FCRP - Emergent Media

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Browsing FCRP - Emergent Media by Author "Bîră, Monica"

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    Involving Older People in Participatory Action Research: An Example of Participatory Action Design
    (College of Communication and Public Relations, NUPSPA, 2018) Schiau, Ioana; Ivan, Loredana; Bîră, Monica
    Participatory Action Research (PAR) has as a main goal the collaborative construction and production of meanings between the researchers and the participants. PAR has been largely used in the area of technology creation and appropriation involving end-users in different stages of technology designing process. However, research studies concerning older people and their use of technology employ PAR to a lesser extent. In the current paper we provide arguments for the value of different participative action approaches when studying technology appropriation by older people, and present an example of a participatory action design that we have implemented in three Romanian cities, with people 60+, to reveal the way older adults depict their experience in using Facebook. We used a five-step collaborative research design – (1) initial evaluation; (2) training session; (3) immediate evaluation; (4) group co-creation; (5) final evaluation – to reflect on the participants’ experience through groups techniques and participant observation notes. Results reveal the fact that one trainer per each participant, adapting the interaction to the participant’s individual needs, intergenerational trainer-trainee communication and patience, as well as proper timing of the organized sessions are key factors to foster participant engagement with social media. In addition, the proposed participatory action design proved to have some potential to empower older people in long time engagement with social media.
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    Social Support Mediated by Technology. A Netnographic Study of an Online Community for Mothers
    (2020) Bîră, Monica; Daba-Buzoianu, Corina; Tudorie, George
    New mothers experience social isolation, and they sometimes lack experience in interacting withtheir babies. Social support accessed via information and communication technologies (ICTs) can helpmitigate such difficulties. Social media groups, in particular, offer opportunities for interacting with oth-er mothers, thus locating an alternative and potentially powerful source of support. In this study, wedescribe such an online community of mothers in Romania, aiming at capturing the mechanisms of so-cial support in the group, and also, schematically, the changing norms of motherhood they are relatedto. The paper expands on a four-dimensional analysis of social support – informational, emotional, af-firmational, and instrumental components (Langfort et al., 1997; Leger & LeTourneau, 2015). It thenintroduces the results of the netnography we conducted in the context of a three-week data gatheringperiod in the observed community. We suggest that the physiognomy of support we observed is relat-ed to changing normative models of motherhood in this Eastern-European nation. In helping each oth-er, the mothers we observed also expressed their difference from older generations, and their personaland professional aspirations.