فصلنامه تحقیقات فرهنگی ایران
پیاپی 2 (تابستان 1387)

Regarding the importance of representation in redefining individuals and social groups’ identity, the interpretation of women from representation of feminine identity in television is examined in this article. The main question asks: what is the relationship between women’s interpretation of feminine identity in television and their media consumption. It was assumed that women resist against those media contents which reproduce unwanted identity for them, and they do this through not consuming the presented contents. The research method was qualitative, using intense interviews with women from different social groups having different characteristics. Using Stewart Hall’s concept of Encoding and Decoding, it is examined that how women with different characteristics in terms of occupation, education and their marital status, adopting different readings, produce different meanings for those serials which try to reproduce a housewife identity for women. The results showed that the kind of women’s interpretation of media representations is different according to their different characteristics, and that this is in relation to their selective usage of media contents and shaping the desired contents for them.

The present paper answer two basic questions: what are the association patterns of the Persian-speaking satellite television channels amongst Tehrani audiences? What are the social origins of these patterns? To answer these questions, we have adopted the research tradition of "the uses and gratifications" in it's structural-cultural variant. In order to identify the uses patterns of such televisions, we initially interviewed 32 audiacnes. Content analysis of the interviews resulted in identifying 60 most-frequently-stated gratification items to be used as part of a large scale questionnaire survey of 400 viewers who were accessed via snowball sampling. Employing an exploratory factor analysis with Varimax rotation, we constructed and named ten gratification scales as follows: dissatisfaction with the national television programs, getting political information, cross-cultural comparison (instructional usage),escaping from everyday life difficulties, lifestyle guidance, facilitating social interaction, familiarity with global and Iranian (underground) popular culture, information on tourism and emigration issues, seeking social status, and finally seeking unedited information on sport events. A series of correlation tests on these ten factors as dependent variables and all the study's independent variables showed that the Blumler's conceptualization of the social character of media gratifications explains the usage patterns of Persian-speaking satellite televisions in Iran. Accordingly, different people turn to such televisions for different purposes and that the prevalent pattern of such usage is mainly of facilitatory, rather than compensatory character.

Recently, cell phone, as an unlimited media, in comparison with others, has deeply changed the modes of interpersonal connections. Accessibility, and inexpensiveness, in addition to the transcendence of normal face to face relation restrictions, could be taken for granted as most fascinating features of SMS. Therefore, content analysis of the SMS could help to clarify the communicative subjectivities in interpersonal communications. This study tends to analyze the content of 2651 short messages exchanged among 80 students both genders, in various universities in Tehran. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Who are the main senders of the messages? In what time are the SMS s frequently s sent or received? What are the most frequent contents? Is there any relationship between the gender of recipients/senders and the content of the messages? Whether the contents are related to the marital statue of the receiver and sender or not?

This research is an attempt to explain how audiences read and decode the dominant or preferred reading of television soap operas (here, one of them named: Parvaz Dar Hobab). The main problem of this research is that in what way TV soap operas prefer or make dominant some meanings, ideas and values and how audiences interpret and decode these meanings and ideas and values. From this viewpoint, a soap opera is an articulation constructed of different, and sometimes contrast, elements which are unified around a nodal point. In other words, a television soap opera is an articulatory discourse which is constructed through some technical, social and ideological codes by hegemonic system. In a TV soap opera, as a discourse, some ideas and meanings are preferred over the others. The question is that how social subjects, who have an objective position in the social structure, read and decode these dominant ideas and meanings? In this research, in the first part we have used the semilogical- structuralist method to explain the preferred reading of TV soap operas, and in the second part we used focused group interview to study women readings. To mention one of the conclusions of this research, we can say that this soap opera attempts to hide that social nihilism which is the main factor of addiction. Most of the audiences have an oppositional reading of this problem.

Considering recent social changes, it seems that interaction among cultural institutions is inevitable. In this regard cultural relations among universities worldwide are essential. Universities, typically, have had vital role on approaching nations and cultures. Thus, academic exchanges among universities may lead to the enhancement of the cultural communication internationally. The purpose of this research-based paper is to investigate how we can strengthen international cooperation among nations through universities. Research method of this study was descriptive and based on perceptions of academic staff of Iranian Humanities Departments. In order to gather the data qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Inferential and descriptive statistical techniques were employed for analysis of the data, using SPSS software.

Student societies and associations are developed in universities in order to provide a healthy and reasonable means for students to spend their leisure time and to develop their social skills. Meanwhile, it seems that the level of membership and participation of different groups of students in these societies and associations is not the same. Some evidences imply that students of special ethnicities participate in these societies more than others and these societies function as a place for regeneration of ethnic and regional relations among the students. This is the main question of the paper: is the level of participation in these societies varying among the students of different ethnicities? This question examined by a secondary analysis of the data of two surveys conducted among a sample of students of state non-medical universities all-over the country. The findings were analyzed on the basis of the historical and cultural characteristics of ethnic relations in Iran.

This paper tends to study tourism attitudes among the youth. It argues that in studying tourism among the youth, it is necessary to consider youth’s other behavioral factors in addition to the youth subculture. Therefore, we should study the youth culture from the view point of “Consumption”. In this view, youth tourism is equal to consumption of time, space and signs. Using ongoing theoretical debates and division, we would attempt to explore various factors of youth tourism. This article shows that youth tourism and youth culture are so mutually interconnected that we should comprehend youth tourism based on youth culture and vise versa. In conclusion, analyzing the youth subculture which is rooted in their consumption attitudes, the study attempts to understand youth tourism.