Parents' roles and question‐asking during pretend and real activities

All activities—real and pretend—provide children opportunities to learn new facts and skills, and parents are often facilitators. Yet little is known about whether and how parents' roles and interactions differ during pretend versus real activities. Here, we examine whether parents self‐report adopting different roles during pretend and real activities and whether we observe changes in their behavior, in particular in their question‐asking; either could impact the potential learning opportunities available to children. Thirty‐two parents engaged their 4‐year ‐olds in one pretend and one real activity (cleaning and snacking, counterbalanced). They self‐reported their roles, and speech was transcribed and coded. Parents regarded their role as a partner in fun during pretend and as a teacher or monitor during real activities. Across pretend and real contexts, they mostly asked information‐seeking questions, followed by rhetorical and pedagogical questions. They asked significantly more questions during pretend than real activities, particularly rhetorical questions. During real activities, parents' roles were not related to the number or types of questions they asked. However, during pretend, their roles were related to the number of rhetorical questions they asked: Monitors asked significantly fewer than teachers. Possible complementary benefits of each activity based on patterns of roles and questions are discussed.     

Information-seeking during acquaintanceship: Effects of level of social understanding and personal relevance

Two studies examined how individual differences in social understanding influence children's information-seeking orientations during an initial meeting with a peer, in which they do or do not anticipate future interaction. Study 1 involved a relatively controlled, laboratory setting in which 7-9 year old children were presented a list of questions from which to choose what to ask the peer. The findings indicate that children who view a person's behavior in terms of stable dispositional characteristics (high SDC), express greater interest in gathering trait-related information about an unfamiliar peer than children who do not perceive people in terms of stable traits (low SDC), but only when they expect to play games with that peer in a future interaction. Study 2 involved a more naturalistic observation of the actual questions 7-9 year old children ask during an initial meeting with an unfamiliar peer. The findings showed that high SDC children asked more questions of the peer when they expected interaction than when they did not, whereas low SDC children did not differ significantly across conditions. Taken together, the two studies indicate that the future, predictability orientation of high SDC children leads to a more extensive information search about a peer when they expect interaction with that peer involving instrumental choices.     

Accommodating stake effects under prospect theory

This paper investigates how letting people predict others’ choices under risk affects subsequent own choices. We find an improvement of strong rationality (risk neutrality) for losses in own choices, but no such improvement for gains. There is no improvement of weak rationality (avoiding preference reversals). Overall, risk aversion in own choices increases. Conversely, for the effects of own choices on predicting for others, the risk aversion predicted in others’ choices is reduced if preceded by own choices, for both gains and losses. Remarkably, we find a new probability matching paradox at the group level. Relative to preceding studies on the effects of predicting others’ choices, we added real incentives, pure framing effects, and simplicity of stimuli. Our stimuli were maximally targeted towards our research questions.     

How many Australians have slept rough?

How many Australians have experienced homelessness during their lifetime and how many people have slept rough? This paper draws on evidence from a random sample of the Australian population to answer these questions (N=1349). First, we explain the methodology for the research. Then we focus on the number of people who have experienced homelessness and the different experiences of men and women. Next, we investigate how many people have slept rough. We conclude that about 2.35 million people have experienced homelessness during their lifetime, and that 59 per cent of them (about 1.4 million people) have slept rough.     

The protestant ethic and the religious tattoo

This research illustrates how basic ideas from Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism are reflected in religious individuals’ choices in obtaining tattoos. Qualitative responses to survey questions show that, among 60 university students who indicated they have one, religious tattoos reflect asceticism in their lives, point them to service (calling) in the name of God, or provide a level of assurance (or anxiety) regarding life after death. We offer this work as an illustration of how the essence of Weber's work persists in the popular culture of the 21st century.     

Children's Attention to Others' Beliefs during Persuasion: Improvised and Selected Arguments to Puppets and People

Until now children's attention to the beliefs of people they wish to persuade has been examined experimentally via tasks that were artificial in important respects. To determine whether such research has underestimated children's psychological perspective taking, two studies that manipulated task elements pertinent to ecological validity were conducted. Children in three age groups (3, 4/5, and 6/7 years) were asked (forced‐choice and open‐ended formats) how best to persuade puppets and people, with differing beliefs, to pet and play with various toy animals. Children offered as many or more belief‐relevant arguments in response to forced‐choice as to open‐ended questions. Only the oldest group attended to beliefs more when persuading a person compared with a puppet. Even on more realistic tasks, significant improvement with age across task formats confirmed a developmental trajectory in line with extant reports of children's belief reasoning. The findings support the idea that enhanced social competence corresponds specifically to children's increasing attention to beliefs in social interactions such as persuasion.     

创业团队形成与演进过程的理论分析

20世纪90年代,在发现研究创业者个体难以客观、全面地剖析创业者对创业活动的作用规律之后,学者们将研究的焦点转向创业团队。本文围绕"什么是创业团队""创业团队如何形成""在新企业生成与成长过程中,创业团队如何演进"三个问题,系统梳理了创业团队的研究文献,并从创业团队组建逻辑、创业团队构成、创业团队过程和创业团队成员变动四个视角探索创业团队的形成和演进过程,进而提出未来的研究方向。     

A Game-Theoretic View of Voting

Two game-theoretic arguments for the potential rationality of voting are presented. The first argument suggests that people make choices that allow the most favorable forecasts. People choose to vote inasmuch as they project their own choices between voting and abstaining more strongly onto members of their own political group than onto members of other political groups. Relevant evidence is reviewed and extended by new findings in a simulated public-goods dilemma. The second argument suggests that people preview how they will feel about each of the four possible scenarios generated by the conjunctions of their own choices (to vote or to abstain) and the election outcome (victory or defeat). They choose to vote inasmuch as they feel their own vote will not be wasted. The implications of both arguments for efforts to increase turnout are discussed.     

The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses

Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decision or to delegate the decision task to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a simple choice task, we show that participants choose to pay in order to control their own payoff more than they should if they were to maximize monetary rewards and minimize monetary losses. This tendency cannot be explained by participants’ overconfidence in their own ability, as their perceived ability was elicited and accounted for. Nor can the results be explained by lack of information. Rather, the results seem to reflect an intrinsic value for choice, which emerges in the domain of both gains and of losses. Moreover, our data indicate that participants are aware that they are making suboptimal choices in the normative sense, but do so anyway, presumably for psychological gains.     

Adults with Down Syndrome and Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

An increasing number of people with Down syndrome are at risk of dementia resulting from Alzheimer's disease. Many reside in community group homes. When they are affected by dementia, the challenge to agencies providing group homes is how to best provide continued housing and provide effective dementia-related care management. In the general population, long term care is typically provided in nursing facilities, often in special care units (SCUs). This study evaluated select factors found in group homes and SCUs to determine which is able to provide a better quality of life for people with Down syndrome affected by dementia. Interviews, using quality of life indicators, were conducted at 20 sites, equally selected from group homes and SCUs, on the basis of their experience with people with dementia. Results indicate that group homes can provide conditions associated with better quality of life and, additionally, operate with lower staffing costs due to the non-utilization of medical staff.     

Tensions and contradictions in Australian social policy reform: compulsory Income Management and the National Disability Insurance Scheme

This paper explores contemporary contradictions and tensions in Australian social policy principles and governmental practices that are being used to drive behavioural change, such as compulsory income management. By means of compulsory income management the Australian Government determines how certain categories of income support recipients can spend their payments through the practice of quarantining a proportion of that payment. In this process some groups in the community, particularly young unemployed people and Indigenous Australians, are being portrayed as requiring a paternalistic push in order to make responsible choices. The poverty experienced by some groups of income support recipients appears to be seen as a consequence of poor spending patterns rather than economic and social inequalities. By contrast, Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has been constructed as a person centred system of support that recognises the importance of both human agency and structural investment to expand personal choices and control. Here we look at the rationale guiding these developments to explore the tensions and contradictions in social policy more broadly, identifying what would be required if governments sought to promote greater autonomy, dignity and respect for people receiving income support payments in Australia.     

The quest for sustainable employment: Challenges faced by young people during the job‐search process

Young people who are unable to find and sustain employment are at risk for long‐term social and economic exclusion. Active labour market policies (ALMPs) addressing the problem of youth unemployment have focused on building the employability skills of young job seekers to expand their employment opportunities. Yet research exploring how young people navigate the job‐search process is limited. Drawing on interviews with young Australian job seekers and their employment consultants, this article addresses the questions of how young people navigate entry into employment through the job‐search process and what challenges they face. The study revealed three common frustrations experienced by the young people during their job‐search: employers' expectations of relevant work experience in the young person's preferred occupation, being required to apply for jobs not aligned with their career aspirations, and the impact of personal factors on their ability to confidently present themselves to prospective employers. The findings highlight the need for ALMPs and employers to facilitate positive employability support mechanisms that will build a stable platform from which young people can build a trajectory towards sustainable employment to reduce long‐term youth unemployment.     

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Politicized Psychology

This article provides two arguments for using caution when interpreting the results of a Global Change Game simulation indicating that people high in right-wing authoritarianism are particularly likely to bring the world to ruin. First, we review research that demonstrates that extremists on both the political left and right share characteristics likely to be associated with poor performance in the Global Change Game (e.g., lower levels of integrative complexity) and that there are reasons to be cautious about letting political extremists on either the left or right inherit the earth. Second, we caution that political psychologists need to be aware of how their own values shape the types of research they conduct and the inferences they draw from that research and that the same results can be construed very differently depending on the lens through which they are viewed.     

The Citizenship of Excluded Groups: Challenging the Consumerist Agenda

The language of consumerism suggests that through involvement in consumer processes, consumers can influence policy formation and service provision. This paper examines, as illustrative cases in Australia, how two groups of consumers, people with a mental illness and older people, engage with these consumer processes. It finds they critically evaluate the opportunity offered by consumer processes for inclusion in policy and programmes. Both people with a mental illness and interviewed older people indicated how they acted as "agents involved in interpreting their needs", despite finding that in consumer processes their needs were predefined. Rather than allowing themselves to be constructed as passive objects, they positioned themselves as active citizens, having agency not as individual consumers but through drawing on networks. The responses of both groups go some distance toward dismantling power differences between professionals and "consumers", suggesting that social policy and programmes for both people with mental illness and older people can and sometimes do develop in a context of greater inclusivity.     

Bias and brains: Risk aversion and cognitive ability across real and hypothetical settings

I collect data on subjects’ risk attitudes using real and hypothetical risky choices. I also measure their cognitive ability using the cognitive reflective test (CRT). On average, measured risk preferences are not significantly different across real and hypothetical settings. However, cognitive ability is inversely related to risk aversion when choices are hypothetical, but it is unrelated when the choices are real. This interaction between cognitive ability and hypothetical setting is consistent with the notion that some individuals, specifically higher-ability individuals, may treat hypothetical choices as “puzzles,” and provides one potential explanation for why some studies find that subjects indicate that they are more tolerant of risk when they make hypothetical choices than when they make real choices.     

Synthesizing Research and Practice: Using the Action Research Approach in Health Care Settings

The traditional dichotomy between research and practice invariably results in having to make difficult choices between the two, or trying to balance them in some way in order to keep both academic and corporate 'sponsors' happy. The real challenge is not so much balancing the two as achieving a closer fusion and synthesis between them. The action research model offers one such way forward in this regard, being better placed than either the 'applied research' model or the 'consultancy' model to realize the synergies and complementarities between research and practice. Action research is a mutual learning process within which people work together to discover what the issues are, why they exist, and how they might be addressed. Over time there is a blurring of the traditional roles of practitioner and researcher, the former becoming 'researching practitioners', the latter 'practising researchers'. The different phases of the action research model are illustrated using data from NHS case studies and relevant literature. Although the focus is upon how an organizational anthropologist would use the model, the suggestion is that it commends itself to a much broader constituency of social scientists and qualitative researchers working in the social and public policy arenas, and hence merits further investigation by all of these.     

Drawing out strengths and building capacity in social work with troubled young women

This paper compares the experiences of a group of marginalized young women with two groups that remained socially engaged. Drawing from a qualitative study of young women aged between 13 and 15 years, we identify four areas (understandings and experiences of well‐being, use of space, making wishes, and emotional and household labour) that illuminated the ways in which marginalized young women articulated their experiences differently from those young women who were still engaged in mainstream social life. Drawing on Ungar's work we consider the ways in which marginalized behaviours, which are typically interpreted as socially disruptive and troubled, can also be read as efforts by young women to create a consistent set of social meanings in their lives and to cement reliable relationships around them. Rather than wholly negative, we suggest that these socially disruptive and troubled behaviours should be understood as having health‐enhancing qualities, given the wider contextual challenges the young women faced, and as being the best choices they could make given their circumstances. Social work and support that assists young women on the margins needs to actively engage with these health‐enhancing qualities and to come to a sensitized understanding of the way in which these young women understand their interpersonal worlds.     

Political trust,young people and institutions in Europe. A multilevel analysis

The constant decline of political trust has been shown in political sociology. Young people in particular seem to display lower levels of political trust, which is a challenge for the sustainability of democracy. Still, these levels of political trust among youth differ greatly from one country to another. This article therefore seeks to answer the following question: How can we account for cross‐national diversity with regard to young people’s political trust? To answer this question, I performed multilevel analyses based on data from the European Social Survey. I show in the article that cross‐national diversity stems from the institutional arrangements that structure entry into adulthood, i.e., what I call ‘youth welfare citizenship regimes’: The more inclusive is the youth economic citizenship and the more individualised is their social citizenship, the higher is young people’s political trust – which could buffer the decline in political trust.