Vol. 13 No. 2 (2024) Current Issue

Published October 27, 2024
This journal issue is not yet closed.

##issue.tableOfContents##

Close-up

  • Experiencing religiosity in prison: First results of qualitative research among long-term prisoners
    1-23
    Views:
    27

    Religion has several positive effects on the life of the prisoner, helping him to cope with prison conditions and can significantly reduce the problems associated with imprisonment. In our qualitative research, we asked long-term prisoners in 3 prisons in Hungary, using a semi-structured interview method, about their perceptions of religiosity, the impact of religion on their life management, and the role they predict religion to play after the end of their sentence. Following a review of the literature, three hypotheses were put forward. We hypothesized that imprisonment is a crisis in the individual’s life that makes him or her open to religious values; religiosity influences the individual’s values and, through them, his or her attitude towards world phenomena; religious prisoners are a lower security risk. The hypotheses are confirmed. Beyond the reintegration of prisoners into society, the analysis of the interviews reveals that some of the narratives not only reflect a desire for reintegration but also a desire to serve as a goal.

  • Exploring the possible expressions of social dominance in an online context: Discourse analysis below the video contents of the representatives of Finn’s Party
    1-24
    Views:
    10

    In the course of the study, discourse analysis was used to examine the comments posted under the videos of three representatives of the Finns Party with the largest YouTube following. The aim of the research was to identify discoursive manifestations of social dominance in the comment field. In addition, we also aimed to validate a word list of socially dominant terms. To this end, we have identified four linguistic categories that could form the basis of socially dominant communication, based on the literature of social dominance. The words with the highest number of elements in each category were presented in a word cloud. After collecting the most frequent terms, three external groups were identified against which social dominance orientation may be relevant. These suggest that the European Union, immigrants and the domestic left may constitute the out-group category in the eyes of populist supporters. Finally, the hierarchical terms were not validated as they occured in a negligible number of items in the sample. The successfully validated categories were plotted on a cross-tabulation, from which we created four different types of Finns Party supporters based on the out-group they named and the dominant common words and phrases in the comment categories. The presence of authoritarian, political out-group category points to the spread of political polarization in Finland. Since social identity underlies both social dominance orientation and political polarization, it may be relevant to examine both together in future research. Nonetheless, social dominance was not expressed in the way that was initially assumed and commentators perceived “real Finns” as the sufferers of a socially dominant situation. The background to this phenomenon is presumably the populist political rhetoric of the Finns’ Party, which tries to portray Finns as people left behind in disadvantaged social positions.

Review