M. Khelghati; H. Molaei
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the discourse about traditionalist women on a popular social media platform, i.e. Instagram. Therefore, ‘Tašt-e Šir’ video which was part of a television program about family values was selected as the case study. In this video, a family counselor, ...
Read More
This study aims to investigate the discourse about traditionalist women on a popular social media platform, i.e. Instagram. Therefore, ‘Tašt-e Šir’ video which was part of a television program about family values was selected as the case study. In this video, a family counselor, advised women to express their love and affection to their husbands through washing their spouse’s feet in a tub of water or milk. The video became very controversial and was distributed vastly on different types of social media including Instagram. The main question of the paper is the discourse about women that are represented on this video. In addition, this study seeks to understand the reception of Instagram users from this discourse according to the Hall encoding-decoding theory. Critical discourse analysis based on the Fairclough model was conducted to answer the first question. A qualitative content analysis was used to answer the second question. The results of the study show ‘traditionalist women’ being the dominant discourse on the video. The results also show that ‘oppositional code' is the dominant reception among Instagram users.
Intercultural Communications
H. Molaei
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the most significant factors affecting the socio-cultural adaptation of international students in Iran. A survey was conducted on international students studying at University of Tehran. Data was collected both online and on paper among the students. 284 valid responses ...
Read More
This paper aims to investigate the most significant factors affecting the socio-cultural adaptation of international students in Iran. A survey was conducted on international students studying at University of Tehran. Data was collected both online and on paper among the students. 284 valid responses were collected. The results indicate that there is a positive relationship between the level of socio-cultural adaptation of international students and factors such as having companion during the study period in Iran, the length of stay, being accepted by people in society, being accepted by university staff and students and an overall satisfaction of living in Iran. The results also suggest that there is no significant relationship between acquiring prior knowledge regarding Iran and the level of socio-cultural adaptation of students. The results also indicate that there is no significant relationship between the demographic factors such as age and gender and socio-cultural adaption of international students at the University of Tehran.
Social Sciences and Communications
H. Molaei; Z. Majdizadeh
Abstract
Social media with their features such as interactivity, participatory, and user-generated content have provided a great opportunity for self-expression of the users. However, cultural differences affect the extent and modality of users’ self-expression. This study aims to investigate the modality ...
Read More
Social media with their features such as interactivity, participatory, and user-generated content have provided a great opportunity for self-expression of the users. However, cultural differences affect the extent and modality of users’ self-expression. This study aims to investigate the modality of self-expression of Iranian users of the social networking sites. In doing so, an online survey was conducted among the students of three Iran universities: University of Tehran, Amirkabir University of Technology, and Sharif University of Technology. A total of 371 students participated in the study. Having conducted quantitative analysis, the study results showed that women and ethnic minorities are more inclined to support their cultural differences compared to men and ethnic majority group. Supporting cultural differences was observed more among Shia religious majority group. Religious minorities expressed less tendency to create content in social networking sites and as a result support their religious identity.
Saeid Reza Ameli; Hamideh Mowlaei
Abstract
This article aimed to investigate the intercultural sensitivities between Sunnite Turkmen groups and Shiite groups in Golestan province of Iran through considering the most important factors influenced it. The intercultural development inventory (IDI), which designed according to Milton Bennet's the ...
Read More
This article aimed to investigate the intercultural sensitivities between Sunnite Turkmen groups and Shiite groups in Golestan province of Iran through considering the most important factors influenced it. The intercultural development inventory (IDI), which designed according to Milton Bennet's the intercultural sensitivities theory, was utilised to examine the intercultural sensitivities between those Muslim groups. The intercultural sensitivities theory essentially states that the more communication among people leads them to have the less intercultural sensitivities. In other words, the development of communications among people causes to diminish their intercultural sensitivities. In this study, both virtual and actual measurement domains were used in order to measure the communications development of two groups. The development of virtual communications was measured according people's interactivity with different types of media, especially Satellite and Internet, whereas the actual one was measured based on three cities varying according to different religious distribution. Finally this article concluded that the development of virtual and actual communications led to decreasing intercultural sensitivities among people in this area.
