“If I Were Nick”: Men’s Responses to an Interactive Video Drama Series to Support Smoking Cessation

Background: Men continue to smoke in greater numbers than women; however, few interventions have been developed and tested to support men’s cessation. Men also tend to rely on quitting strategies associated with stereotypical manliness, such as willpower, stoicism and independence, but may lack the self‐efficacy skills required to sustain a quit. In this article we describe the development of and reception to an interactive video drama (IVD) series, composed of 7 brief scenarios, to support and strengthen men’s smoking cessation efforts. The value of IVD in health promotion is predicated on the evidence that viewers engage with the material when they are presented characters with whom they can personally identify. The video dramatizes the challenges unfolding in the life of the main character, Nick, on the first day of his quit and models the skills necessary to embark upon a sustainable quit. 
Objective: The objective was to describe men’s responses to the If I were Nick IVD series as part of a pilot study of QuitNow MenTM, an innovative smoking cessation website designed for men. Specific objectives were to explore the resonance of the main character of the IVD series with end‐users, and men’s perceptions of the effectiveness of the IVD series for supporting their quit self‐management. 
Methods: Seven brief IVD scenarios were developed, filmed with a professional actor and uploaded to a new online smoking cessation website, QuitNow MenTM.  A sample of 117 men who smoked were recruited into the study and provided baseline data prior to access to the QuitNow MenTM website for a 6 month period. During this time, 47 men chose to view the IVDs. Their responses to questions about the IVDs were collected in 3‐month and 6‐month online follow‐up surveys and analyzed using descriptive statistics. 
Findings: The majority of participants indicated they related to the main character, Nick. Participants who “strongly agreed” they could relate to Nick perceived significantly higher levels of support from the IVDs than the “neutral” and “disagree” groups (P <.001, d =2.0, P <.001 d =3.1). The “agree” and “neutral” groups were significantly higher on rated support from the videos than the “disagree” (P <.001 d =2.2, P =.01 d = 1.5). Participants’ perception of the main character was independent of participant age, education attainment or previous quit attempts. 
Conclusions: The findings suggest that IVD interventions may be an important addition to men’s smoking cessation programs. Given that the use of IVD scenarios in health promotion is in its infancy, the positive outcomes from this pilot study signal the potential for IVD and warrant ongoing evaluation in smoking cessation and, more generally, men’s health promotion.  

Italian Canzone d'autore and Greek Entechno tragoudi: a comparative overview

‘Canzone d’autore’ is the name that a vast community of Italian music critics, authors, per-formers, producers agreed upon in the mid-1970s, to describe the Italian singer-songwriter genre. Singer-songwriters, who had been missing from Italian popular music – with very few exceptions – until the late 1950s, had become increasingly popular after 1958, and were dubbed ‘cantautori’ in 1960. The term, which propagated to Spain, Catalonia, and Latin Amer-ica, is still in use, but ‘canzone d’autore’ superseded it as a genre label, highlighting the con-nections between authorship and artistic value, implied in the already established notion of ‘Cinéma d’auteur’ from which it was derived.

The expression ‘entechno laiko tragoudi’ (‘art-folk song’) was coined in Greece by Mikis The-odorakis in the 1950s, to describe a new music genre combining the urban-folk musical idi-om with lyrics coming from high-art poetry. Although the origins of the genre are tied to the work of composers like Theodorakis and Hatzidakis who did not perform as singers, from the 1970s onwards entechno became the privileged field of new generations of Greek singer-songwriters. Dropping ‘laiko’ (folk) from its label, entechno expanded its musical influences outside the urban-folk repertory and transformed into the more all-encompassing contempo-rary ‘art song’.

'This is a beautiful school.' 'This school is useless!' Explaining disengagement in a Greek vocational school through the examination of teacher ideologies

This multimethod case study of a Greek vocational school explored teachers’ culture (including beliefs about education, teachers’ role, and students’ nature) using the concept of Pupil Control Ideology to explain problems of disengagement and low morale among staff and students, as well as tensions in relationships. A prominent custodial culture was identified in the school using a functional/apolitical pedagogy to transmit ‘legitimate’ knowledge to students whose working-class background did not produce desired outcomes. This generated deficit views of students, teachers’ sympathy, and a seemingly caring school ethos which was, nevertheless, oppressive. Students’ failings were naturalised and vocational education misinterpreted as merely a streaming device in a system honouring academic achievement and middle-class ways. Teachers were blind to these cultural subtleties, believing they acted ‘rationally’ and altruistically. A humanistic subculture emphasising student empowerment and social transformation consisted of a minority of teachers and was rather marginalised. This disallowed meaningful dialogue and the identification of an alternative rationale for the sector, generating strong feelings of futility. Positive change in this school necessitated the deconstruction and (subsequent) reconstruction of custodial teachers’ worldview as embedded in their practice.