The issue of mass shootings and how to prevent them has become a widely discussed topic in the United States, and attitudes about the role of guns in mass shootings are closely linked with gun policy preferences. An emerging frame to predict gun policy preferences is a "guns and freedom" ideology that views the wide availability of firearms as essential for freedom from criminal perpetrators and government authority. We rely on survey data to test the ability of the guns and freedom ideology to better predict the perspective that more guns in the hands of citizens would reduce mass shootings than frames typically discussed in the literature: political beliefs, region-rurality, gender-race, and gun ownership. Our results indicate that the belief that guns are essential to freedom is the strongest predictor of viewing the wide availability of guns as a solution for reducing mass shootings.

In recent years, partisan polarization has intensified, and social media has amplified the spread of inaccurate information. As misinformation circulates more widely, non-partisan fact-checkers play a crucial role in improving public knowledge. However, their efforts often compete with sources that may undermine attempts to correct misinformation. In polarized political environments, elites and partisan media frequently promote narratives that conflict with fact-checkers’ conclusions. To understand this dynamic better, we present new findings from an experiment on the voting public during the most high-profile congressional election of the 2020 cycle: the Georgia Senate runoff elections. Our experiment exposed subjects to a series of statements about the runoff candidates that non-partisan fact-checkers rated as false or mostly false. We test whether a false rating from a non-partisan fact-checking organization changes participants’ beliefs about the statements. Additionally, we examine the extent to which people trust these organizations to cover politics fairly. Our findings show that partisan biases prevented fact-checking efforts from changing perceptions of misinformation. Party identification also influenced participants’ trust in fact-checkers. These results highlight the obstacles fact-checkers face in correcting misinformation and raise important normative concerns for the future of American democracy.

Purpose Social media (SM) platforms have become major sources for generating, sharing and gathering political and election news. Although there appears to be an assumption that reliance on SM for political news consumption will continue to gain in popularity, there are reasons to believe that many Americans are retreating from using SM for political news. The purpose of this study is to examine if Americans are reducing reliance on SM for political news and to analyze why retreat may be happening. Design/methodology/approach Using longitudinal panel data from Pew’s American Trends Panel study, the authors tracked 993 respondents from February of 2016 to November of 2019 to monitor their reliance on SM for political news leading up to the 2020 US presidential election. Findings The results of this study indicate that a sizeable percentage of people (about a third) are retreating from SM platforms for political news consumption and some are abandoning it altogether – people we refer to as new SM “nones.” The authors find that retreat from SM is associated with increased distrust of the information found on the platforms. Concerns about fake news, incivility on SM and information overload were unrelated to retreat from use of SM for political news consumption. Originality/value The findings of this study are novel and suggest that reliance on SM for political news by the public may have waxed, seen its zenith and may now be waning largely because of distrust in the information found on SM platforms.

Objective This study aims to examine the influence of Republican and Democratic partisan television news on attitudes toward candidates for president immediately following the 2016 general election. Method Using two waves of the 2016 American National Election Study, we examine feelings toward Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton before and after the election. Results Exposure to Republican partisan media did have a significant negative effect on feelings toward Hillary Clinton, even when controlling for party identification, ideology, and feelings toward Clinton before the election. Consumption of Democratic partisan television, however, had no influence on feelings toward Donald Trump. Conclusion Further fragmentation and the expansion of partisan media has—and will continue to—benefit Republicans over Democrats.

Evidence on the population-level mental health impacts of COVID-19 are beginning to amass; however, to date, there are significant gaps in our understandings of whose mental health is most impacted, how the pandemic is contributing to widening mental health inequities, and the coping strategies being used to sustain mental health. The first wave of a repeated cross-sectional monitoring survey was conducted between May 14?29, 2020 to assess the mental health impacts of the pandemic and to identify the disproportionate impacts on populations or groups identified as experiencing increased risks due to structural vulnerability and pre-existing health and social inequities. Respondents included a nationally representative probability sample (n = 3000) of Canadian adults 18 years and older. Overall, Canadian populations are experiencing a deterioration in mental health and coping due to the pandemic. Those who experience health, social, and/or structural vulnerabilities due to pre-existing mental health conditions, disability, income, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or gender are more likely to endorse mental health deterioration, challenging emotions, and difficulties coping. This monitoring study highlights the differential mental health impacts of the pandemic for those who experience health, social, and structural inequities. These data are critical to informing responsive, equity-oriented public health, and policy responses in real-time to protect and promote the mental health of those most at risk during the pandemic and beyond.

Previous research finds that misinformation is often difficult to correct once a person accepts it as truth. Nonetheless, a few studies have shown evidence that fact-checkers can help lower an individual's susceptibility to believing false news and rumors. Our study builds on this research by examining the fact-checking inoculation effect on political misinformation (also known as "fake news") that circulated on the Internet in the months following the election of President Donald Trump. Using an experimental design, we find only selected instances of inoculation effects. Instead, our results are consistent with previous studies that show individuals are more likely to accept or reject misinformation based on whether it is consistent with their pre-existing partisan and ideological beliefs. However, partisanship and ideology played a much stronger role in predicting believability for fake news stories critical of Democrats than stories critical of Republicans.

Abstract Background Mental health challenges are a leading health concern for youth globally, requiring a comprehensive approach incorporating promotion, prevention and treatment within a healthy public policy framework. However, the broad enactment of this vision has yet to be realized. Further, mental health promotion evidence specific to youth is still emerging and has not yet focused at a policy level. This is a critical gap, as policy is a key mental health promotion lever that can alter the social and structural conditions that contribute to shaping youth mental health outcomes for all youth, across the full spectrum of need. Responsive to this research and intervention priority, our prototype study intervention—the Agenda Gap—is comprised of an innovative, multi-media engagement intervention, developed in collaboration with youth. This intervention aims to equip youth and build capacity for them to lead meaningful policy change reflective of the mental health needs of diverse communities of youth, including those who experience structural vulnerability and who would not typically have had their voice represented in policymaking processes. Methods This study will use a multiple case study design and mixed methods grounded in a realist approach and will be conducted in three sites across two Canadian provinces (British Columbia and Alberta). In an earlier phase of this research, we collaboratively designed the prototype intervention with youth, community and policy partners. In this phase of the study, the intervention will be implemented and further tested with new groups of youth collaborators (n = 10–15/site). Outcome data will be collected through realist qualitative interviews, validated questionnaires [i.e., Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-12), General Self-Efficacy (GSE) Scale, and the Critical Consiousness Scale (CCS)] and additional survey items developed by our study team. Analysis will focus on identification of key context-mechanism-outcome configurations to provide comprehensive insights into how this intervention works, for whom, and in what context. Discussion This study is unique in its “upstream” focus on youth-engaged policymaking as a tool for improving the social and structural conditions that influence youth mental health across socioecological levels. Through the implementation and testing of the Agenda Gap intervention with diverse youth, this study will contribute to the evidence base on youth-engaged policymaking as a novel and innovative, mental health promotion strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the conviviality between practices of narrative therapy and the emerging field of critical suicide studies. Bringing together ideas from narrative therapy and critical suicide studies allows us to analyze current suicide prevention practices from a new vantage point and offers us the chance to consider how narrative therapy might be applied in new and different contexts, thus extending narrative therapy's potential and possibilities. We expose some of the thin, singular, biomedical descriptions of the problem of suicide that are currently in circulation and attend to the potential effects on distressed persons, communities, and therapists/practitioners who are all operating under the influence of these dominant understandings. We identify some cracks in the dominant storyline to enable alternative descriptions and subjugated knowledges to emerge in order to bring our suicide prevention practices more into alignment with a de-colonizing, social justice orientation.

Abstract In this paper we explore the creation of jokes told on late night talk shows targeted at major party nominees for president from 1992–2008. We hypothesize that the number of jokes told about candidates are related to variations in polling numbers, mainstream media coverage, and party identification of the candidates. Our results show a positive relationship between the number of jokes told at a candidate’s expense and the amount of negative news coverage about the candidate. In addition, we find that Republicans are targeted with more frequency than Democrats. Results suggest that favorability ratings and whether or not a presidential candidate is an incumbent has no effect on the number of jokes targeting a candidate.

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We are pleased to introduce this special issue of Death Studies, which showcases original research, theoretical contributions, and critical reflexivity under the banner of critical suicidology. The study of suicide—or suicidology—has developed and coalesced as a field of research and practice since the late 1940s even though a much longer history can be traced. Focused on both the prevention of suicide, and the phenomenon of suicide itself, contemporary suicidology has made significant contributions to our shared understanding of suicide prevention, suicide intervention, and responses in the aftermath of a death by suicide. Over the past decade, an international body of scholars, researchers, and practitioners has begun to carve out a space for a more critically oriented suicidology, with the intent of broadening the horizon and subsequent possibilities for action. Critical suicidology continues to develop as a transdisciplinary project, deepening the knowledge base and expanding perspectives. This special issue is one example of the growing momentum in critical suicidology. The articles in this special issue were presented in March 2016 at the first critical suicidology conference, called Suicidology’s Cultural Turn and Beyond, at the Vila Lanna, Prague, Czech Republic and sponsored by the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. It was co-organized by Ludek Broz of Charles University and Michael J. Kral of Wayne State University. An increasing number of scholars, researchers, and practitioners have started to note the effects of limitations and constraints inherent to contemporary suicidology. Contemporary suicidology is founded primarily on the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, indexes suicide with an internal pathology and mental illness, is bound to an individual frame of reference, is predominantly reinforced by positivist and quantitative research, and is identified as a science (Marsh, 2010). Michael J. Kral has written about suicidology’s “great origin myth” being the belief that the idea of suicide originates within the individual, perhaps even in something neurobiological (Kral, 1998). We have learned a lot from contemporary suicidology as it stands currently, with important implications for prevention, risk assessment, and treatment. Positivist and quantitative research have helped us to implement evidence-based best practices. These forms of inquiry have helped deepen our understanding of suicide, including the epidemiological knowledge that many people living with mental health and addiction problems experience suicidal thinking. We believe all the authors of this special issue would agree with these premises. However, the authors in this special issue have asserted through their writing that there are limitations to contemporary suicidology, and that the ways of knowing, doing, and being inherent to the field ignore critical and legitimate ways of making sense of this complex phenomenon. Critical suicidology positions the traditional research and practice frames as being too narrow and interrogates contemporary suicidology through contextualist, historical, subjective, ecological, political, cultural, and social justice perspectives. Uniquely, the field of critical suicidology examines first-person accounts of having been suicidal, the effects of colonial histories of Indigenous people, prejudice and suicide, meaning made through poetry, community-driven suicide prevention, and other creative alternatives to the status quo (White, Marsh, Kral, & Morris, 2016). A series of articles exemplifying the creative contributions of critical suicidologists was recently published in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (https://social-epistemology.com/? s=suicidology). One contributor wrote that an important goal in the development of a critical suicidology would be to “subvert the claims of precedence that suicidology makes concerning its ‘scientific’ hold on suicide” (Widger, 2015, p. 3). Several of the articles in this issue are focused on theorizing suicide and the practice of suicide prevention more deeply and critically. For example, in the first article, White asks, “What can critical suicidology do?” Among other things, she suggests “it means confronting the limits of psycho-centric conceptualizations of distress and suffering and exposing the ways in which our current therapeutic culture casts structural violence, social inequities, and colonial relations of dominance as individual private troubles.” She argues for viewing selves as relational entanglements, which in turn invites a reading of suicide as co-constituted and interactive. none defined

This study addresses the changing role of Internet usage on the political knowledge and participation gap between individuals of low and high socioeconomic status (SES). Analysis of data collected by the Pew Research Center's Biennial Media Consumption Studies (1998–2012) shows that the percentage of the population that accidentally encounters political information online has risen dramatically. Results show that accidental exposure and SES are positively related to political knowledge, and that accidental exposure reduces the SES knowledge gap. Moreover, accidental exposure appears to be mitigating the SES voting gap at an increasing rate over time.