Six‐Month‐Old Infants Predict Agents’ Goal‐Directed Actions on Occluded Objects

Infants can infer agents’ goals after observing agents’ goal‐directed actions on objects and can subsequently make predictions about how agents will act on objects in the future. We investigated the representations supporting these predictions. We familiarized 6‐month‐old infants to an agent who preferentially reached for one of two featurally distinct objects following a cue. At test, the objects were sequentially occluded from the infant in the agent's presence. We asked whether infants could generate action predictions without visual access to the relevant objects by measuring whether infants shifted their gaze to the location of the agent's hidden goal object following the cue. We also examined what infants represented about the hidden objects by removing one of the occluders to reveal either the original hidden object or the unexpected other object and measuring infants’ looking time. We found that, even without visual access to the objects, infants made predictive gazes to the location of the agent's occluded goal object, but failed to represent the features of either hidden object. These results suggest that infants make goal‐based action predictions when the relevant objects in the scene are occluded, but doing so may come at the expense of maintaining representations of the objects.     

Conducting a Hispanic Health Needs Assessment in rural Kansas: building the foundation for community action

Healthy People 2020 states ethnic health disparities are a priority for the US. Although considerable national statistics document ethnic-related health disparities, information specific to rural areas is scarce and does not provide direction for implementing chronic disease prevention programming. Therefore, the purpose of our project was to use the Hispanic Health Needs Assessment (HHNA), a tool designed by the National Alliance for Hispanic Health (NAHH), in culturally diverse, rural Southwest Kansas. Our focus areas included: access to healthcare, heart disease, diabetes, overweight, nutrition, and physical activity. METHODS: The assessment followed six steps: (1) developing the assessment team, (2) data gathering using community member surveys, existing statistics and community leader interviews, (3) assembling the findings, (4) formulating recommendations for action at individual, institutional, community and policy levels, (5) sharing findings and program planning, and (6) sharing findings with NAHH. We identified several challenges collecting health related data in rural communities, but overall, the HHNA was a comprehensive and useful tool for guiding a community level health assessment. CONCLUSION: This process has provided our community partners with locally relevant statistics regarding the current status of health, health behaviors, and perceived community needs to inform resource allocation, program planning and applications for new funding initiatives.     

The protective role of religious coping in adolescents' responses to poverty and sexual decision-making in rural Kenya

In this study, we explored how adolescents in rural Kenya apply religious coping in sexual decision-making in the context of high rates of poverty and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 adolescents. One-third (13) reported religious coping related to economic stress, HIV, or sexual decision-making; the majority (29) reported religious coping with these or other stressors. Adolescents reported praying for God to partner with them to engage in positive behaviors, praying for strength to resist unwanted behaviors, and passive strategies characterized by waiting for God to provide resources or protection from HIV. Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa may benefit from HIV prevention interventions that integrate and build upon their use of religious coping.     

#Engagement: use of Twitter chats to construct nominal participatory spaces during health crises

Although Twitter chats and other forms of social media engagement events are idealized in the literature as opportunities for dialogic communication between organizations and individuals, less is known about how engagement is operationalized within these spaces. Using textual and content analysis, we conducted two studies to explore how health organizations engage with the public via Twitter chats during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks. In official records of Ebola chats, the organization addressed both hostile and neutral public questions that pressed for specification of disease characteristics and protocol. However, in a content analysis of all public tweets sent during a later Zika chat, we found that questions were privileged, and other tweet forms and themes were excluded from the participatory space. Specifically, public comments demonstrating expertise or extending the topic of the chat were not addressed by the organization. Our analysis provides insight into the implicit rules governing how organizations engage with the public online during a rapidly evolving health crisis. We argue that the question–response dyad is a form of ideal communication that suggests engagement but maintains organizational expertise.     

Paradoxes of Providing Rural Social Services: The Case of Homeless Youth

Abstract Economic and demographic changes in rural areas continue to introduce big‐city problems in small towns. These communities' ability and willingness to respond are likely to be influenced by the geography, culture, and array of organizations in rural places. But how these characteristics of rural places shape local response is hard to predict and as yet unexplored. This article reports data from interviews with social‐service providers and homeless youth in a rural county in the northwestern United States, drawing insights from both groups about the challenges of providing social services in rural places. Findings about drug use, sexual abuse and prostitution in rural communities illustrate how aspects of a rural context can influence the way small towns address social problems.     

The Use of Protective Behaviors in Relation to Gambling Among College Students

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate a measure of gambling protective behaviors and examine the relationship between indices of gambling behavior, including frequency, quantity and problem severity, and the use of gambling protective behaviors. Undergraduates from a large public university (N = 4,014) completed a web-based screening survey comprising measures of gambling and health behaviors, from which those who gambled within the past 6-months (n = 1,922, 48 % of the entire sample) were invited to complete the baseline assessment, including the Gambling Protective Behavior Scale (GPBS). The GPBS was determined to have two subscales, primarily consisting of harm reduction strategies that reduce the money or time spent on gambling, or avoidance strategies that help to minimize engagement in gambling activities. Hierarchical multiple regressions found participants’ sex moderated the relationship between use of protective behavioral strategies and gambling outcomes. However, effects were in the opposite direction to those hypothesized. Specifically, because women gambled less, had lower gambling problem severity, and reported more frequent use of gambling avoidance protective behaviors, the relationship between use of gambling protective behaviors and gambling outcomes was stronger for men than women. Men who used more avoidance strategies gambled less frequently compared to men who used fewer avoidance strategies. Similarly, men who used more harm reduction strategies spent fewer dollars on gambling and had lower scores on gambling problem severity compared to men using fewer harm reduction strategies for women these relationships were less pronounced. Implications of incorporating specific gambling protective behavioral strategies into prevention and treatment programs are discussed.     

Sacred Blasphemy: Global and Local Views of the Destruction of the Bamyan Buddha Statues in Afghanistan

In March 2001, the Taliban government of Afghanistan destroyed two ancient Buddha statues carved into a cliff face in Bamyan, Afghanistan. The event received wide coverage in the international media. The local ethnic minority group that inhabits Bamyan, the Hazaras, received little or no attention in the reporting of this event. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Western media participated in the construction of a history of the statues and the region that excluded the Hazaras because of a narrative that was created that compared a cosmopolitan, tolerant West with the Silk Road era of the statues, and contrasted this with the intolerance and parochialism of the Taliban. The inclusion of the Hazaras would have upset this dichotomy, and as a result this minority group was excluded, despite evidence that they have their own beliefs about and relationship to the Buddha statues.     

The Implicit Curriculum Survey: An Examination of the Psychometric Properties

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Implicit Curriculum Survey (ICS) using an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Students enrolled in four different MSW programs (N=262) from different geographic locations completed the ICS, which is a Web-based survey. The domains of the ICS include field, academics, community, diversity, faculty advising, and support services. The ICS includes quantitative and qualitative responses. However, for this study only the quantitative results were used. The EFA revealed that for each of the subscales, Cronbach’s alphas ranged from .52 to .90 and validity of the ICS was demonstrated through the good model fits found during the factor analysis. Implications for social work education and future research are discussed.     

Episodic Volunteering at a Religious Megaevent

In preparation for Pope Francis's visit to Philadelphia and the 2015 World Meeting of Families, organizers looked for thousands of volunteers to help carry out these events. This is common for many one‐time and episodic events, such as large sporting events (from marathons to Special Olympics), arts and cultural events (such as festivals and concerts), and fundraising events. After the pope's visit, volunteers were asked to respond to a questionnaire about their experiences and the volunteer management of the event; 2,408 responded (34.4 percent). Data on motivation, who volunteered, recruitment, training, assignment, supervision, communication, satisfaction, and suggestions for improvement were elicited. We focused on episodic volunteering at a religious event and on a broad spectrum of issues pertaining to management of episodic volunteers. Our findings add to the knowledge regarding volunteer management and also add to conceptual understanding of the distinction between ongoing and episodic volunteers.