Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self‐narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self‐narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture—especially “bitch” imagery and sometimes racialized discourse—to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre‐making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.     

Development of a Model of Holistic Reflection to facilitate transformative learning in student midwives

Background

Reflective practice is considered an essential aspect of personal and professional development, and critical reflection is considered the cornerstone of being an accountable and autonomous practitioner. Tertiary education should lay the foundations of lifelong learning by ensuring students develop into critically reflective and reflexive practitioners, who demonstrate self-awareness and an ability to reflect on personal values and beliefs and their impact on the wider healthcare system. This level of reflective practice is essential to effect change at both an individual and societal level. Reflection should therefore be embedded into education programs as a learning, teaching and assessment strategy.

Maternity high-dependency care and the Australian midwife: A review of the literature

Background

Maternity high-dependency care has emerged throughout the 21st century in Australian maternity hospitals as a distinct sub-speciality of maternity care. However, what the care involves, how and why it should be provided, and the role of midwives in the provision of such care remains highly variable.

美国艺术教育的转变与发展走向——基于《艺术教育国家标准》与《国家核心艺术标准》的比较分析

1994年,美国首次将艺术教育确定为基础教育核心学科。同年,全国艺术教育协会联盟编制出美国历史上第一个《艺术教育国家标准》,为美国艺术教育迈入21世纪奠定了重要基础,也把美国艺术教育推向了前所未有的发展高度。21世纪,随着经济全球化、文化多元化、信息视觉化的进一步推进,艺术教育也迎来全新挑战。为适应社会思潮的变化和艺术教育理论自身的发展,2014年,美国推出了最新的《国家核心艺术标准》。通过比较美国新旧两版艺术教育标准,发现新《标准》在艺术教育理念、框架结构、教学内容设计及课程评价上都出现了新的变化,更加注重学生学习、思考、创作的过程,强调培养学生主动思考及自主创造的能力。新《标准》促进了艺术教育向综合性与多元化的转变。     

A frequentist understanding of sets of measures

We present a mathematical theory of objective, frequentist chance phenomena that uses as a model a set of probability measures. In this work, sets of measures are not viewed as a statistical compound hypothesis or as a tool for modeling imprecise subjective behavior. Instead we use sets of measures to model stable (although not stationary in the traditional stochastic sense) physical sources of finite time series data that have highly irregular behavior. Such models give a coarse-grained picture of the phenomena, keeping track of the range of the possible probabilities of the events. We present methods to simulate finite data sequences coming from a source modeled by a set of probability measures, and to estimate the model from finite time series data. The estimation of the set of probability measures is based on the analysis of a set of relative frequencies of events taken along subsequences selected by a collection of rules. In particular, we provide a universal methodology for finding a family of subsequence selection rules that can estimate any set of probability measures with high probability.     

Providing perinatal loss care: satisfying and dissatisfying aspects for midwives

PURPOSE: There is limited midwifery research that focuses on midwives experiences and attitudes to providing care for women who experience the death of a baby. There is also limited research investigating care components, and evidence to inform the basis of clinical practice in Australia and internationally. This paper presents the qualitative findings of a small study that aimed to investigate midwives experience, confidence and satisfaction with providing care for women who experienced perinatal loss. PROCEDURE: Eighty-three Western Australian midwives responded to an open ended question asking them to describe the most and least satisfying aspects of their role when providing care to women who experienced a perinatal loss. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. FINDINGS: The analysis revealed that Australian midwives gained most satisfaction from providing skilled midwifery care that they considered made a difference to women. This was enabled when midwives were afforded the opportunity to provide continuity of midwifery carer to women throughout the labour, birth and early postnatal period. In terms of the least satisfying aspects of care, midwives identified that they struggled with the emotional commitment needed to provide perinatal loss care, as well as with how to communicate openly and share information with women. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Within the context of the study setting, midwifery care for women following perinatal loss reflects the care components espoused in the literature. There are, however, organisational issues within health care that require commitment to continuity of care and further education of practitioners to enhance outcomes for clients.     

Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words? Adolescent Interpretations of Parental Substance Use

Parents are powerful socialization agents for children and as children reach adolescence parental role models, among other sources of influence, become particularly salient in adolescents’ decision-making regarding initiation of substance use. Open parent-adolescent communication about substances is associated with less substance use by adolescents; however, it is unclear how youth interpret antidrug use messages from their parents, especially if the parents engage in legal and/or illicit substance use themselves. Framed by social learning theory and social constructionism, this study analyzed in-depth interviews with 108 adolescents about personal experiences with substance use, family communication about substance use, and adolescent interpretations of parental use. Emergent themes in the data include: positive parental influence, parental contradictions, and negative outcomes of use. Prevalence of parental use—regardless of legality, rarity of explicit communication about parental use, and various interpretations of parental use are discussed.     

The effect of mothers’ emotion‐related responses to adolescent disclosures and adolescent perspective taking on the timing of future disclosures

Adolescent disclosure to parents is an important feature of high‐quality parent–adolescent relationships and is associated with positive adolescent adjustment. However, no studies have examined parental emotion‐related responses (ERRs) to disclosures and adolescent dispositional characteristics that may facilitate or inhibit adolescent disclosures during real‐time conversations. The present study tested (a) which maternal ERRs to adolescent disclosures predicted quicker subsequent disclosures during mother–adolescent conversations, and (b) whether adolescent perspective taking moderated these associations. Adolescent disclosures and maternal ERRs were coded moment‐to‐moment during a problem‐solving discussion and adolescents reported on their perspective taking. Multilevel Generalized Linear Mixed‐Effects Models revealed that maternal interest and validation predicted the shortest lag times compared with other maternal ERRs, controlling for adolescent age, gender, total durations of maternal ERRs, and total frequency and duration of adolescent disclosures. Adolescent perspective taking moderated associations between maternal ERRs to adolescent disclosures and lag times. Specifically, adolescents high in perspective taking were most likely to make quicker subsequent disclosures when mothers responded to disclosures with interest. This is the first study to examine how contingent parental responses to adolescent disclosures in real time affect the timing of subsequent disclosures during parent–adolescent conversations.     

Comparison of Type I error rates and statistical power of different propensity score methods

Propensity score analysis (PSA) is a technique to correct for potential confounding in observational studies. Covariate adjustment, matching, stratification, and inverse weighting are the four most commonly used methods involving propensity scores. The main goal of this research is to determine which PSA method performs the best in terms of protecting against spurious association detection, as measured by Type I error rate, while maintaining sufficient power to detect a true association, if one exists. An examination of these PSA methods along with ordinary least squares regression was conducted under two cases: correct PSA model specification and incorrect PSA model specification. PSA covariate adjustment and PSA matching maintain the nominal Type I error rate, when the PSA model is correctly specified, but only PSA covariate adjustment achieves adequate power levels. Other methods produced conservative Type I Errors in some scenarios, while liberal Type I error rates were observed in other scenarios.