the electrode, and were able to produce green hydrogen using a biocatalyst, and with over 90 percent efficiency; that is, over 90 percent of the electrons introduced into the system were deposited in the hydrogen without any secondary processes.

 

Prof. Iftach Yacoby explains that, “The material of the gel itself is known, but our innovation is to use it to produce hydrogen. We soaked the electrode in the gel, which contained an enzyme for producing hydrogen, called hydrogenase. The gel holds the enzyme for a long time, even under the electric voltage, and makes it possible to produce hydrogen with great efficiency and at environmental conditions favorable to the enzyme — for example, in salt water, in contrast to electrolysis, which requires distilled water. Prof. Lihi Adler-Abramovich adds: “Another advantage is that the gel assembles itself — you put the material in water, and it settles into nanometric fibers that form the gel. We demonstrated that these fibers are also able to stick the enzyme to the electrode. We tested the gel with two other enzymes, in addition to the hydrogenase, and proved that it was able to attach different enzymes to the electrode.”

 

“Today, ‘green’ hydrogen is produced primarily through electrolysis, which requires precious and rare metals such as platinum along with water distillation, which makes the green hydrogen up to 15 times more expensive than the polluting ‘grey’ one, says Dr. Oren Ben-Zvi. “We hope that in the future, it will be possible to employ our method commercially, to lower the costs, and to make the switch towards using green hydrogen in industry, agriculture, and as a clean energy source.”

 

Link to the article:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cey2.411

 

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DOI

10.1002/cey2.411 

 

Report highlights public health impact of serious harms from diagnostic error in US

Johns Hopkins Medicine experts emphasize path forward to greater diagnostic excellence via improving diagnosis of high impact, dangerous diseases

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE

Improving diagnosis in health care is a moral, professional and public health imperative, according to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. However, little is known about the full scope of harms related to medical misdiagnosis — current estimates range widely. Using novel methods, a team from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence and partners from the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions sought to derive what is believed to be the first rigorous national estimate of permanent disability and death from diagnostic error.  

The original research article was published July 17 by BMJ Quality & Safety. Results of the new analysis of national data found that across all clinical settings, including hospital and clinic-based care, an estimated 795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled by diagnostic error each year, confirming the pressing nature of the public health problem.  

“Prior work has generally focused on errors occurring in a specific clinical setting, such as primary care, the emergency department or hospital-based care,” says David Newman-Toker, M.D., Ph.D., lead investigator and director of the Center for Diagnostic Excellence. “These studies could not address the total serious harms across multiple care settings, the previous estimates of which varied widely from 40,000 to 4 million per year. The methods used in our study are notable because they leverage disease-specific error and harm rates to estimate an overall total.”  

To identify their findings, researchers multiplied national measures of disease incidence by the disease-specific proportion of patients with that illness who experience errors or harms. Researchers repeated this method for the 15 diseases causing the most harms, then extrapolated to the grand total across all dangerous diseases. To assess the accuracy of the final estimates, the study’s authors ran the analyses under different sets of assumptions to measure the impact of methodological choices and then tested the validity of findings by comparing them with independent data sources and expert review. The resulting national estimate of 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities reflects serious harms widely across care settings, and it matches data produced from multiple prior studies that focused on diagnostic errors in ambulatory clinics and emergency departments and during inpatient care.  

Vascular events, infections and cancers, dubbed the Big Three, account for 75% of the serious harms. The study found that 15 diseases account for 50.7% of the total serious harms. Five conditions causing the most frequent serious harms account for 38.7% of total serious harms: stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism and lung cancer. The overall average error rate across diseases was estimated at 11.1%, but the rate ranges widely from 1.5% for heart attack to 62% for spinal abscess. The top cause of serious harm from misdiagnosis was stroke, which was found to be missed in 17.5% of cases.  

The researchers suggest that diseases accounting for the greatest number of serious misdiagnosis-related harms and with high diagnostic error rates should become top priority targets for developing, implementing and scaling systematic solutions.   

“A disease-focused approach to diagnostic error prevention and mitigation has the potential to significantly reduce these harms,” Newman-Toker says. “Reducing diagnostic errors by 50% for stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, pulmonary embolism and lung cancer could cut permanent disabilities and deaths by 150,000 per year.”  

Newman-Toker adds that disease-based solutions have already been developed and deployed at Johns Hopkins to address missed stroke, the top identified cause of serious harms. These solutions include virtual patient simulators to improve front-line clinician skills in stroke diagnosis, portable eye movement recordings via video goggles and mobile phones to enable specialists to remotely assist front-line clinicians in diagnosing stroke, computer-based algorithms to automate aspects of the diagnostic process to facilitate scaling, and diagnostic excellence dashboards to measure performance and provide feedback on quality improvement.  

“Funding for these efforts remains a barrier,” Newman-Toker says. “Diagnostic errors are, by a wide margin, the most under resourced public health crisis we face, yet research funding only recently reached the $20 million per year mark. If we are to achieve diagnostic excellence and the goal of zero preventable harm from diagnostic error, we must continue to invest in efforts to achieve success.”  

Other members of the multidisciplinary research team involved in the report are Najlla Nassery, Adam Schaffer, Chihwen Winnie Yu-Moe, Gwendolyn Clemens, Zheyu Wang, Yuxin Zhu, Ali Saber Tehrani, Mehdi Fanai, Ahmed Hassoon and Dana Siegal.  

These studies were funded by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (EPC VI [TOPIC ID 503-4262], R01 HS 27614, R18 HS 029350) and the Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence at the Johns Hopkins Medicine.  

COI: David Newman-Toker has a career focus in and conducts research related to diagnostic errors, including those in patients with dizziness and stroke. The principal investigator for multiple grants and contracts on these topics, Newman-Toker is a former volunteer president and member of the board of directors of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine. Two companies have loaned research equipment (video-oculography systems) to Johns Hopkins for use in Newman-Toker’s research, and one of these companies has also provided funding for Newman-Toker’s research on diagnostic algorithm development related to dizziness, inner ear diseases and stroke. Newman-Toker has no other financial interest in these or any other companies. Newman-Toker is an inventor on a provisional patent (US PCT/US2020/070304) for smartphone-based stroke diagnosis in patients with dizziness. He delivers frequent academic lectures on these topics and occasionally serves as a medical-legal consultant for both plaintiff and defense in cases related to dizziness, stroke and diagnostic error. Dana Siegal is also a former volunteer member of the board of directors of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine. There are no other conflicts of interest. None of the authors have financial or personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work.  

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JOURNAL

BMJ Quality & Safety

Study finds how to reduce risk of kids playing with a found gun

Viewing a safety video reduced unsafe behavior with real firearm

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

COLUMBUS, Ohio – In a lab at The Ohio State University masquerading as a playroom, pairs of kids ages 8 to 12 participating in a study found a variety of toys and games to play with – as well as a mysterious file cabinet.

 

Inside one of the drawers of the unlocked cabinet were two disabled 9-mm handguns.

 

As they played in the room, nearly all the children eventually found the guns. But some kids in the study were much more likely to tell an adult they found a gun, less likely to touch the gun, and were less reckless if they did touch it – and they were the kids who had watched a one-minute gun safety video a week earlier.

 

The study may be the first to randomly assign some children to watch a gun safety video to determine if it had a protective effect, said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication at Ohio State.

 

“It was pretty remarkable to see that this one-minute video had such a powerful impact a week after the kids saw it,” Bushman said.

 

Bushman conducted the study with Sophie Kjærvik, a doctoral candidate in communication at Ohio State.  Their results were published today (July 17, 2023) in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

 

“Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children. These results point to a way that may help reduce the toll,” Kjærvik said.

 

The study involved 226 children whose parents or guardians gave permission for their participation. They were tested in pairs of kids who knew each other, including siblings, cousins and friends.

 

A week before the lab portion of the study, the children watched one of two one-minute videos created especially for the study. Both videos were of The Ohio State University police chief delivering a message in full uniform.

 

Half of the participant pairs saw the chief in a car safety video, while the other half saw her in a gun safety video.  All of the kids watched the videos in their own homes.

 

A week later the children came to the lab and were told they could play with any of the toys and games in the room – including Legos, Jenga, nerf guns, foam swords and others – for 20 minutes.

 

The researchers and the children’s parents watched the children play from another room via a hidden camera.

 

Out of the 226 children, 216 (96%) opened the drawers of the filing cabinet and found the guns, which were disabled but rigged with a device that counted how often the kids pulled the trigger.

 

“Kids are naturally curious, so we were not surprised that they opened the drawers and found the guns,” Bushman said.

 

The researchers asked parents informally if they thought their kids would report the gun to adults and not touch the firearm.

 

“That’s what most parents in our study thought their child would do,” Kjærvik said. “But that is not what happened.”

 

Over half of the children (53%) touched the gun and fewer than a quarter (23%) told an adult.

 

But the key finding was the difference between those who watched the gun safety versus the car safety video.

 

Those who watched the gun safety video were more than three times more likely to tell an adult (34% vs. 11%) and less likely to touch a gun (39% vs. 67%).

 

Even those who did touch the gun were somewhat less reckless if they had watched the gun safety video. They held the gun for fewer seconds (42 versus 100 seconds), were less likely to pull the trigger (9% versus 30%) and pulled the trigger fewer times (four versus seven times).

 

“These are strong results, especially given that the video was so short and the children watched it a full week earlier,” Bushman said.

 

The video may have been effective because it featured an authority figure – a police chief – in full uniform.  Previous research has shown that younger children find authority figures in uniforms to be especially persuasive.

 

In contrast, a firearm safety video by the National Rifle Association has been found to be ineffective, perhaps because it features a cartoon bird called Eddie Eagle rather than an authority figure, Bushman said.

 

Which video the children saw wasn’t the only risk factor linked to playing with the gun and not reporting it to adults. Being a boy was a risk factor, as was watching more age-inappropriate movies (which may include violence) and having an interest in guns.

 

Kids who had previously received firearms training were less at risk, as were those who had negative attitudes about guns.

 

Another protective factor was having a gun in the home, the study found.

 

“Research shows that gun owners talk to their children more often about gun safety than non-gun owners,” Kjærvik said.

 

The researchers also had children in the study watch a short clip of a violent PG-rated movie either with guns, or with the guns digitally removed, before they went into the playroom. The researchers had theorized that kids who watched the movie clips with guns would be more likely to play with the gun in the lab, but there was no effect.

 

“But the fact that kids who watched more age-inappropriate movies – which often include violent use of guns – were more at risk of playing with the gun makes us believe that media use does have an effect,” Bushman said.

 

Overall, the study provides a realistic and relatively easy way to help stem gun injuries and deaths among children, Kjærvik and Bushman said.

 

“We recommend that adults teach children about gun safety and reduce their exposure to age-inappropriate media,” the authors wrote.

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JOURNAL

JAMA Pediatrics

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

A Gun Safety Video Can Reduce Children’s Unsafe Behavior Around Real Guns: A Randomized Clinical Trial

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Jul-2023

 

Inequality and COVID-19

Barcelona's poorest districts were the most affected by school confinement during the pandemic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

 

IMAGE: THE EXPERTS MARIA GRAU I CARLES PERICAS, FROM THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE AND HEALTH SCIENCES. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the educational systems. It is estimated that approximately 1.6 billion children worldwide were affected by school closures, which had a major impact on their learning. In Catalonia, one of the measures to control the spread of this virus was the confinement of class groups when a case of positive COVID-19 was detected. Now, a study conducted by the University of Barcelona has found that, during the academic year 2020-2021, the risk of closing public schools was higher in the poorer districts of Barcelona. Given these results, the researchers stress the need to consider socioeconomic inequalities when designing public policies for future pandemics or similar health crises. 

“The link between a low socioeconomic level and a poor health state explains these results, and if this vicious circle is not broken, the local health inequity problems will go on and could even worsen in future pandemics. Therefore, the efforts to contain an epidemic or future health emergencies cannot ignore the equity problems regarding health, and this requires a coordinated and transdisciplinary work between different areas such as social services, housing, education and urbanism, among others”, notes Maria Grau, coordinator of the study published in the Journal of Public Health, and Serra Hunter professor at the Department of Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the UB, researcher at the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) and member of the Biomedical Research Networking Center for Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP).

The study, conducted in collaboration with professionals from the Catalan Institute of Health, is also signed by the researchers of the same Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Carles Pericas, Gülcan Avcii, Diana Toledo and Carles Vilaplana, as well as Professor Àngela Domínguez.

Six times more likely to close in Ciutat Vella than in Sant Gervasi

The study was based on data from the Department of Education on the primary education public schools in Barcelona, from September 2020 — the beginning of the academic year after the first COVID-19 outbreak — to February 2022, when the regulation on school confinements changed.

The researchers counted, by district, the number of children in isolation or quarantine and the number of days each child stayed home due to the confinement of the school class. Then, this information was compared to the average income of each district, obtained from the per capita disposable family income, an index that measures the income of the residents of a territory for consumption or savings.

The results of the academic year 2020-2021 show a “sustained and significant” upward tendency of the risk of closing a classroom in the districts with lower incomes, to the extent that the probability in Ciutat Vella, the most underprivileged district, was six times higher than in Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, the wealthiest one. “Therefore, children in areas below the average annual income were at a greater risk of a classroom confinement”, notes Carles Pericas, first author of the study. 

The pandemic, a catalyst for inequalities

Given the results, the study highlights the importance of learning from the experience of the pandemic and rethinking public policies to deal with similar situations. “Any future measure in public health, whether in a context of a pandemic or a specific transmissible disease control measures, must be approached considering these inequalities and with an understanding of what can magnify them”, they say.  

Along with these lines, the researchers note that “it is necessary to understand that the health impact of COVID-19 does not result from morbidity and mortality associated with the infection directly, but the pandemic also acts as a catalyst for all the previously existing inequalities and it magnifies synergies between them, apart from adding its effects: the more vulnerable an individual or population is, the worse health results they will get”.

Guaranteeing the access to canteen services and promoting health literacy

An example of this interrelation between disease and inequality is the fact that the school closures led to the end of essential services in the educational centers, such as the canteen service or the mental health support programs, which —as the researchers say— “could have had a negative impact on the health of most disadvantaged children and students”.

Therefore, according to the new study, in future situations that require school confinement measures, access to complementary services offered by the schools should be guaranteed, as well as equity in accessing the virtual learning sessions. “The initial shift to exclusively online formats during the beginning of the pandemic brought inequalities in access to new technologies and led to an educational loss of students from low-income families”, the researchers note.

Finally, the researchers highlight the need to boost the health literacy of the citizens, in order to “improve appropriate decision-making, which could help reduce the risk of the spread of infections and increase the understanding and adherence to disease-prevention measures”.

A change in contagion patterns during the academic year 2021-2022

The analysis of the academic year 2021-2022 data did not find a relationship between the confinements and the socioeconomic indicators of the districts. The infections in this second period were caused by the Delta and Omnicron variants, which were highly contagious but which only caused mild symptoms or were asymptomatic in many cases. “Incidences from the summer of 2021 to early 2022 reached previously unseen levels and generated unexpected changes in infection patterns”, notes Carles Pericas.

In this sense, the UB researcher thinks the cause of the differences between the two periods is mainly “the great protective effect of previous infections in the most underprivileged communities”, which had suffered most of the infections in the first stages of the pandemic.

 

 

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JOURNAL

Journal of Public Health

DOI

10.1093/pubmed/fdad084 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

“Risk of partial school closure for COVID-19 by socio-economic level in the period 2020-22

 

Democrats’ perceptions of immigrants largely favorable while Republicans hold positive and negative views

New study looks beyond issue of “immigration” to reveal opinions on immigrants themselves

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Views of immigrants vary by political party affiliation, with Republicans holding both negative and positive perceptions of immigrants and Democrats expressing uniformly positive ones, finds a new study that sheds additional light on the complexities of immigration polarization. 

“While there has been a lot of research on immigration, not much is known about what people think about immigrants themselves,” says Victoria Asbury-Kimmel, a New York University sociologist, who conducted the research. “By focusing on attitudes Americans hold towards immigrants rather than immigration, this study adds depth and nuance to our understanding of public opinion on immigration issues—and how they vary by political party.” 

The paper, which appears in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, also revealed differences in how Democrats and Republicans respond to messages about immigrants.  Specifically, Republicans tend to interpret anti-immigrant political rhetoric as commentary about unauthorized immigrants and pro-immigrant discourse as messaging about immigrants in general—and about legal immigrants in particular. Democrats, however, interpret both anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant narratives to be about immigrants in general—rejecting the former type of messaging while embracing the latter.

To gauge Americans’ views of immigrants specifically, Asbury-Kimmel surveyed, as a doctoral student at Harvard University, more than 2,000 participants in 2021 using NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel, which is composed of a representative sample of the US population and deployed by researchers for tailored studies.

To measure attitudes toward immigrants, Asbury-Kimmel posed both pro- and anti-immigrant messages. These messages were informed by text analyses of nearly 28,000 press releases and “issues” web pages from both Republicans and Democrats in the US House of Representatives, as well as from the Trump and Obama White House websites. The messages themselves were drawn from actual political speeches from Democratic and Republican lawmakers. 

Participants read either a pro- or an anti-immigrant message, then provided, on a 7-point scale, ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” their response to the message.

To get a better understanding of what drove the participants’ responses, Asbury-Kimmel also asked subsets of those surveyed specific follow-up questions, such as: Was the message “mostly fact” or “mostly opinion”? Others were asked to provide an open-ended, one-sentence summary of the message they read. The text of these summaries was coded for the inclusion or exclusion of legal status-related (e.g. “legal,” “illegal,” “undocumented”, and “unauthorized”) and immigration-related (e.g. “immigrant,” “immigration,” “migrant,” and “refugee”) terms.

In addition to accounting for political party, the study also considered self-identified Independents.

Overall, Republicans agreed with the anti-immigrant narrative while Democrats rejected this characterization, with Independents also disagreeing with this message—though only narrowly so. 

By contrast, there was alignment between the parties when it came to positive messaging about immigrants in general (i.e., the “worthy immigrant” narrative). Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all tended to agree to some extent with the pro-immigrant narrative, even if Republicans agreed with the message less strongly than did Democrats and Independents. 

These findings raised an obvious question: How is it possible to agree with both anti- and worthy-immigrant narratives, as was the case with Republicans? To address this question, Asbury-Kimmel turned to the responses in her follow-up questions, which offered some clarity on these seemingly conflicting responses. 

Overall, one-third of the respondents believed the anti-immigrant narrative is mostly factual; in contrast, a greater number—half of those surveyed—believed the worthy-immigrant narrative as mostly factual. 

Second, a majority of Democrats and Independents believed the anti-immigrant narrative to be mostly opinion, while most Republicans believed it to be mostly factual. Conversely, a majority of Democrats believed the worthy-immigrant narrative was factual, while most Republicans saw it as opinion. Notably, Independents were split 50-50, with the majority of those who lean Democratic indicating the message was fact and a majority of those who lean Republican indicating the worthy-immigrant narrative was mostly opinion. 

Third, Republicans were significantly more likely to include immigration status in their written summaries of the anti-immigrant narrative than were Democrats. By contrast, Democrats were significantly more likely to mention immigrants without including legal status than were Republicans and Independents. 

“In other words, Republicans were more likely to state that the anti-immigrant message was about unauthorized immigrants and Democrats were more likely to state that the message was about immigrants in general,” explains Asbury-Kimmel.

“Democrats and Republicans have different interpretations of the same messages,” she adds. “These interpretative differences can help us understand why Republicans agree with negative and positive characterizations of immigrants and why Democrats strongly embrace positive and firmly reject negative characterizations.”

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JOURNAL

Social Psychology Quarterly

DOI

10.1177/01902725231184201 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Attitudes toward Immigrants and Partisan Differences in Information Evaluation

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Jul-2023