Securing Disunion: young people’s nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland.

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014.  We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literatures from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children’s emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign. Keywords: nationalism, young people, race and ethnicity, ontological security, everyday geopolitics

Construct and content validity of the Greek version of the birth satisfaction scale (G-BSS).

Background: ‘Birth Satisfaction’ is a term that encompasses a woman’s evaluation of her birth experience. The term includes factors such as her appraisal of the quality of care she received, a personal assessment of how she coped, and her reconstructions of what happened on that particular day. Her accounts may be accurate or skewed, yet correspond with her reality of how events unfolded. Objective: To evaluate properties of an instrument designed to measure birth satisfaction in a Greek population of postnatal women. Study design: We assessed factor structure, internal consistency, divergent validity and known-groups discriminant validity of the 30-item Greek Birth Satisfaction Scale – Long Form (30-item G-BSS-LF) and its revised version the 10-item Greek-BSS-Revised (10-item-G-BSS-R), using survey data collected in Athens. Participants: A convenience sample of healthy Greek postnatal women (n = 162) aged 22–46 years who had delivered between 34 and 42 weeks’ gestation. Results: The 30-item-G-BSS-LF performed poorly in terms of factor structure. The short-form 10-item-G-BSS-R performed well in terms of measurement replication of the English equivalent version as a multidimensional instrument. The short-form 10-item-G-BSS-R comprises three subscales which measure distinct but correlated domains of: (1) quality of care provision (4 items), (2) women’s personal attributes (2 items), and (3) stress experienced during labour (4 items). Key conclusions: The 10-item-G-BSS-R is a valid and reliable multidimensional psychometric instrument for measuring birth satisfaction in Greek postnatal women.

Consequences of big data on the individual: Interview

The speed with which data has moved from being scarce, expensive and valuable, thus justifying detailed and careful verification and analysis to a situation where the streams of detailed data are almost too large to handle has caused a series of shifts to occur. Legal systems already have severe problems keeping up with, or even in touch with, the rate at which unexpected outcomes flow from information technology. The capacity to harness massive quantities of existing data has driven Big Data applications until recently. Now the data flows in real time are rising swiftly, become more invasive and offer monitoring potential that is eagerly sought by commerce and government alike. The ambiguities as to who own this often quite remarkably intrusive personal data need to be resolved – and rapidly - but are likely to encounter rising resistance from industrial and commercial bodies who see this data flow as ‘theirs’. There have been many changes in ICT that has led to stresses in the resolution of the conflicts between IP exploiters and their customers, but this one is of a different scale due to the wide potential for individual customisation of pricing, identification and the rising commercial value of integrated streams of diverse personal data. A new reconciliation between the parties involved is needed. New business models, and a shift in the current confusions over who owns what data into alignments that are in better accord with the community expectations. After all they are the customers, and the emergence of information monopolies needs to be balanced by appropriate consumer/subject rights. This will be a difficult discussion, but one that is needed to realise the great benefits to all that are clearly available if these issues can be positively resolved. The customers need to make these data flow contestable in some form. These Big data flows are only going to grow and become ever more instructive. A better balance is necessary, For the first time these changes are directly affecting governance of democracies, as the very effective micro targeting tools deployed in recent elections have shown. Yet the data gathered is not available to the subjects. This is not a survivable social model. The Private Data Commons needs our help. Businesses and governments exploit big data without regard for issues of legality, data quality, disparate data meanings, and process quality. This often results in poor decisions, with individuals bearing the greatest risk. The threats harbored by big data extend far beyond the individual, however, and call for new legal structures, business processes, and concepts such as a Private Data Commons. This Web extra is the audio part of a video in which author Marcus Wigan expands on his article "Big Data's Big Unintended Consequences" and discusses how businesses and governments exploit big data without regard for issues of legality, data quality, disparate data meanings, and process quality. This often results in poor decisions, with individuals bearing the greatest risk. The threats harbored by big data extend far beyond the individual, however, and call for new legal structures, business processes, and concepts such as a Private Data Commons.