Suchergebnisse

Iranians in the Minds of Americans is hitherto the most extensive study on perceptions American people have of Iranians. Also, though there are many books that study political relations between Iran and the US, this book tries to take an intercultural approach and reveal what is actually behind politics. This book not only studies perceptions Americans hold for Iranians, but also tries to put these views in the wider historical, political, cultural and social context. Therefore, we can see in this book a very well-documented history of American missionary work and life in Iran's 19th century. The work of these missionaries, particularly in the field of education, changed the history of Iran forever. Also, missionaries provided the scene for the establishment of the first American legation in Iran. Therefore, in this book the historical relationship between these countries is depicted from before a time of formal relationships to present day. Through the introduction of the concept of cross cultural schemata by Shahghasemi and Heisey (2009), the book presents a framework for analysis and then it goes on to present results of a study on 1,752 American citizens across 50 American states. The results show clearly the negative role of American media in creating an unfavorable image of Iranian people. Also, we can see that historical events like Hostage Crisis have left a negative effect on Americans' perception of Iranians. Conversely, American citizens who knew an Iranian citizen in person have shown much more positive perceptions about Iranian people

Although research has shown that nowadays we are less likely to have a lifelong love partner, the media industry has increasingly incorporated 'love' as a guarantor of success for media products of all kinds. My argument is that, in order to sell more, the media industry has constructed a false notion of love. Worse than that, we the audiences have adopted this notion; since this is a false construct, many people have come up with unrealistic expectations of their love life. The results can be seen in the ever-increasing rate of divorce. I argue that we need something that I would call "love literacy" to appropriately respond to one evolutionary intention that exists in all of us.

Celebrities have gained considerable influence in the last one hundred years or so, but the advent of so-called Web 2.0 technologies has given celebrity culture a new momentum. We are living in a world in which celebrities are striving to curve their place in every niche and hence we have to become more media literate in order to avoid being exploited by celebrity media and culture. We have to be aware that celebrities promote commodities that they will never use, that they are carefully working on their image to become pleasant to us, and that if they do humanitarian work, they are mainly doing it for their reputation, and not for a real and authentic cause.

It is generally perceived that serious games are more interesting to people who are more educated. But is this perception really true? This paper tries to answer this question and some other related questions to provide a clearer picture of who plays strategic games in the US. Data were taken from a large dataset of one of the PEWs surveys. The American Trends Panel is a probability-based online panel which is carried out nationally using a sample of adults in the United States living in households. This survey was fielded for the Pew Research Center by Abt Associates from April 4 to April 18, 2017. Overall, 4,168 participants completed the Wave 26 survey. The results found that in comparison with non-strategic gamers, strategic gamers are more likely to be men, more educated and wealthier, though the differences are small. It seems the old stereotypes about Sgamers and NSgamers should be re-evaluated, if we want to know how to use serious games for educational purposes.

Given the immense shifts the social networking sites and applications have brought about, a considerable number of researchers in the field of communication studies have turned to study different aspects of social media usage and factors influencing it. This study gathered data from 33318 US non-institutionalized citizens over 18 including 17079 females and 16239 males; they were members of web panelists of Pew, and their answers revealed that a majority of this online participants used a kind of social media. The results of this study revealed women use social media more than men, and religious people more than non-religious people. In addition, the results indicated that married people are the least users of social media in comparison with other marital groups. Our results showed that all demographics are significantly related to social media usage. But this significance can be somehow misleading because of weak practical effect sizes. Except for marital status and age Cramer's V values are too small and their significance may have nothing to say but sensitivity to the degree of freedom.

Purpose
For about four decades, Iran and the USA have continued to be two most stubborn enemies and this has drawn much research on this subject. Yet, only a very small fraction of this body of research has been allocated to studying the perceptions that the people of the two countries have of each other. Using a mixed method survey, the purpose of this paper is to explore cross-cultural schemata US American people have of Iranians.


Design/methodology/approach
By way of an e-mail survey, the authors collected 1,752 responses from American citizens across 50 American states. The open ended responses were codified and categorized. Three out of six categories were further sub-categorized.


Findings
The outcomes showed that about 40 percent of Americans had negative cross-cultural schemata of Iranians with the media being the main source of negative cross-cultural schemata. Conversely, personal contact and communication with Iranians proved to be the source of positive cross-cultural schemata toward Iranians. Other results showed that US American exceptionalism and negative attitudes toward Iranians had a direct and positive relationship with having negative cross-cultural schemata of Iranians.


Originality/value
As the authors have explained in this paper, very few scholars have taken up the issue of cross-cultural schemata Iranian and American people have of each other. By doing this and several other works, the authors have tried to create a new research interest in academic circles.

Whenever we turn our TV news channel on, we are likely to hear about an Iran-U.S. conflict. Images of the leaders of these two countries intimidating each other can be seen in news channels all over the world. When we are talking about Iran-U.S. international relations, most people think of the political relations which this study takes as intergovernmental rather than international relations. In this study, as we are Iranian and U.S. scholars, we tried a systematic review of studies focusing on perceptions the Iranian and American people have of each other. Our systematic review of studies reveals that, Americans have more negative perceptions of Iranians than the Iranians have of their American counterparts. Moreover, we discussed sources for these perceptions as well.

Over the last decade, the retail industry has had a phenomenal growth. All figures show their success and efficiency and many studies have shown the role of customer reviews in encouraging ambivalent purchasers to buy items online. There have been numerous studies on why people read and trust these comments and taking for granted the important role of customer reviews in determining buying decision, this study endeavors to identify and explain the different factors involved in making a comment "useful". We took an Iranian retail website and collected comments on perceived "usefulness" of each review. Our results showed that perceived level of usefulness was related to the word count of the comments, personal experience of the writer with the product, emotional description of the product, and mentioning the strength/weakness points of the product.

This paper studies the meanings and connotations using cosmetics among Iranian young women. A salient phenomenon in contemporary Iran is the overuse of cosmetics by women. This has culminated in raising concerns by religious figures, social critics, government authorities, and physicians. These are all happening in post-revolutionary Iran in which according to Islamic rules, women are expected not to expose their body and ornaments. Therefore, the paradox of living under Islamic laws and the will to be modern is concerned / addressed / discussed here. How, then, Iranian young women interpret their make-up, whether as ostentation, as resistance against dominant ideology, as distinction from others or as the result of new global media influence is explained in the research. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s3p182