Interpersonal Communication and News Comprehension

This study examines the role of interpersonal and mass mediachannels in public awareness and comprehension of major newsstories. Unlike previous research which asks about respondentperceptions of their "main source" for news, this study attemptsto determine actual comprehension of stories that had been inthe news during the previous week. On the basis of two separateprobability samples, respondent awareness and comprehensionof a week's news was measured and related to demographic, newsmedia use, and interpersonal discussions variables. A MultipleClassification Analysis of the data indicates that conversationabout the news is a major and often overlooked correlate ofcomprehension, and that interpersonal channels may play at leastas important a role in the public's awareness and understandingof the news as exposure to the news media.     

Adult children of parents with mental illness: navigating stigma

The experiences of children who live with parental mental illness are becoming increasingly recognized. However, there remains a limited body of knowledge in relation to an individual's longer term experiences. This study sought adult children's experiences of childhood parental mental illness. It generated reflections of 13 adult children who had lived with parents with mental illness during their childhood. The narrative design of the study facilitated a voice for participants. The paper presents one main theme of the findings. The findings offer a unique insight into childhood awareness of social stigmas and children's behavioural changes to avoid disclosure of parental mental illness. Participants noted that they were aware of social stigmas associated with mental illness during their childhood. This contributed to their fear of disclosure to others that fuelled a culture of familial secrecy, reinforcing the children's own sense of difference. Further work is required to enhance community understanding about the familial journeys of parental mental illness and the impact of negative‐natured stigmas.     

Barriers Associated with the Implementation of an Advance Care Planning Program in a Prison Setting

Advance care planning is considered a best practice within health care. However, the extent to which planning occurs within prison settings is unknown. Through the course of implementing an advance care planning (ACP) program for aging and dying offenders at a medical classification center, multiple barriers were identified that need to be addressed systemically to ensure the medical wishes of offenders were known and honored. This article will outline the barriers and the steps that were taken to create systems change to promote and sustain advance care planning.     

Why Do People Become Modern? A Darwinian Explanation

A procession of cultural changes, often referred to as “modernization,” is initiated as a society undergoes economic development. But cultural change continues to be rapid in societies that industrialized several generations ago. Much of the change in both developed and developing societies is a progressive abandonment of the norms, values, and beliefs that encourage behavior consistent with the pursuit of genetic fitness. The kin influence hypothesis suggests that these changes are part of a cultural evolutionary process initiated by the replacement of largely kin‐based communities with social groups consisting largely of non‐kin. Kin have an interest in encouraging one another to behave in ways consistent with the pursuit of reproductive success, and a high level of social exchange between kin will tend to maintain norms that prescribe such behaviors. When social exchange between kin is reduced, these norms begin to relax. Cross‐national comparisons of measures that reflect attitudes and behavior support the hypothesis by showing that cultural differences between countries can be substantially explained by their position on a cultural continuum that begins with social networks widening so that they become less kin‐based.     

Time‐Series Models for Border Inspection Data

We propose a new modeling approach for inspection data that provides a more useful interpretation of the patterns of detections of invasive pests, using cargo inspection as a motivating example. Methods that are currently in use generally classify shipments according to their likelihood of carrying biosecurity risk material, given available historical and contextual data. Ideally, decisions regarding which cargo containers to inspect should be made in real time, and the models used should be able to focus efforts when the risk is higher. In this study, we propose a dynamic approach that treats the data as a time series in order to detect periods of high risk. A regulatory organization will respond differently to evidence of systematic problems than evidence of random problems, so testing for serial correlation is of major interest. We compare three models that account for various degrees of serial dependence within the data. First is the independence model where the prediction of the arrival of a risky shipment is made solely on the basis of contextual information. We also consider a Markov chain that allows dependence between successive observations, and a hidden Markov model that allows further dependence on past data. The predictive performance of the models is then evaluated using ROC and leakage curves. We illustrate this methodology on two sets of real inspection data.     

Sociocultural Researchers Can Shape the Future of Education

It has been argued that self-generated explanation (self-explanation) is an important tool in the acquisition of knowledge. However, the rationalist and the empiricist approaches, with which self-referential activity has usually been discussed, makes the phenomenon of self-explanation problematic. In this article, I examine self-explanation as a private case of the classical learning paradox, which is associated with self-referential activity, and consider an activity oriented solution to this difficulty. From a practical perspective, I suggest a reframing of self-reference in Activity Theory in order to provide researchers with a method for analyzing and supporting bootstrapping phenomena, such as the self-explanation effect, in learning and problem solving.