Neighbourhood watch

In 2003 Paul Garcia was awarded a Royal Statistical Society Campion Fellowship, with a grant of £5000, to carry out a study to try to determine the age profile of residents of new housing developments and explain how that profile changes over time. He describes why he wanted to do the work and how he set about organising the survey.     

Factors of regional poverty reduction in Colombia: Do institutional conditions matter?

Colombia has a unique history, which has been heavily conditioned by armed conflict lasting more than 50 years. This study examines the institutional conditions for success and failure in reducing poverty in Colombian departments by considering changes that took place between 2003 and 2014. Fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis identifies the changes in regional conditions that reduce poverty over time. The pathways for poverty reduction are multidimensional, and many involve changes in institutional attributes such as government transparency, absence of violence, and electoral turnout. The framework developed in this paper can be used to monitor necessary and sufficient pathways in regional clusters.     

Medical Problems Where Talk is the Problem: Current Trends in Conversation Analytic Research on Aphasia,Autism Spectrum Disorder,Intellectual Disability,and Alzheimer’s

While a large body of conversation analytic research focuses on talk in medical settings, a relatively small but important emerging body of research on that subset of medical problems which affect individuals’ ability to produce and comprehend language has been developing. This paper reviews such research on four such medical problems: aphasia, Autism Spectrum Disorder, intellectual disability, and forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s. This research provides useful insight into the nature of symptoms and the actual communicative competence of the individuals affected, as well as improving our knowledge of the best ways to diagnose, assess, and treat these conditions.     

Sexual evaluation of women with feminist attitudes

A study was conducted to investigate whether subjects make inferences about a female's sexuality based on her attitudes toward feminist issues. Based on the idea that both attitudes toward feminist issues and toward sexual traits are components of prototypes about females, it was hypothesized that females who expressed nontraditional attitudes on various feminist issues would be rated higher on a number of sexual traits than females who expressed more traditional attitudes. Male and female subjects were given information about a 19‐year‐old, single, female's attitudes on a number of issues related to women's occupational and domestic roles. The target's answers were manipulated so that in one condition she expressed traditional attitudes, and in a second condition she expressed nontraditional or feminist attitudes. The respondents were then asked to rate the target on traits reflecting a sexual and an evaluative dimension. As predicted, it was found that the female expressing nontraditional attitudes was rated higher in the sexual traits and was evaluated more negatively. The results were discussed in terms of the perceived incongruity between feminist attitudes and the traditional female prototype.     

The Relevance of Interactional and Institutional Contexts for the Study of Gender Differences: A Demonstrative Case Study

Previous studies of gender differences in language and interaction have made inadequate use of the context of the language behavior being studied. In this paper, I use a single-case method to demonstrate how a conversation analytic approach to the interactional and institutional context of a mediation hearing can be informative in the search for gender differences. In the mediation hearing studied, an apparent gender difference in the mediator's address of disputants is first identified and then shown to disappear when the interactional and institutional context of the utterances are taken into account.     

Implementation of Intercultural Education Programmes based on Cooperative Learning

An intercultural programme must not overlook the elimination of racist attitudes, but should especially promote multicultural and democratic values.

In Spain, one of the most rejected groups is Gypsy people and their schooling is a problematic issue. We believe that intercultural attitude training programmes can be a practical pedagogical answer for promoting acceptance and respect for diversity.

To do this, we have chosen educational strategies of Cooperation in the Classroom, Active Participation and Persuasive Communication. All of them involve a search for new perspectives, the use of sociocognitive conflict as a driving impulse for learning, and an atmosphere of equality, respect and participation in the classroom.

We present in this paper one of the school programmes we have implemented in Valencia. This programme has been designed to be integrated within the ordinary school curriculum and not regarded as an added out‐of‐school activity. In order to implement it, we organised a teacher‐training course to analyse the intercultural model, to show the need for attitude training in education and to offer pedagogical guidance for the implementation of this type of intercultural programme.

The results of the programme show the improvement in pupils ‘ attitudes towards Gypsy people and cultural diversity in general.     

Motivations for Extradyadic Infidelity Revisited

Relationship infidelities are motivated by many distinct factors, with previous research indicating motivations of dissatisfaction, neglect, anger, and sexual desire (Barta & Kiene, 2005). We expand on this by demonstrating additional, empirically distinct motivations for infidelity. Using an Internet-based questionnaire, participants (N = 495), most of whom were young adults, self-reported their infidelities. In addition to evidence for previously studied motivations, our data demonstrate additional factors, including lack of love (“I had ‘fallen out of love with’ my primary partner”), low commitment (“I was not very committed to my primary partner”), esteem (“I wanted to enhance my popularity”), gaining sexual variety (“I wanted a greater variety of sexual partners”), and situational factors (“I was drunk and not thinking clearly”). Our results also show personality correlates with infidelity motivations. Consistent with predictions, attachment insecurity was associated with motivations of anger, lack of love, neglect, low commitment, and esteem, while unrestricted sociosexual orientation was associated with sexual variety. Implicit beliefs (e.g., growth, destiny, romanticism) were differentially associated with sexual desire, low commitment, lack of love, and neglect. These findings highlight multifaceted motivations underlying infidelity, moving beyond relationship deficit models of infidelity, with implications for research and psychotherapy involving people’s romantic and sexual relationships.