Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Esta investigación documenta la participación política de la mujer en el municipio de usos y costumbres de San Simón Almolongas, Oaxaca, con un enfoque cualitativo, sustentado en trabajo de campo mediante una guía de entrevista semiestructurada, dirigida a mujeres y hombres que ocupan cargos públicos y ciudadanas que asisten a las asambleas generales. La discusión de resultados se realizó triangulando la teoría con los argumentos de los informantes. Los resultados ponen en evidencia que la participación política de las mujeres está condicionada por los usos y costumbres, se aprecia una división de cargos, los hombres ocupan los de mayor jerarquía y las mujeres los de menor. Se descubrió que en este trienio (2017-2019) con los nuevos lineamientos establecidos por el IEEPCO, obligadamente existen mujeres en la jerarquía de cargos sin haber participado en el esquema de escalafón, provocando inconformidad, porque se han quebrantado los usos y costumbres que imperan en el municipio.

People with disabilities or functional diversity form a significant part of the population (15%) and access to communication is a right recognized by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CDPD) ratified by Spain in 2007. This study aims, on the one hand, to analyse the state of the art of accessibility services that are currently offered in a sample of seven Catalan-language TV stations; and, on the other hand, to put forward some suggestions for improvement based on user needs and demands in order to increase, both in terms of quality and quantity, the accessibility services available. A sample of seven broadcasters (namely, Televisió de Catalunya, Radiotelevisión Española, IB3 TV, betevé, 8tv, El Punt Avui TV and Girona TV) was analysed using different methodological approaches, allowing us to triangulate the data and, therefore, offer an overview of the current situation to identify new paths of work. The main conclusion is that, although Spanish television broadcasters are legally obliged to produce accessible content, this is still a pending topic for those included in our sample. It is hoped that this study will serve to denounce legal irregularities. Yet, it is also hoped that this analysis will pave the way for those in charge of granting equal access to the media, since our results offer a point to depart from for future improvements.

This article explores advertising as a space where spiritual discourses are reproduced from the critical approach of academics in communication and sociology, along with professionals in the advertising sector. Therefore, a qualitative methodology of semi-structured interviews with a panel of fifteen experts was used. This research aims to develop a discourse derived from the interviewee’s experience of the meaning provided by advertising as a transcendent dimension. The interviews were analysed by applying a spiral model by simple induction. The study identifies a compensatory character between brands and religions based on a functional definition of the latter, where brands have acquired the ability to construct social meaning, offer an existential programme to the individual, and arouse identity and awareness through their own narration. Without disregarding the economic objective of corporations or the different levels of transcendence expressed by brands and religious forms, there is consensus on advertising’s attempt to follow the same scheme of adhesion, claims, symbology, and evocations offered by religions, assuming a post-materialist turn of the advertising discourse towards transcendental values, even superficially or banally. The list of interviewees and the use of this technique, which has not previously been applied to the interactions between advertising discourse and spirituality, provide an original perspective on this emerging study field

This study analyses the discourses of Education and Journalism students in order to understand their perception of complementary and alternative therapies. Likewise, to know if educational background or friends or acquaintances opinion has a more considerable influence on their knowledge and use of these socially controversial techniques than the media. This study uses qualitative research methods based upon 12 discussion groups with 102 participants. Once transcriptions were completed, discourse analysis was conducted using linguistic corpus software (T-LAB. 9.1.). In the design of the research, these students were selected for their social involvement in their future careers, such as when they are going to address or analyse scientific controversies, both in classrooms and media, or evidence-based medicine. Also, to complement the results of the qualitative study, and thus obtain more robust conclusions, this work compares the data collected in discussion groups, with results of a survey (quantitative research) administered to 718 students of Education, Journalism, Medicine and Nursing. One hand, the focus groups revealed that the information channels through which students learned about these therapies were by word of mouth and through networks of family members, friends and acquaintances and their digital equivalents, social networks and blogs. In all the discussion groups, a lack of scientific knowledge was detected. Second hand, survey results showed that the Education and Nursing students presented a higher level of acceptance of alternative therapies compared with the Medicine and Journalism students, who were the most unaccepting

This article analyses and quantifies the influence that the political party ruling the regional government has upon the economic performance of the corresponding public service broadcaster. An analysis of the economic performance of regional broadcasting companies was undertaken over the period from 1995 to 2016, studying variables such as expenses per employee, total expenses, total assets, ROA, assets turnover and total share; and their relationship with the political party ruling in the region. The correlation analysis, based on the Krukal-Wallis test, confirms the political parties' influence on the broadcasting entities' management approach. The results obtained indicate that there are significant differences in economic performance depending on the political party (Partido Popular, Spanish Socialist Workers Party and nationalist-regionalist parties) which governs the Autonomous Community, and suggest research areas of interest in order to examine in greater detail the impact of these parties in each case.

While a far from recent phenomenon, fake news has acquired a very special significance in the wake of the latest US elections. Against a broad background of different definitions and subtypes that require us to find a new, broader definition of the concept of fake news, the main debate about it concerns its scope and reach, which vary primarily in terms of intentionality and exactly how it disrupts the information process. With the discussion also focusing on the threats to (McChesney, 2014; Fisher, 2018) and opportunities for (Beckett, 2017) journalism itself, we seek to expand the debate on fake news to its impact on the dimension of trust in news. The starting point is Fletcher and Nielsen’s (2017) idea that, because they don’t make a clear distinction between real and fake news, Internet users feel a generalised sense of distrust in the media. Using data from the latest (2018) Reuters Digital News Report survey of a representative sample of the Portuguese Internet-using population, we describe the main reasons why the Portuguese (increasingly familiar with fake news and disinformation and their impacts) have been displaying higher levels of trust in news than counterparts in other countries, such as the United States –reasons that are linked to Portugal’s media system and historical context.

Given that the democratisation of video games has allowed this industry to appropriate a series of themes traditionally the exclusive preserve of other expressive media, this work analyses the capacity of videoludic expression to elicit emotions and convey the seriousness of cancer by performing a comparative study with literature and cinema. To this end, three works (one per medium) were selected to be respectively read, viewed or played by all the study subjects (n=90). A two-step methodology was employed. Firstly, the concepts of emotion and narrative scheme were defined in the context of disciplines relating to the three media and then shared with the subjects. Secondly, once both variables, i.e. the concepts of emotion and narration, had been controlled, a questionnaire was designed to determine which of the three works comprising the corpus best conveyed the experience of cancer. The results reveal that the sample game, in spite of its shortcomings in character design, was judged to be the one that most poignantly described the development of the disease. Therefore, it is possible to claim that the common belief that video games are trivial devices, solely designed to entertain, contrasts with their true expressive ability to convey dramatic experiences.

Analyses of business models and media consumption within the traditions of media economics and media management explicitly –but mostly implicitly– rely on the representation of a media consumer that rationally pursues the maximisation of utility. Such concept provides the basis for the generalised understanding of the passive consumer of media goods, motivated by subjective wants, needs and preferences. Yet, the digitalisation of media production and distribution has fundamentally changed consumers, producers and their relationship. Users of digital media platforms select, purchase or attend the output of media providers, and leave traces of their digital activities for marketers and advertisers. In addition, they supply content, rate, comment, and share or promote among their network the offers of media providers. The increasing variety of media providers are better understood as brands proposing different value generating activities rather than substitute products at different prices. Critically and by drawing from literature from a variety of research traditions, including political economy of communication, sociology, philosophy and marketing, this theoretical paper discusses the features of the active user of media brands, the hypothetical recipient of the business models of digital media services such as YouTube, Google, Netflix, Amazon Video or Facebook. It is argued that practical knowledge, affect, different types of gratifications and universal values, which are guiding principles for a better life, should be taken into account

In recent years, there is interest in examining the effects of user comments on online content consumers’ attitudes and perceptions. Building on theoretical foundations from social psychology and using an online experimental design, we investigated whether exposure to online comments attached to news content affects attitudes toward refugees. We recruited students from a public university in the Mediterranean region and, after administering a printed pretest on their attitudes toward refugees, we assigned them into three groups: one that read a series of positive comments about refugees (positive experimental group), one that read a series of negative comments about refugees (negative experimental group) and one that did not read comments (control group). The comments and a neutral reference news video were communicated to the participants via email during a five-day period after the pretest. After the implementation of the experimental stimuli, we administered a modified version of the pretest as a posttest. We found that exposure to positive comments reduced prejudice and that the intensity of prior prejudice was positively associated with the magnitude of prejudice reduction. Exposure to negative comments did not affect prejudice. A repeat posttest, administered one week after the posttest, showed stability of the observed attitude change.

The development of web 2.0 has brought with it new communication platforms based on the active role of users and their mutual collaboration. In this new media ecosystem, news aggregators have come into being and these have led to a new way of distributing journalistic content over the social web. This article analyzes the origin of contents promoted to the front page of Menéame, the most successful Spanish-language news aggregator. The main objective is to discover which media outlets the news published during its first ten years of existence (2006- 2015) comes from, in order to identify the most linked media and find out about their development during that period.