In this dissertation I have investigated certain aspects of retirement experiences and early post-retirement lives of men and women in the Netherlands during the last two decades. The main research question was how the lives of Dutch men and women are influenced by retirement and shaped after retirement, and to what extent the changing social context has affected retirement experiences during t...

Abstract The following paper presents two stages of an action research project involving two oral proficiency courses held in the virtual world Second Life. Course 1 was conducted during the Autumn of 2007. Based on the experiences of this course, we redesigned many aspects of it in order to improve student activity in terms of oral participation and gave the course again in Spring 2008. By ana...

Educators who work in community settings often encounter participants with a wide array of individual leadership beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Given this situation, one of the challenges we face is to identify effective methods and tools to teach leadership in community and organizational settings. As an educator, it is important to understand and use quality scholarship and theory in le...

The experiences in many countries document that alcohol is involved in a substantial fraction of traffic crashes, and particularly crashes involving fatalities. In the USA a national surveillance system is now in place which provides information on all traffic crashes involving one or more fatal events. Data from this Fatal Accident Reporting System for the years 1977 through 1981 have been ana...

—Spectacular consumption is a process through which the relations among cultural forms, the culture industry, and the lived experiences of persons are shaped by public consumption. This essay examines how the spectacular consumption of “Whassup?!” Budweiser advertising is constitutive of white American ambivalence toward “authentic” blackness. The essay argues that Budweiser’s hottest ad campai...

This paper provides a critical insight into the learning outcomes of a global, real-life, clientbased communication project and its role in preparing future strategic communicators for the challenges presented in their prospective work environments, which are assumed to be shaped by an increasing level of diversity on one hand, and reliance on digital technologies on the other. This longitudina...

Undergraduate and postgraduate students in chemistry, pre-medical sciences, and science education enroll in coursework which focuses on contextual learning experiences in science through supervised research. A theoretical framework of constructivism guides the learning activities in this research community, linking to students’ prior experiences and understandings within a real-life context. Th...

This study investigated gamers’ auditory experiences as after effects of playing. This was done by classifying, quantifying, and analysing 192 experiences from 155 gamers collected from online videogame forums. The gamers’ experiences were classified as: (i) involuntary auditory imagery (e.g., hearing the music, sounds or voices from the game), (ii) inner speech (e.g., completing phrases in the...