The psychological wellbeing of Iranian journalists: a descriptive study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Iran ranks 173 out of 180 countries on an index of press freedom. The purpose of the study was to assess the psychological wellbeing of Iranian journalists and document the stressors encountered in their work. DESIGN: A secure website was established and participants were given their unique identifying number and password to access the site. SETTING: Newsrooms in Iran and the diaspora. PARTICIPANTS: Responses were received from 114 journalists (76%) of whom 65.8% were living in the diaspora. The mean age was 37.8 years (SD = 7.30) and 57% male. MAIN OUTCOMES MEASURES: Type of stressor and behavioural data: Impact of Event Scale-revised for posttraumatic stress disorder, Beck Depression Inventory-II for depression. RESULTS: Stressors include arrest (41.2%), torture (19.3%), assault (10.5%), intimidation (51.4%) and family threatened (43.1%). Eighty nine (78.1%) journalists had stopped working on a story because of intimidation. Arrest, torture, intimidation and family threatened were associated with more intrusive and arousal PTSD symptoms (p < .01 to .001) and assault and intimidation with more depressive symptoms (p < .05). Almost a third of Iranian journalists regularly used barbiturates, with use correlating with symptoms of intrusion (p < .0001), avoidance (p < .01), arousal (p < .0001) and depression (p < .0001). 46.5% of Iranian journalists were not receiving therapy for their distress. CONCLUSIONS: The findings, the first of their kind, provide data highlighting the extraordinary degree of danger confronted by Iranian journalists, their emotional distress in response to this and their proclivity to self-medicate with barbiturates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".