Myriad potential for mentoring: Understanding the process of transformational change through a gender equality intervention

This article contributes to understanding transformational change towards gender equality by examining the transformational change potential of a mentoring programme for women, a type of gender equality intervention both criticized and praised for its ability to bring about change. Drawing upon an empirical case study of a mentoring programme for women academics in a Dutch university, we explore three dimensions of transformational change: organizational members (i) discussing and reflecting upon gendered organizational norms and work practices; (ii) creating new narratives; and (iii) experimenting with new work practices. Our findings indicate five specific conditions that enable transformational change: cross‐mentoring, questioning what is taken for granted, repeating participation and individual stories, facilitating peer support networks and addressing and equipping all participants as change agents. We suggest that these conditions should be taken into account when (re)designing effective organizational gender equality interventions.     

Coping Trajectories from Adolescence to Young Adulthood: Links to Attachment State of Mind

The objective of this study was to examine the links between coping and attachment. In a longitudinal study of 112 participants, coping behavior was assessed at five points in time during adolescence (starting at the age of 14 years) and early adulthood. In addition, at the age of 21 years, state of mind regarding current and earlier attachment experiences was assessed by employing the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). In both adolescence and early adulthood, differences in coping styles were found to be related to differences in attachment. Individuals classified as secure dealt with their problems more actively by using their social network during adolescence and at the age of 21 years. Both secure and dismissing individuals used more internal coping than those with a preoccupied state of mind. Latent growth curve modeling revealed that differences in active and internal coping between secure and insecure individuals applied to the rate of change in these coping styles between 14 and 21 years, with participants in the secure group showing much steeper growth in both coping styles. Only minor differences were found with respect to withdrawal as a coping style. The results represent first evidence that coping trajectories during adolescence and young adulthood are linked with attachment state of mind.     

A Population Approach to Analysis of Variance Models

Several authors have contributed to what can now be considered a rather complete theory for analysis of variance in cases with orthogonal factors. By using this theory on an assumed basic reference population, the orthogonality concept gives a natural definition of independence between factors in the population. By looking upon the treated units in designed experiments as a formal sample from a future population about which we want to make inference, a natural parametrization of expectations and variances connected to such experiments arises. This approach seems to throw light upon several controversial questions in the theory of mixed models. Also, it gives a framework for discussing the choice of conditioning in models     

Beyond Contact? Policy approaches to work with families of looked after children in four European countries

In England, placement within the looked after system is not viewed as a desirable long‐term solution for most children, and policy has prioritised continued contact with parents, and swift return home, wherever possible. This review examines policy approaches to work with families of looked after children in England and in three other European countries: Denmark, France and the Netherlands, aiming to identify areas for shared learning in relation to this challenging area of policy and practice. The research highlights relationships between care populations and policy understandings of the purpose of work with families, including understandings of children's and/or parents’ rights.     

Seeing the system: Systemic gender knowledge to support transformational change towards gender equality in science

Scholars agree that gender inequality is systemic and that participants in gender equality interventions need knowledge on gender inequality processes. However, a detailed view on the specific characteristics of this knowledge is as yet missing. This article aims to contribute to gender equality interventions by conceptualizing and visualizing systemic gender knowledge as an important condition for transformational change. Combining gender and participatory system dynamics literature, this article first introduces the concept of systemic gender knowledge. This concept captures two main characteristics that make gender knowledge systemic: knowledge on the interaction of gender inequality processes and endogenous thinking, here implying a focus on the organization as the relevant level of analysis. In addition to this conceptual contribution, the research contributes methodologically to the gender inequality intervention literature by designing a visualization process, translating written texts into system dynamics models which enable exploration of systemic gender knowledge. Finally, the research contributes empirically by exploring the systemic gender knowledge of participants in two science research institutes of a Dutch university, finding shifts in both characteristics of systemic gender knowledge. This enables researchers to discern whether gender equality interventions lead to increases in systemic gender knowledge, thus supporting transformational change.     

Stancetaking and the joint construction of zine producer identities in a research interview

This article examines the construction of zine producer identities (self and other) during a research interview. Zines are self‐published texts that circulate in mainly underground communities. In this study, I draw on dialogic understandings of the notion of ‘stance’ to show how a zine producer accomplishes a situated identity performance in the interview that also functions as an interdiscursive move in a larger conversation about the role Do‐It‐Yourself (DIY) ethics should play in zine communities. Specifically, I show how this speaker displays stances in relation to recognizable social types within zine communities but also the canonical stances associated with these social types. I unpack the features that work in support of this stancetaking, including discourse markers, constructed dialogue, referring terms, and prosodic cues. The analysis also foregrounds how the interviewer's turns contributed to these emergent stance displays, which furthers our understanding of the dynamic social context of the research interview.     

Simple Counterexamples against the Conditionality Principle

The famous theorem of Birnbaum, stating that the likelihood principle follows from the conditionality principle together with the sufficiency principle, has caused much discussion among statisticians. Briefly, many writers dislike the consequences of the likelihood principle (among other things, confidence coefficients and levels of tests are dismissed as meaningless), but at the same time they feel that both the conditionality principle and the sufficiency principle are intuitively obvious. In the present article we give examples to show that the conditionality principle should not be taken to be of universal validity, and we discuss some consequences of these examples.     

Kernel naive Bayes discrimination for high‐dimensional pattern recognition

Kernel discriminant analysis translates the original classification problem into feature space and solves the problem with dimension and sample size interchanged. In high‐dimension low sample size (HDLSS) settings, this reduces the ‘dimension’ to that of the sample size. For HDLSS two‐class problems we modify Mika's kernel Fisher discriminant function which – in general – remains ill‐posed even in a kernel setting; see Mika et al. (1999). We propose a kernel naive Bayes discriminant function and its smoothed version, using first‐ and second‐degree polynomial kernels. For fixed sample size and increasing dimension, we present asymptotic expressions for the kernel discriminant functions, discriminant directions and for the error probability of our kernel discriminant functions. The theoretical calculations are complemented by simulations which show the convergence of the estimators to the population quantities as the dimension grows. We illustrate the performance of the new discriminant rules, which are easy to implement, on real HDLSS data. For such data, our results clearly demonstrate the superior performance of the new discriminant rules, and especially their smoothed versions, over Mika's kernel Fisher version, and typically also over the commonly used naive Bayes discriminant rule.