This article explores the complex relationship between communication technologies and spatial power, as well as between the politics of mobility and spatial exclusion, against the backdrop of globalisation and digital technology. Building upon the naive predictions of the 1990s that technology would bring about universal mobility and connectivity, as well as the early techno-deterministic opinion that digital media inherently served as forces of democratisation and border dissolution, the article highlights how the distribution and access to communication infrastructure have themselves become crucial mechanisms of social exclusion and the main reason of reflecting the inequalities of mobility in reality. The digital divide is no longer merely a question of “access or no access,” but rather a hierarchical system involving the quality of access, the distribution of visibility, and permissions for virtual mobility. Taking Europe as an example, the article analyzes how, while promoting internal mobility and integration, the European Union also shapes an exclusive “European citizen” identity through border control, infrastructure planning, and cultural policies, thereby marginalising peripheral regions and groups. Phenomena such as Brexit and the rise of populism are seen as political backlash from regions “left behind” economically and culturally by globalisation. Furthermore, through the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, the article demonstrates that even in a highly interconnected era, the allocation of physical location and material resources (including communication resources) remains a fundamental determinant of life chances and visibility. It emphasises the importance of physical location and the politics of immobility, refuting the myth that virtual space can completely transcend geographical constraints.

Background Semantic differential scales, in which respondents rate their relative agreement between two opposing statements, are rarely used in assessment of health related quality of life (QOL). Here we present a use-case study describing our experiences constructing such a scale, part of a larger project to generate a questionnaire, the VALVQ, to measure QOL in heart valve disease (HVD). Methods and results Individuals with HVD were identified from echocardiographic databases. Initial questionnaire content was generated from semi-structured interviews with 34 individuals with HVD as well as three family members and five clinical experts. Four methods were used to generate semantic differential items. Firstly, two participants could give opposing points, allowing an item to be generated directly. Secondly, a participant could report a single experience at one extreme, with the research team generating the opposing statement. Thirdly, a participant could report an experience in the middle of two extremes, with two opposing statement generated by the research team. Finally, subtly different items were generated where an obvious corresponding item was not clear, allowing for future psychometric testing to examine item robustness. 64 semantic differential items were generated for pilot testing. 46 valid completed questionnaires were returned. Multiple items required changes due to phrasing of the item content, but no difficulties were reported with the semantic differential format. Conclusion The semantic differential scale can be considered for health related QOL research. Further head-to-head comparisons with the more common Likert format will allow assessment of differences in respondent biases between these questionnaire formats.

Introduction: Heart valve disease (HVD) is common globally, yet there is no questionnaire measuring quality of life (QOL) across the lifespan of HVD. This limits assessment of changes in QOL in response to intervention in HVD. Research Question: What are all features of QOL in lived HVD, and how may these be best selected between to create a well-performing questionnaire? Goal: We aimed to generate a patient-reported outcome measure of QOL in common and significant types of HVD: aortic stenosis, mitral regurgitation, mitral valve disease in rheumatic heart disease, and valve repair/replacement. Methods: Participants were recruited from echocardiographic databases in two tertiary surgical centres in three phases. Phase One described QOL in interviews; Phase Two pilot-tested the questionnaire; and Phase Three selected between items using item distributions, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and item response theory (IRT) to create the final questionnaire, called the Valve Quality of life (VALVQ). Results: In Phase One, 34 people with HVD, three family members, and five clinical experts were interviewed. Key features of QOL were physical capacity relative to ‘normal’, symptom interpretation causing reduced activity, and fatigue. In Phase Two, we showed in 62 participants that the resulting questionnaire - and its semantic differential item format - was functional. In Phase Three, 290 participants returned questionnaires. Items were removed for poor distributions, then EFA identified ‘physical capacity’ and ‘disease perception’ as key factors. A two-parameter Graded Response Model was used to generate the final 12-item VALVQ, which is shown in the attached table. Conclusion: Through application of sequential analyses across three phases, we generated the final 12-item VALVQ. It has two factors - physical capacity and disease perception - and can be deployed for future research on QOL in HVD, whether before or after intervention and across multiple forms of HVD.

Masculine power is evident in a number of the families as the ultimate determinant on occasions of conflict over viewing choices. Women seem to show much less reluctance to 'admit' that they talk about television to their friends and workmates. The issue of the differential tendency for women and men to talk about their television viewing is of considerable interest. In principle it could be argued that the claims many of the male respondents make about only watching 'factual' television are a misrepresentation of their actual behaviour, based on their anxiety about admitting to watching fictional programmes. Monitoring techniques may seem to show that many women are 'watching' factual television when, as far as they are concerned, they are in fact paying little or no attention to what is on the screen, as revealed by their comments when asked to give their own accounts of their viewing behaviour.

ABSTRACT Background There is an increasing prevalence of people worldwide with heart valve diseases (HVD), especially rheumatic heart disease, aortic stenosis, and mitral regurgitation, as well as people with a previous valve repair or replacement. Treatment decisions for HVD can be complex, making quality of life an important factor, but no questionnaire to measure quality of life across the lifespan of HVD exists. In this article, we describe the protocol for the development of such a questionnaire. Methods and Results The project will occur over four phases. First, people with HVD, family members and clinical experts will be interviewed to generate a list of questions (‘items’) that comprehensively describe participants’ quality of life. In the second phase, this will be formatted into a questionnaire that is pilot tested for functionality. In the third phase, items will be selected according to item distributions, factor analysis and rotation, and item response theory using the Graded Response Model to generate a final questionnaire containing only the best-performing items, which will then be tested for validity. Validity assessments will be repeated after final questionnaire administration in a new sample in the fourth phase. Conclusion The article gives a template for development of a patient report outcome measure (PROM) in the health sciences. It is expected that the final questionnaire, called the VALVQ, will allow clinical trials to more sensitively assess quality of life changes across the spectrum and lifespan in HVD.

IntroductionThe PDQ-Carer is a 29-item measure of health-related quality of life (QoL) for use with carers of people with Parkinson's (PwP). The measure produces a profile of scores across four domains. Previous validation data indicates that the measure possesses sound psychometric properties in terms of validity and internal consistency. An additional important attribute of any measure is test-retest reliability, i.e. the ability to provide stable results over time, presuming that there has been no change in the status of the construct being measured. To date, no assessment of the test-retest reliability of the PDQ-Carer has been undertaken.MethodsCarers of PwP were recruited via Parkinson's UK. Participants completed the PDQ-Carer online on two occasions, two weeks apart. On second administration participants answered an additional question asking how much, if at all, their QoL had changed over the two week period. Subsequent analyses focused on those carers who reported no change in their QoL.ResultsAt first administration 142 carers fully completed the PDQ-Carer and at second administration 104 participants with no missing data responded. Seventy four of these participants (71.2%) reported no change in QoL and thus went forward to the final analysis. Intraclass correlation coefficients for each domain were calculated as follows: Social and Personal Activities .97; Anxiety and Depression .95; Self-Care .96; Stress .95ConclusionResults indicate that the PDQ-Carer demonstrates sound test-retest reliability and can be confidently used by researchers who wish to incorporate it in studies of carers of PwP.

INTRODUCTION:The PDQ-Carer is a 29-item measure of health-related quality of life (QoL) for use with carers of people with Parkinson's (PwP). The measure produces a profile of scores across four domains. Previous validation data indicates that the measure possesses sound psychometric properties in terms of validity and internal consistency. An additional important attribute of any measure is test-retest reliability, i.e. the ability to provide stable results over time, presuming that there has been no change in the status of the construct being measured. To date, no assessment of the test-retest reliability of the PDQ-Carer has been undertaken.METHODS:Carers of PwP were recruited via Parkinson's UK. Participants completed the PDQ-Carer online on two occasions, two weeks apart. On second administration participants answered an additional question asking how much, if at all, their QoL had changed over the two week period. Subsequent analyses focused on those carers who reported no change in their QoL.RESULTS:At first administration 142 carers fully completed the PDQ-Carer and at second administration 104 participants with no missing data responded. Seventy four of these participants (71.2%) reported no change in QoL and thus went forward to the final analysis. Intraclass correlation coefficients for each domain were calculated as follows: Social and Personal Activities .97; Anxiety and Depression .95; Self-Care .96; Stress .95 CONCLUSION: Results indicate that the PDQ-Carer demonstrates sound test-retest reliability and can be confidently used by researchers who wish to incorporate it in studies of carers of PwP.

Exercise is recognised as an important tool in the management of Parkinson's disease. The PDQ-Exercise is a newly developed seven-item patient reported outcome measure (PROM) that has been developed to assess the efficacy of studies that focus on or incorporate an exercise component. Validation surveys indicate that the measure demonstrates excellent validity, internal consistency and test-retest reliability. A further important attribute of any PROM is sensitivity to change; the capacity to detect meaningful changes in health status over time. The objective of this study was to make an assessment of the sensitivity to change of the PDQ-Exercise and identify the minimally important difference (MID) and effect size for the measure.

Abstract This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the various factors that must be taken into account to explain the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers an interdisciplinary perspective on questions of how virtual and material geographies are enmeshed, paying particular attention to the continuing importance of transport infrastructures. The key concerns are with the politics of differential power over—and access to—mobility, in both its actual and virtual modalities. The COVID-19 crisis is argued to have functioned both as a mode of amplification of many preexisting forms of inequality and as a powerful solvent of the unexamined presumptions of the dominant discourse of globalization.

Nikitas Fessas holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences: Communication Sciences, from Ghent University, Belgium. His research interests include film noir, Greek cinema, and gender and sexuality. He has worked as a film reviewer for several years, and has published numerous cultural criticism essays in both Greek and English-language media, as well reviews and academic articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Greek Film Noir (Edinburgh University Press).

This chapter will address the changing relations of virtual and material geographies (and demographies) in matters of place, space, and their representation. This will entail the need to articulate questions of communication with matters of transportation (treating the mobility of messages alongside that of bodies and commodities). The English city of Birmingham - long derided within the United Kingdom as the ultimate Non-Place (in Auge's (1995) terminology) but now the site of a seemingly counterintuitive boom in tourism - will provide us with a place-study in which these themes can be explored. The tourist boom will be considered in the context of the city council's extensive investment in a place-making strategy designed to "rebrand" the city as a regional hub for the cultural/leisure industries and of the impact of recent televisual representations of the city, including the "steampunk" image of the 19th-century city offered in the highly successful series Peaky Blinders. These representations will then be compared to those offered by contemporary audiovisual artists, including John Akomfrah, George Shaw, and Richard Billingham - which raise, among other matters, the buried spectres of the city's racial histories.

Background Exercise is now a significant and key component in the management of Parkinson's disease. However, no self-report, Parkinson's-specific measure of exercise currently exists. Objective To develop a patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) for use in studies and clinical trials that aim to assess the efficacy of exercise therapy for people with Parkinson's (PwP). Methods Participants were recruited via Parkinson's UK. To generate meaningful items, PwP participated in exploratory cognitive interviews. To pretest the items generated, PwP took part in two rounds of cognitive debrief interviews. Items were subsequently tested through an online survey that also included the eight-item Parkinson's Disease Questionnaire (PDQ-8) and Oxford Participation and Activities Questionnaire (Ox-PAQ). Results Twenty PwP were interviewed for item generation. Analyses identified issues related to adopting and maintaining exercise, resulting in the generation of 10 items. Fourteen PwP took part in subsequent cognitive debrief interviews. Following the first 10 interviews, one item was removed, and minor adjustments were made to the wording of two items. Four final interviews verified that no further adjustments were required. Consequently, nine items were included in the validation survey, which was fully completed by 398 PwP. Inspection of floor and ceiling effects resulted in the removal of two further items. A principal component analysis identified a single seven-item factor explaining 61.6% of variance. Further analyses indicated that the measure demonstrates sound reliability and validity. Conclusions Results indicate that the PDQ-Exercise is an acceptable, reliable, and valid PROM. Further assessment of its psychometric properties is in progress. (c) 2021 The Authors. Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society

This chapter offers a meta-commentary on the concept of mobile socialites, and on claims that the new technologies of our globalised age have ushered in a borderless world of unprecedented rates of mobility and time-space compression. That vision of how Progress is driven by improvements in the efficiency of transport and communication is here placed in historical context, in an attempt to avoid the dangers of an unself-conscious focus on the present day. The analysis addresses questions concerning how ideas of home and community need to be adapted in the context of contemporary changes in patterns of communication and physical mobility and the changing relations of virtual and material geographies. It focusses on differential mobilities, the politics of waiting - and exclusion- and the continuing significance of place-based modes of sociality. It also discusses the fate of those populations who, rather than exploring any kind of mobile sociality, are increasingly retreating behind sedentarist, particularistic boundaries. The chapter investigates how these desires to to regain some sense of security in a world of flux have provided the seed-bed for the contemporary forms of populism. In conclusion, the argument also considers how the Covid-19 pandemic is reshaping previous debates about both mobility and sociality. Presumptions about the unquestioned value of increased speeds of circulation take on a quite different hue in a context in which the dominant rhetoric is necessarily now one of social distancing and boundary regulation.

This article examines what the coronavirus crisis reveals about the unexamined presumptions of existing discourses of urbanisation and globalisation. It takes a micro-oriented focus on the impact of the pandemic on the future of the high-rise buildings which are central to both the functionality and the imaginary of the modern city. Its focus is specifically on the constraints which the pandemic has imposed on current norms of vertical mobility (via lifts/elevators) within these buildings. It then considers the broader significance of the potential obsolescence of previously prestigious architectural and technological forms, including the high-rise building and the cruise ship, both of which have come to be enveloped by this pandemic within dystopian forms of symbolism.