Service user and carer feedback: simply pass/fail or a genuine learning tool?

Social Work Students in Britain are required to submit feedback from Service Users and Carers as part of their Practice Learning portfolios. The purpose of this is twofold—to demonstrate evidence of the student’s ability and to provide information for the student to reflect on and learn from. Members of the Service User and Carer Advisory group attached to a Social Work degree course believe this represents an opportunity for users and carers to influence future social work practice. In reality however, does this feedback actually make a difference? Group members reviewed user and carer feedback contained within student portfolios submitted during one academic year. They found that whilst there were some excellent examples of constructive criticism, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive towards students. The findings raised questions about how gathering Service User and Carer feedback is viewed and undertaken. Is the feedback seen more as a pass/fail issue or as an opportunity to learn from? Could there be better ways to gain constructive feedback for students? What conditions enable students to learn from the feedback that is gathered? This paper starts to explore these questions and suggests ideas for further research and training.     

Carceral Kinship: Future Families of the Late Leviathan

This essay examines the monstrous first as a figure haunting Western legal history, stripped of rights and often merging with the animal, and second, as a divergent sociality borne of emergencies, crises, and faultlines of late liberal governmentality. In particular I ask how the figure of the pathological and violent gang member structures debates about the US‐Mexico border crosser, and the limits of humanity before the law. The essay moves from a genealogy of the gang member in Honduras, to the refugee asylum seeker of 2018, to ask what forms of difference‐making, in the form of new monstrosities, might inform new notions of kinship and solidarity amid anthropocenic futures.     

The fertility integration of Mexican-Americans across generations: confronting the problem of the ‘third’ generation*

The manner in which ‘third generation’ Mexican-Americans are identified, predicated on self-reported ethnic identity rather than grandparental nativity, is imprecise and potentially confounded with later generations. This study examines the degree to which this imprecision accounts for the stagnation found in many past studies of integration, including fertility integration. We use data from the study Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA), which includes questions on grandparental nativity, to construct a better-defined third generation. When IIMMLA data are aggregated into the commonly measured third-plus generation, the findings show a pattern of slow intergenerational-fertility integration, similar to previous research using the Current Population Survey or other data with third-plus generation measures. However, when we consider a third generation identified by grandparental nativity, evidence emerges of a faster fertility decline, bringing the third generation's fertility more in line with the native-born population as a whole. The results suggest that conclusions about integration based on third-plus generation measures should be regarded with greater scepticism and support efforts to include in surveys questions on grandparental nativity to enable the isolation of a genuine third generation among ethnic groups with immigrant origins.     

The promise and pitfalls of composite endpoints in sepsis and COVID-19 clinical trials

Composite endpoints reveal the tendency for statistical convention to arise locally within subfields. Composites are familiar in cardiovascular trials, yet almost unknown in sepsis. However, the VITAMINS trial in patients with septic shock adopted a composite of mortality and vasopressor-free days, and an ordinal scale describing patient status rapidly became standard in COVID studies. Aware that recent use could incite interest in such endpoints, we are motivated to flag their potential value and pitfalls for sepsis research and COVID studies.     

Comparability of Mortality Estimates from Social Surveys and Vital Statistics Data in the United States

Population Research and Policy Review - Social surveys prospectively linked with death records provide invaluable opportunities for the study of the relationship between social and economic...     

The development of infants’ sensitivity to native versus non-native rhythm

Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants’ sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhythm alone, and second, it is not known how infants discriminate languages not classified in any of the putative rhythm classes. Employing a central-fixation preference paradigm with natural stimuli, this study tested whether infants differentially attend to native versus nonnative varieties that differ only in temporal rhythm cues, and both of which are rhythmically unclassified. An analysis of total looking time did not detect any rhythm preferences at any age. First-look duration, arguably more closely reflecting infants’ underlying perceptual sensitivities, indicated age-specific preferences for native versus non-native rhythm: 4-month-olds seemed to prefer the native-, and 6-month-olds the non-native language-variety. These findings suggest that infants indeed acquire native rhythm cues rather early, by the 4th month, supporting the theory that rhythm can bootstrap further language development. Our data on infants’ processing of rhythmically unclassified languages suggest that formal rhythm classification does not determine infants’ ability to discriminate language varieties.     

Ideal football culture: A cultural take on self‐determination theory

This paper discusses cultural psychology and psychological training in football (soccer). Self‐Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1980) has shown to be pragmatically successful in sport and suggests that being regulated by autonomous forms of motivation leads to better psychological outcomes. Cultural psychologists would be tempted to dismiss SDT because it is predicated on an a‐cultural approach to mind. It is possible to nurture a stronger and more effective team culture by reframing SDT in a cultural direction. As such, this paper outlines a cultural approach that reconceptualizes SDT in a way that retains the latter's pragmatic value while not approaching mind in a self‐contained individualist manner.     

#wheresRey: feminism,protest, and merchandising sexism in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The blockbuster film Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) earned over $2 billion dollars at the box-office worldwide and became a cultural phenomenon. Produced by media giant Disney, The Force Awakens also generated huge merchandising sales and earned over $9 billion within a year. The film’s main protagonist, Rey, was heralded as a strong, feminist-influenced heroine that capably carved her own space within the male dominated Star Wars universe. Unfortunately, the inherent sexism of the film’s marketing strategy meant that Rey was excluded from the merchandising line. Consumers protested Rey’s absence and demonstrated the importance of popular culture within the realm of political protests about gender equality and commercialization, ultimately leading to industrial and social change.     

The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-laboratory study

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non-verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always have access to the same word-learning heuristics (e.g., mutual exclusivity). In a preregistered study, we tested the hypothesis that bilingual experience would lead to a more pronounced ability to follow another's gaze. We used a gaze-following paradigm developed by Senju and Csibra (Current Biology, 18, 2008, 668) to test a total of 93 6- to 9-month-old and 229 12- to 15-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants, in 11 laboratories located in 8 countries. Monolingual and bilingual infants showed similar gaze-following abilities, and both groups showed age-related improvements in speed, accuracy, frequency, and duration of fixations to congruent objects. Unexpectedly, bilinguals tended to make more frequent fixations to on-screen objects, whether or not they were cued by the actor. These results suggest that gaze sensitivity is a fundamental aspect of development that is robust to variation in language exposure.     

An urban stream can support a healthy population of coastal cutthroat trout

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanization presents numerous challenges to aquatic species. For fish, typical threats include altered flow dynamics, poor water quality, and degraded food webs. These threats...