Thirty Years of Lottery Public Health Research: Methodological Strategies and Trends

Cognitive measurement techniques, such as self-reports of behavior and reaction time measures, largely dominate the field of psychological research. It is uncommon for researchers to examine a phenomenon of interest by observing actual behavior within natural settings. To illustrate the existence of this methodological trend for gambling research, this article reviews systematically selected samples of the peer-reviewed literature related to lottery gambling in general and the literature related to pathological gambling and lottery more specifically. The results indicate that self-report surveys dominate the extant lottery literature, and experimental investigations of video lottery terminal gambling supplement those papers. This landscape encourages researchers to expand their methodological approaches to the study of lottery gambling. Currently, we know more about what research participants tell us they do with respect to lottery gambling than we do about their real-life lottery gambling behavior.     

Landscape,vegetation characteristics,and group identity in an urban and suburban watershed: why the 60s matter

As highly managed ecosystems, urban areas should reflect the social characteristics of their managers, who are primarily residents. Since landscape features develop over time, we hypothesize that present-day vegetation should also reflect social characteristics of past residents. Using an urban-to-suburban watershed in the Baltimore Metropolitan Region, this paper examines the relationship between demographics, housing characteristics, and lifestyle clusters from 1960 and 2000 with areas of high woody and herbaceous vegetation cover in 1999. We find that 1960 demographics and age of housing are better predictors of high woody or tree coverage in 1999 than demographics and housing characteristics from 2000. Key variables from 1960 are percent in professional occupations (+), percent of pre-WWI housing (−), percent of post-WWII housing (+), and population density (−). Past and present demographic and housing variables are poor predictors of high herbaceous cover in 1999. Lifestyle clusters for 2000 are very good predictors of high herbaceous coverage in 1999, but lifestyle clusters from 1960 and 2000 are poor predictors of high woody vegetation coverage. These findings suggest that herbaceous or grassy areas, typically lawns, are good reflections of contemporary lifestyle characteristics of residents while neighborhoods with heavy tree canopies have largely inherited the preferred landscapes of past residents and communities. Biological growth time scales of trees and woody vegetation means that such vegetation may outlast the original inhabitants who designed, purchased, and planted them. The landscapes we see today are therefore legacies of past consumption patterns.     

Social relationships and shifting languages in Northern Thailand1

This paper explores how speakers’ understandings of the conduct of social relationships mediate changing and socially distinctive syncretic language practices in a Northern Thai community. Although a shift away from vernacular (Kam Muang) speech styles to Standard Thai was emblematically tied to young and urban speakers in nostalgic discourses, syncretic speech styles and metalinguistic discourses also reflected local and socially positioned understandings of institutional roles and social relationships. I argue that scholars of language change and shift should foreground the mediating role of social relationships in speakers’ uses and understandings of their communicative repertoires across multiple timescales.     

Indicators of a balanced long-term service and support system: examining the impact on individuals aging with a lifelong disability

This article explores how rebalancing efforts can support the needs of individuals aging with a lifelong disability. The National Balancing Indicator project examined the overall long-term supports and services system (LTSS) progress in five indicators within the Sustainability, Coordination and Transparency, and Prevention principles toward a balanced LTSS system for those aging with a lifelong disability. In assessing state efforts to create a balanced participant-directed LTSS system with the National Balancing Indicators, the findings suggest states are better equipping the system to handle a burgeoning population of individuals aging with a lifelong disability, but more progress is still needed. Overall, states need to continue to create a seamless system that allows individuals with lifelong disabilities to transition smoothly through the life course.     

The challenge of quantifying national well-being: lessons from the Measures of Australia's Progress initiative

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, the use of gross domestic product (GDP) as a proxy for national well-being has been criticised on the grounds it excludes important social and ecological considerations. Several alternatives have been proposed that promise to generate more comprehensive and balanced quantitative measures of well-being, but all of these alternative indicators remain contested and controversial. This paper critically reviews Australia's contribution to this effort: the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS's) Measures of Australia's Progress initiative. Unlike many other alternatives to GDP, the Australian initiative does not settle on one measure but uses expert-mediated public consultation to establish a ‘dashboard’ of indicators. In so doing, this model makes explicit the serious challenges confronting efforts to coherently define and measure progress in late modernity. In its attempt to integrate diverse views on national progress, the ABS has created an ambiguous tool that is not being taken up in public and political discourse.     

The Career Development Facilitator Project: Then and Now

The National Career Development Association (NCDA) has consistently been involved in the professional training of individuals who provide career development services for youth and adults. It has provided outstanding leadership in the field of career development. NCDA's impact on the training of professionals and paraprofessionals working in the career development field is evident in its support of the Career Development Facilitator (CDF) project and delivery of CDF training. This article provides a history of the CDF project, its development and expansion from national to international use, current developments in the project, and its impact on the careers of those involved.     

Social Work Faculty Development: An Exploratory Study of Non-Tenure-Track Women Faculty

Administrators of schools of social work are paying more attention to the changing roles and types of faculty in their institutions, particularly given the surge of non-tenure-track faculty in academia. This topic is timely as social work grapples with the divergent roles, structure, and demographic characteristics of non-tenure-track faculty compared to their tenured or tenure-track counterparts. This exploratory study presents data from non-tenure-track women faculty (N = 10) on how they experience professional development. In-depth, qualitative data was collected to answer the research question, What do faculty identify as the barriers, supports, and opportunities for professional development and job satisfaction? Results indicate that organizational climate and mentoring are barriers and facilitators of faculty development, and the subjective definition of faculty development varies.     

ARTICLES: Studying Cognition in Flux: A Historical Treatment of Fu in the Shifting Structure of Oksapmin Mathematics

This article extends a framework for the study of culture-cognition relations to problems of historical research and diachronic analysis. As an illustrative case, we focus on mathematics in Oksapmin communities located in a remote highland area in central New Guinea. The Oksapmin, like their neighboring Mountain-Ok groups to the West, traditionally use a 27-body-part counting system for number, and there is no evidence that Oksapmin used arithmetic in prehistory. We present a coordinated analysis of shifts in functions of a word form based on field studies completed in 1978, 1980, and 2001. These shifts are related to changing collective practices of economic exchange in which arithmetical activities are increasingly important. The word form fu has changed from its use as an intensive quantifier that means "a complete group of plenty" to one that means double a numerical value. We show how the analytic framework affords a multilevel inquiry into genetic processes of change in the Oksapmin case and argue that the approach is useful for understanding the interplay between cultural and developmental processes in cognition more generally.