Researchers studying the health of migrants frequently use standard quantitative instruments to assess psychological constructs. Such instruments are often validated only in the respective source population of migrants. For example, when studying Turkish migrants in Germany, instruments validated in Turkey are applied. However, considerable differences in culture and language may have developed between migrants and their source population. These differences limit the validity and reliability of quantitative instruments, a problem that is often overlooked. Using the example of the Revised...

Convergence is undoubtedly revolutionizing communications technologies and businesses, merging networks of different types and origins. Hence, the future depends on the success of combining old and new solutions to serve new customer needs. Thus, this book addresses Intelligent- and IP-Networks analysis and modeling as well as their converging architecture for services and signaling. The goal of this work is to design architecture for seamless interworking between different elements of the converged network necessary for the support of new hybrid services. Further, signaling interworking...

Intercultural and cross-cultural mediation in the Western world has emerged as an object of research that has attracted a growing attention over the past thirty years. Meanwhile, static and essentialist notions of culture in communication have been challenged by dynamic and constructivist approaches taking culture as a flux that is changing permanently. The contributions in this book adopt these tendencies to cross-cultural mediation research: They center around the question if and in what ways people from different cultural groups have constructed their own notions of how conflict mediation...

"Nigerian English Phonology" is a stimulating volume on the world concern for English as a global language. In addition to contributing to the sociolinguistics of New Englishes, it contributes to their pedagogy. It employs the theoretical model of Preference Grammar to define the status of phonological elements. The book represents a vital contribution to the endonormative stabilisation of Nigerian English, among the canons of national varieties of English recognised worldwide. The results importantly yield materials for a normative inventory, essential to the pedagogical phonology of...

If the new cultural sociology is to gain firm grounds, it should rediscover the classic studies on cultural dynamics and cultural systems. This book contributes to a better understanding of Florian Znaniecki as an eminent culturologist and the lasting relevance of his theory of cultural becoming. Znaniecki opted for a humanistic approach that he called culturalism. Culturalism, founded on the principle of the humanistic coefficient, is applied also to the cultural person. The concept of social values makes this cultural approach an original one. The cultural logic and cultural ethos of...

The African Union (AU) aims at creating an African Economic Community (AEC) by 2034. Eight recognized Regional Economic Communities (REC) are supposed to form the building blocs of the AEC. The book shows that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is currently the most advanced and promising REC but still behind schedule in reaching its own integration objectives. If the currently most successful of the African RECs may not achieve sufficiently deep regional integration in time then the chances to establish the AEC by 2034 are slim indeed. Combining economic and political analysis...

Perceptions of place and of landscape often clash. Based upon a decade of intermittent yet ongoing ethnographic research which explores the UK's Cornish peninsula, this volume investigates the social construction of landscape identity from a diversity of conceptual perspectives influenced by contemporary anthropological theories as well as recent developments within the fields of visual and material culture studies.

A first-order statistical model was implemented to follow the vocabulary changes in literary works. The model only takes into account the frequency of the words of a text; it is thus independent of syntactic and semantic constrains. Using this model a characteristic pattern was found, describing these changes in vocabulary and being unique to each text. The pattern not only identifies the vocabulary-rich segments but enables the user to compare the vocabulary of different texts. The work focuses on comparing foreign language translations, condensation, and lemmatization of texts. It provides...

This study applies Victor Turner s theory of liminality to an examination of early British Gothic fiction and its cultural context. Contrary to the widespread belief that the Gothic is escapist in nature, a close reading of novels such as William Godwin s Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley s Frankenstein (1818) or Charles Maturin s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) reveals that they actively engage with socio-political and educational debates of the time. Using the licence of fantastic literature, the Gothic sets up social experiments in which young, inexperienced protagonists...

Defining the construct of interaction for paired assessment purposes has been difficult, despite the evolution of our view of language to include the social perspective of co-construction, and the fact that such discourse is increasingly taught and assessed. In this volume three sequenced studies define interaction in paired oral assessment through the verbal protocols of learners of Spanish and their assessors. Assessors then scale performances from videoed test performance data resulting in the development of an evidence based rating process which includes non-verbal interpersonal...