The future of children's rights

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was a great achievement. The rights strategy must continue to be pursued. The Convention itself is an imperfect instrument and a new Convention or Protocols needs to address many children whose rights are currently neglected, including disabled children, gay children, girl children and street children. Rights themselves need rethinking, and so does the reporting and implementation process. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Soccer matches as experiments: how often does the ‘best’ team win?

Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is superior and examine the probability that the outcome of the experiment (match) truly represents the relative abilities of the two teams. Given a final score, it is possible by using a Bayesian approach to quantify the probability that it was or was not the case that ‘the best team won’. For typical scores, the probability of a misleading result is significant. Modifying the rules of the game to increase the typical number of goals scored would improve the situation, but a level of confidence that would normally be regarded as satisfactory could not be obtained unless the character of the game was radically changed.     

Friends First? The Peer Network Origins of Adolescent Dating

The proximity of dating partners in peer friendship networks has important implications for the diffusion of health‐risk behaviors and adolescent social development. We derive two competing hypotheses for the friendship–romance association. The first predicts that daters are proximally positioned in friendship networks prior to dating and that opposite‐gender friends are likely to transition to dating. The second predicts that dating typically crosses group boundaries and opposite‐gender friends are unlikely to later date. We test these hypotheses with longitudinal friendship data for 626 ninth‐grade PROSPER heterosexual dating couples. Results primarily support the second hypothesis: Romantic partners are unlikely to be friends in the previous year or share the same cohesive subgroup, and opposite‐gender friends are unlikely to transition to dating.     

Test–Retest Reliability in Infant Speech Perception Tasks

A long line of research investigates how infants learn the sounds and words in their ambient language over the first year of life, through behavioral tasks involving discrimination and recognition. More recently, individual performance in such tasks has been used to predict later language development. Does this mean that dependent measures in such tasks are reliable and can stably measure speech perception skills over short time spans? Our three laboratories independently tested infants with a given task and retested them within 0–18 days. Together, we can report data from 12 new experiments (total number of paired observations N = 409), ranging from vowel and consonant discrimination to recognition of phrasal units. Results reveal that reliability is extremely variable across experiments. We discuss possible causes and implications of this variability, as well as the main effects revealed by this work. Additionally, we offer suggestions for the field of infant speech perception to improve the reliability of its methodologies through data repositories and crowd sourcing.     

The Quality of Pitches in Major League Baseball

This article considers the quality of pitches in Major League Baseball (MLB). Based on approximately 2.2 million pitches taken from the 2013, 2014, and 2015 MLB seasons, the quality of a particular pitch is evaluated as the expected number of bases conceded. Quality is expressed as a function of various covariates including pitch count, pitch location, pitch type, and pitch speed. The estimation of the pitch quality is obtained through the use of random forest methodology to accommodate the inherent complexity of the relationship between pitch quality and the associated covariates. With the fitted model, various applications are considered which provide new insights on pitching and batting.     

Clients’ perceptions of marriage and family therapists’ way‐of‐being: a phenomenological analysis

Previous research highlights the influence of therapist factors on treatment outcomes. One therapist factor proposed as fundamental to the process of therapy is the therapist's way‐of‐being, a relational concept that refers to how the therapist regards a client—either as a person or object (Fife et al., [2014] Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 40, 20–33). Although this case has been made conceptually, there is little empirical research on therapists’ way‐of‐being with clients. The primary purpose of this research is to investigate clients’ perceptions of their therapists’ way‐of‐being. Utilizing a common factors perspective, the study seeks to explore: (a) how clients experience their therapists’ way‐of‐being and (b) the influence therapists’ way‐of‐being has on clients’ engagement. Phenomenological methods were used to gain a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon. Qualitative data were collected through semi‐structured face‐to‐face interviews with clients (N = 10) who received individual therapy from a marriage and family therapist. Results were organized into two main themes: core tenets (attunement, congruency, and aligning with clients) and operational tenets (providing affirmation and validation, balancing flexibility and structure, and accomplishing goals). Findings are used to make a case for adding the concept of way‐of‐being as an overarching construct for several well‐established therapist factors. Clinical and training implications are discussed.     

Dignity,happiness and being able to live a ‘normal life’ in the UK – an examination of post-accession Polish migrants' transnational autobiographical fields

This article examines data from a qualitative study of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. We examine themes from our interviews such as ‘dignity’, ‘normality’, ‘happiness’ and the ‘affordability’ and ‘ease’ of life in the UK (compared to Poland). We focus on the autobiographical or intra-personal discursive practices that define what Habib calls migrants' continuing relationship with their ‘homeland’. We draw on Emirbayer and Mische's analysis of the relationship between ‘agency’ and what they call ‘embedded temporalities’ to examine the interaction between our participants' recollections of life in Poland and their evaluation of their present lives in the UK in order to examine the impact of these on their future plans (to stay in the UK or return to Poland). We locate this analysis in what we call a transnational autobiographical field which is a modification of what Levitt and Glick Schiller call a transnational social field. Rather than examine, for example, how decisions to migrate, settle and re-migrate are embedded in inter or trans-personal social relations and networks, in this article we examine the self-dynamics associated with our participants' articulation of their intra-personal and autobiographical embedded temporalities. Our argument is that articulations of individuals' pasts, presents and anticipated futures are also significant factors shaping their migration, settlement, and re-migration decisions.     

Monitoring Perceptions of the Causes of Poverty in South Africa

This study explored how people perceive the causes of poverty. Literature revealed that there are three broad theoretical explanations of perceptions of the causes of poverty, namely individualistic explanations, where blame is placed squarely on the poor themselves; structural explanations, where poverty is blamed on external social and economic forces; and fatalistic explanations, which attribute poverty to factors such as bad luck or illness. To examine South Africans perceptions according to these dimensions secondary analysis was employed on one of the Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC) national representative client surveys. Approximately 3,498 respondents across South Africa were surveyed between 18 April and 30 May 2006. The bivariate analysis revealed that South Africans in general attribute poverty to structural over individualistic and fatalistic dimensions of poverty. Ordinary least square regressions revealed that these perceptions of poverty interacted with a host of socio-demographic and economic variables such as race and peoples’ lived experiences of poverty. In this regard, all three ordinary least square regressions showed that lived poverty had a significant impact in predicting respectively structural, individualistic and fatalistic perceptions of the causes of poverty. The second regression predicted individualistic perceptions and showed that being white was the most significant predictor. The third regression predicted fatalistic perceptions and established that being coloured was the most significant predictor.     

“May the Force be with Katie”

Responding to the 2010 media discourse around Katie Goldman—a ten-year-old Star Wars fan bullied for her interest in something perceived to be “for boys”—this essay investigates the relationship between industrial logics of media franchising, postfeminist culture, and the vernacular participation of social media users in regulatory ideologies of gender and sexuality. Reading mediated public performances of support for Katie against the hyper-feminized, industrially-produced “princess” media culture she seemingly rejected, as well as the sci-fi fashion shop HerUniverse that opened up a feminized space of fan subjectivity in the marketing of the Star Wars Star Wars (1977). Film. George Lucas (dir.), Twentieth Century Fox, US. [Google Scholar] franchise, we can see how the transgression of normative consumer ideals by girls became re-inscribed within postfeminist and heteronormative gender roles. While celebrating unruly girl science fiction consumers as “different,” both industry and vernacular media cultures repositioned these figures in relation to beauty, princesses, heteronormative romance, and other postfeminist (but traditionally feminine) ideological frames.     

Using computerized ambulatory diaries for the assessment of job characteristics and work-related stress in nurses

Abstract

Much research into work-related stress is based on retrospective self-reports, whereas records made at the time could be more valuable. In this study the primary components of two models of work stress, Karasek's demand-control (DC) model and Siegrist's effort-reward imbalance (ERI), were assessed in trained nurses using ambulatory diaries and traditional questionnaire methods. The diaries were entered on small hand-held computers and the method used has been termed ecological momentary assessment (EMA), in which recordings are made in real time in the working environment. The participants were 36 nurses who completed standardized questionnaires evaluating ERI, strain (from DC model), and, over three shifts, computerized behavioural diaries that measured effort-demand, control, reward, and stress every 90 minutes on average, enabling determination of strain and ERI repeatedly in the work situation. A total of 674 observations were recorded. Using multilevel linear modelling, it was found that the questionnaire and computerized diary derived measures of strain (DC) and ERI were reliably correlated. In addition, the ambulatory measures of both strain (DC) and ERI correlated with ratings of stress taken at the same time. From this study it would appear that ambulatory diaries could be a powerful and flexible way of assessing work related stress and its putative determinants in a real life work setting.