Sense of School Membership and Associated Academic and Psychological Outcomes in Post-Institutionalized Adopted High School Students

Research highlights lasting cognitive and academic challenges in youth internationally adopted from institutional care. However, there is a lack of research examining internationally adopted students' sense of membership at school and associated academic and psychological outcomes. The current study measured sense of school membership and academic and psychological outcomes in post-institutionalized internationally adopted high school students (n = 29) compared to adolescents internationally adopted from foster care (n = 28) and non-adopted adolescents (n = 32). Post-institutionalized males had a lower sense of school membership than males adopted from foster care or non-adopted males. Group differences in school membership were mediated by academic achievement and psychological well-being.     

The FARSEEING real-world fall repository: a large-scale collaborative database to collect and share sensor signals from real-world falls

Background

Real-world fall events objectively measured by body-worn sensors can improve the understanding of fall events in older people. However, these events are rare and hence challenging to capture. Therefore, the FARSEEING (FAll Repository for the design of Smart and sElf-adaptive Environments prolonging Independent livinG) consortium and associated partners started to build up a meta-database of real-world falls.

Results

Between January 2012 and December 2015 more than 300 real-world fall events have been recorded. This is currently the largest collection of real-world fall data recorded with inertial sensors. A signal processing and fall verification procedure has been developed and applied to the data. Since the end of 2015, 208 verified real-world fall events are available for analyses. The fall events have been recorded within several studies, with different methods, and in different populations. All sensor signals include at least accelerometer measurements and 58 % additionally include gyroscope and magnetometer measurements. The collection of data is ongoing and open to further partners contributing with fall signals. The FARSEEING consortium also aims to share the collected real-world falls data with other researchers on request.

Conclusions

The FARSEEING meta-database will help to improve the understanding of falls and enable new approaches in fall risk assessment, fall prevention, and fall detection in both aging and disease.

     

Structured Voluntary Youth Activities and Positive Outcomes in Adulthood: An Exploratory Study of Involvement in Scouting and Subjective Well-Being

This study explores whether youth involvement in Scouting has positive consequences later in life. We examine whether the number of years of participation in Scouting is positively associated with human and social capital and recreational lifestyles in adulthood, and whether these are linked to subjective well-being: relational, emotional, and physical health. To explore this potential relationship, we estimated a structural equation model, analyzing data from a national sample of adult males. We found that youth involvement in Scouting is positively related to subjective well-being indirectly via the positive adult outcomes.     

The Development of a Reliable Change Index and Cutoff for the Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale

The Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale (RDAS; Busby, Crane, Larson, & Christensen, 1995) is a measure of couple relationship adjustment that is often used to differentiate between distressed and non‐distressed couples. While the measure currently allows for a determination of whether group mean scores change significantly across administrations, it lacks the ability to determine whether an individual's change in dyadic adjustment is clinically significant. This study addresses this limitation by establishing a cutoff of 47.31 and reliable change index of 11.58 for the RDAS by pooling data across multiple community and clinical samples. An individual whose score on the RDAS moves across the cutoff changes by 12 or more points can be classified as experiencing clinically significant change.     

Being disabled,being a manager: ‘glass partitions’ and conditional identities in the contemporary workplace

This article critically explores the working lives and views of disabled senior staff working in UK organisations. The qualitative research at the core of the article establishes that some disabled people are confounding established notions of disabled people only working in peripheral employment roles by exploring the working lives and perceptions of disabled managers. The findings do, however, point to continued barriers to what disabled staff in senior positions can be seen to do and be organisationally. Here both practical and ontological risk inheres in organisationally induced change, openness about impairment and risky identities. Such ideas, it is argued, present limits to further promotion and workplace inclusion for some disabled managers.     

Lessons learned about collaborative evaluation using the Capacity for Applying Project Evaluation (CAPE) framework with school and district leaders

Schools, districts, and state-level educational organizations are experiencing a great shift in the way they do the business of education. This shift focuses on accountability, specifically through the expectation of the effective utilization of evaluative-focused efforts to guide and support decisions about educational program implementation. In as much, education leaders need specific guidance and training on how to plan, implement, and use evaluation to critically examine district and school-level initiatives. One specific effort intended to address this need is through the Capacity for Applying Project Evaluation (CAPE) framework. The CAPE framework is composed of three crucial components: a collection of evaluation resources; a professional development model; and a conceptual framework that guides the work to support evaluation planning and implementation in schools and districts. School and district teams serve as active participants in the professional development and ultimately as formative evaluators of their own school or district-level programs by working collaboratively with evaluation experts. The CAPE framework involves the school and district staff in planning and implementing their evaluation. They are the ones deciding what evaluation questions to ask, which instruments to use, what data to collect, and how and to whom results should be reported. Initially this work is done through careful scaffolding by evaluation experts, where supports are slowly pulled away as the educators gain experience and confidence in their knowledge and skills as evaluators. Since CAPE engages all stakeholders in all stages of the evaluation, the philosophical intentions of these efforts to build capacity for formative evaluation strictly aligns with the collaborative evaluation approach.     

Expert panel reviews of research centers: the site visit process

Site visits are used extensively in a variety of settings within the evaluation community. They are especially common in making summative value decisions about the quality and worth of research programs/centers. However, there has been little empirical research and guidance about how to appropriately conduct evaluative site visits of research centers. We review the processes of two site visit examples using an expert panel review: (1) a process to evaluate four university research centers and (2) a process to review a federally sponsored research center. A set of 14 categories describing the expert panel review process was obtained through content analysis and participant observation. Most categories were addressed differently through the two processes highlighting the need for more research about the most effective processes to use within different contexts. Decisions about how to structure site visits appear to depend on the research context, practical considerations, the level at which the review is being conducted and the intended impact of the report. Future research pertaining to the selection of site visitors, the autonomy of the visitors in data collection and report writing, and the amount and type of information provided would be particularly valuable.     

Apps4Africa: A new State Department public diplomacy initiative

In 2010 the U.S. State Department funded an “Apps4Africa” contest to encourage development of socially conscious mobile applications for Africa. The initiative marked a significant departure from traditional public diplomacy efforts to expand diplomatic outreach beyond traditional government-to-government relationships. This case study analyses Apps4Africa to reveal its appropriateness as a model for future efforts and concludes Apps4Africa succeeded primarily because it responded to the changing dynamics of the 21st Century.     

Being Judged,Being Assessed: Young People’s Perspective of Assessment in Youth Justice and Education

Research from the Economic and Social Research Council programme on Pathways Into and Out of Crime prioritised young people’s ‘voices’ in exploring experiences of crime and a range of intervention services. Drawing on data from interviews with 110 young people, this paper explores their perspectives of professional assessment. Embedded within neo‐liberal youth welfare policies are a number of contradictions. Policies encourage ‘individualisation’, ‘responsiblisation’ and ‘self‐realisation’ while also needing to maintain control and regulation of ‘risky’ populations. This paper explores the implication of these contradictions through examining the experiences of young people being assessed in youth justice and education. The impact on their identities as neo‐liberal citizens is discussed in the conclusion.