Predictors of Longitudinal Growth in Inhibitory Control in Early Childhood

In the current study, we examined latent growth in 731 young children's inhibitory control from the ages of two to four years, and whether demographic characteristics or parenting behaviors were related to initial levels and growth in inhibitory control. As part of an ongoing longitudinal evaluation of the family check‐up, children's inhibitory control was assessed yearly at the ages of two to four years. Inhibitory control was initially low and increased linearly to the age of four years. High levels of harsh parenting and male gender were associated with low initial status in inhibitory control. High levels of parental positive behavior support were associated with faster growth. Extreme family poverty and African‐American ethnicity were also associated with slower growth. The results highlight parenting as a target for early interventions in contexts of high socioeconomic risk.     

Social cohesion revisited: a new definition and how to characterize it

This paper provides a general overview on different perspectives and studies on social cohesion, offers a definition of social cohesion that is deeply rooted in current literature, and provides a framework that can be used to characterize social cohesion and help support resilient cities. The framework highlights the factors that play a substantial role in enabling social cohesion, and shows from which perspectives it can be fostered.     

Integrated services in Australian early childhood education and care: what can we learn from our past?

Recent Australian interest in the integration of early childhood services is largely informed by international research and policy developments, particularly from the United Kingdom. Service integration is widely recognised as an effective means of holistically meeting the needs of children and families and ameliorating disadvantage. What is less well known is that Australia has a history of integrated early childhood services. This paper focuses on three points in 20th century Australia when advocacy for integrated early childhood service provision was evident: post‐World War I when the first Mother and Baby Welfare Clinic was established; during the late 1930s to mid 1940s with the advent of the Lady Gowrie Centres; and in the 1970s when several reports recommended the integration and co‐ordination of early years services. Attending to this history acknowledges this innovative Australian work, and provides potentially valuable, and somewhat cautionary, lessons for contemporary advocacy for integrated early childhood services.     

CO-tucker: a new method for the simultaneous analysis of a sequence of paired tables

Relationships between species and their environment are a key component to understand ecological communities. Usually, this kind of data are repeated over time or space for communities and their environment, which leads to a sequence of pairs of ecological tables, i.e. multi-way matrices. This work proposes a new method which is a combined approach of STATICO and Tucker3 techniques and deals to the problem of describing not only the stable part of the dynamics of structure–function relationships between communities and their environment (in different locations and/or at different times), but also the interactions and changes associated with the ecosystems’ dynamics. At the same time, emphasis is given to the comparison with the STATICO method on the same (real) data set, where advantages and drawbacks are explored and discussed. Thus, this study produces a general methodological framework and develops a new technique to facilitate the use of these practices by researchers. Furthermore, from this first approach with estuarine environmental data one of the major advantages of modeling ecological data sets with the CO-TUCKER model is the gain in interpretability.     

(Im)mobility: regional population structures in Aboriginal Australia

The socio‐cultural factors underlying contemporary Aboriginal settlement and mobility patterns are invisible to the categorisations that underpin both demographic modelling and policy that relies on that modelling. Taking the Yolngu people of north east Arnhem Land as a case study, this paper elaborates an anchored network model consisting of three tiers—an ontologically prior ancestral geography, with its associated contemporary settlements, to which kin‐based networks are anchored by nodal individuals. While the content of each tier may vary across the continent, this model can potentially be applied wherever Aboriginal Australians continue to live in kin‐based social universes. It is argued that constructing a ‘recognition space’ between conventional demographic categories and Aboriginal categorisations of their socio‐spatial universes would lead to more informed policy‐making on the part of government. Such policies would take account of the aspirations of Aboriginal people rather than imposing upon them the state's aspirations for them.     

Performance and burnout in intensive care units

Abstract

The relationship between three different performance measures and burnout was explored in 20 Dutch Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Burnout (i.e. emotional exhaustion and depersonalization) proved to be significantly related to nurses' perceptions of performance as well as to objectively assessed unit performance. Subjective performance measures relate negatively to burnout levels of nurses, whereas an objective performance measure relates positively to burnout. Furthermore, subjectively assessed personal performance (i.e. personal accomplishment) is more strongly related to burnout than subjectively assessed unit performance. A model test of the relationship between both types of subjective performance and burnout reveals that nurses' perception of unit performance is indirectly related to burnout through perception of personal performance. This model holds similarly for objectively well- and poor-performing ICUs.