While organizational stigma has emerged as an important and vibrant area of study, yet the processes of stigmatization have not been as thoroughly examined. Specifically, this study explores the ...subsequent, ongoing stigmatization processes beyond stigma emergence that are triggered by stigma transfer. To do so, we draw on a qualitative case study of an American university selling the naming rights of its newly built football stadium to a company that runs for-profit prisons with a history of human rights violations. We find that the stigma transfer through an exposed association can lead to amplifying stigmatization of both the source and target organizations, featuring a reverberation process fueled by both rhetorical and material stigmatizing practices. Even after the stigmatizing association ceased, stigmatization of the target organization, though muffled, lingered and required further management. Through developing a model of amplifying and muffling stigmatization after stigma transfer, we offer contributions to scholarship on ongoing stigmatization and stigma transfer. We also open the opportunity to understand the temporal dimensions of stigmatization.
Debt accumulation has been linked to materialism, impulsivity, shortsightedness, self-control, and lifestyle preferences. However, applying stigma theory allows novel insights into debt accumulation ...for middle-class individuals who access a variety of credit-related products. The authors define anticipated stigmatization of debt as the negative judgment and discrimination an individual expects to experience because of their consumer indebtedness. Results from a series of studies demonstrate that although financial stress motivates behaviors designed to reduce debt, debtors who anticipate stigmatization perform a variety of concealment behaviors (secrecy, social spending, and help avoidance) that hinder debt reduction and have negative effects on well-being. To understand how to help these individuals, the authors collaborated with a financial education company, designing a field experiment to examine the efficacy of a behavior change course. Individuals who anticipated stigmatization and formed new social connections in a community-based condition reduced their consumer debt. Although the emotional effect of community-based support has been examined in other stigma contexts, this study is the first to investigate the effect on well-being in a debt context and link social benefits to actual behavior change in terms of debt reduction behaviors and debt repayment.
Background & Objective: Epilepsy is not only a common neurological disorder, but also a stigmatising cause of psychosocial difficulties and discrimination. This study aimed to evaluate adults’ ...knowledge levels and attitudes toward epilepsy. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted between August and September 2022 from four family healthcare units in Samsun, Türkiye. In the questionnaire, a personal information form, the Epilepsy Knowledge Scale (EKS), and the Epilepsy Attitude Scale (EAS) were used. Results: Four hundred and six people participated in this study. The mean age of the participants was 39.4±13.6 years, and 54.2% were women. The mean EKS score was 9.9±3.1 (Maximum 16), and the mean EAS score was 56.8±8.9 (Maximum 70). University graduates (p=0.001), participants familiar with individuals with epilepsy (p<0.001), with epilepsy in the family (p<0.001), who had witnessed epileptic seizures (p<0.001), who had previously heard about epilepsy (p<0.001), and who had read about epilepsy (p<0.001) registered higher mean epilepsy knowledge scores. Participants over 35 (p=0.002), unmarried individuals (p<0.001), university graduates (p<0.001), the employed (p=0.008), participants with children (p<0.001), who knew individuals with epilepsy (p=0.016), with epilepsy patients in the family (p=0.023), who had witnessed epileptic seizures (p<0.001), who had previously heard of epilepsy (p=0.012), and who had read about epilepsy (p<0.001) registered higher mean attitudes to epilepsy scores. Positive attitudes toward epilepsy increased according to the level of knowledge of epilepsy (r=0.387; p<0.001). Conclusion: The participants from Samsun, Türkiye exhibited moderate levels of knowledge about epilepsy and positive attitudes toward the disease. Increasing levels of knowledge were associated with increasingly positive attitudes toward epilepsy.
In the nineteenth century a new type of mystic emerged in Catholic Europe. While cases of stigmatisation had been reported since the thirteenth century, this era witnessed the development of the ...‘stigmatic’: young women who attracted widespread interest thanks to the appearance of physical stigmata. To understand the popularity of these stigmatics we need to regard them as the ‘saints’ and religious ‘celebrities’ of their time. With their ‘miraculous’ bodies, they fit contemporary popular ideas (if not necessarily those of the Church) of what sanctity was. As knowledge about them spread via modern media and their fame became marketable, they developed into religious ‘celebrities’.
The purpose of the study was to develop and test a virtual reality application designed to put the participants "in the shoes" of an autistic person during a routine task.
The study involved a ...randomized controlled trial that included 103 participants recruited from a technical college. Each participant responded to three questionnaires to measure attitudes, knowledge, and openness toward autism. Prior to responding to these questionnaires, the participants in the experimental group also completed an 8-min virtual reality simulation designed by the research team in collaboration with autistic individuals.
The participants who completed the virtual reality simulation reported better attitudes, more knowledge, and higher openness toward autism than the participants in the control group.
The results of the study suggest that virtual reality simulations are promising tools to raise awareness about autism.
Introduction
People with mental disorder can share negative stereotypes, related to mental disorders. This might cause self-stigmatization, which is negatively related to quality of life and ...compliance with treatment. This self-stigmatization can be non-conscious or implicit, which might complicate it detection and further therapy.
Objectives
In present study we investigated the role of values in implicit self-stigmatization among 40 women diagnosed with schizophrenia (mean age 23.77 years ±6).
Methods
Participants completed the Portrait Value Questionnaire (Schwartz, 2003) and two brief implicit association tests (BIAT), measuring implicit self-esteem and attitudes towards mental disorders (Corrigan et al., 2010). The results of two BIATs were combined as a measure of implicit self-stigmatization.
Results
A linear regression model was built. Four values (self-enhancement, self-transcendence, openness to change and conservation values) were entered as independent variables, while implicit self-stigmatization – as dependent variable. It was found that self-transcendence values were marginally negatively related to implicit self-stigmatization (b=-.122, β=-.398, SE=.064, p=.067), while other values were not significantly related to it (ps>.125).
Conclusions
Self-transcendence values – values related to the well-being of others, which include tolerance, altruism and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature – are negatively related to implicit or non-conscious self-stigmatization. This finding, although marginally significant, is in line with previous studies. Previous studies showed that self-transcendence values are also negatively associated with explicit or conscious self-stigmatization (Lannin et al., 2020). Thus, these values can be targets for programs which aim to decrease self-stigmatization tendencies among patients with mental illness.
In a world where population is growing and the percentage of vulnerable groups is increasing, cultural sensitivity requires very special attention. It is not surprising that cultural factors play a ...very important role in the healing process, outlining the response to disease and treatment. From Hippocratic Oath to the Romanian legal texts, all argue for a conduit for patients regardless of culture, race, ethnicity, religion. The vulnerable groups are: minorities, people with disabilities, pregnant women, children, whose self-image, and whose hole life is affected, the more they are under the influence of a medical context. We are the richest when we have health, and we are entitled to it, all of us, regardless of where we come from and where we are headed. In this context, medical communication with vulnerable groups has its specificity, given both the professional ethics and the cultural traditions of those concerned.
This Presidential Address offers elements for a systematic and cumulative study of destigmatization, or the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth. Contemporary sociologists ...tend to focus on inequality in the distribution of resources, such as occupations, education, and wealth. Complementing this research, this address draws attention to “recognition gaps,” defined as disparities in worth and cultural membership between groups in a society. I first describe how neoliberalism promotes growing recognition gaps. Then, drawing on research on stigmatized groups across several societies, I analyze how experiences of stigma and destigmatization are enabled and constrained by various contextual factors and actors, including institutions, cultural repertoires, knowledge workers, and social movement activists. I conclude by proposing a research agenda for the sociology of recognition and destigmatization, and by sketching how social scientists, policymakers, organizations, and citizens can contribute to the reduction of recognition gaps.
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