Development of Shyness: Relations With Children's Fearfulness,Sex, and Maternal Behavior

The relations of childhood fearfulness (observed and adult reported) and adult‐reported shyness at 18 (n = 256) and 30 (n = 230) months of age were assessed. Fear was positively related to shyness concurrently and longitudinally, but slightly more consistently at 18 months. The moderating roles of observed maternal sensitivity and children's sex in the relation between 18‐month fearfulness and 30‐month shyness, and between 18‐ and 30‐month shyness, were tested. The positive relation between mother‐reported fearfulness and shyness was strongest for sons of insensitive mothers but was not significant for daughters of sensitive, average, or insensitive mothers. The positive relation between mother‐reported 18‐ and 30‐month shyness was strongest for sons of insensitive mothers and for daughters of sensitive mothers. Moreover, when using scores of fear or shyness that were independent of each other, 18‐month mother‐reported fearfulness continued to interact with sex and sensitivity to predict 30‐month shyness; however, the positive relation between Time 1 and Time 2 shyness was consistent across sex and levels of sensitivity.     

What Are Strategies to Advance Policies Supporting Family Caregivers? Promising Approaches From a Statewide Task Force

Family caregivers are the cornerstone of the long-term supports and services infrastructure in the United States, yet they often contend with many challenges related to this role. Public policy has been slow to change, leaving many caregivers vulnerable to health and economic consequences. Using models of policy making, we identify barriers to advancing policies that support family caregivers and overcome policy drift. We draw on discussions from the California Task Force on Family Caregiving as it prepares state policy recommendations. Identified strategies include identification of caregivers in health care and workplace settings to promote political consciousness raising, collecting and reporting on data that frame caregiving as a policy problem, borrowing policies and language from overlapping fields to emulate their policy successes, and presenting supportive caregiver policies as solutions to other policy problems. By presenting specific strategic approaches to advance caregiving policies, we provide tools to address the growing gap between caregiver needs and policy responses.     

Vernacular religion on the prairies: negotiating a place for the unquiet dead

The study of vernacular religion looks at faith as it is lived and emphasizes praxis. Research conducted among Ukrainian Canadians living on the prairies shows that the location where beliefs are expressed plays a role in the relationship between individual religion, folk religion, and official religion. Vernacular religion is freely expressed in the home, while its expression within the confines of the church is constrained. Negotiation, sometimes leading to change in church policy, takes place in cemeteries. As parishioners change their definition of personhood and see stillborn babies as human, as they come to consider suicide to be the result of illness rather than sin, their new views can affect the burial practices of their church, forcing it to include previously excluded persons in the sanctified ground of the cemetery.     

Hearing the voice of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander training stakeholders using research methodologies and theoretical frames of reference

Abstract

Researchers in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contexts within Australia are frequently faced with the challenges of working in an intercultural space where channels of communication are garbled with interference created by the complexities of misunderstood worldviews, languages, values and expectations. A concern of many researchers in these contexts is to ensure that the voices of research participants in remote communities are not only accurately represented, but are allowed to transcend the noise of dominant paradigms, policies and practices. This article brings together the experiences of four non-indigenous researchers in the space of remote vocational education and training. The authors present two vignettes from research in the context of health, employment and education. These vignettes highlight some of the conundrums for researchers as they attempt to harmonize the aims of research with the expectations of organizations involved. The purpose of the article is to explore the utility of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Indigenist methodologies, culturally responsive methodologies and those positioned at the ‘cultural interface’ (Nakata 2007). In so doing this article makes some assessments about the fit of CRT methodologies for such contexts.     

“Jimmy Cap Before You Tap”: Developing Condom Use Messages for African American Women

This study examined which characteristics of persuasive communications are most effective in changing African American women’s condom use attitudes. Focus groups were convened with 40 African American women (M_age = 25.54, SD = 4.67) to assess their opinions on current effective strategies used to promote condom use among their peers. Participants discussed effective characteristics of messaging campaigns (i.e., source, message type, channel) and how these could be used in future prevention messages. Findings revealed that making messages that are fun, catchy, and informative, delivered frequently through social media, TV, or radio by a peer or celebrity would be perceived as most effective in changing young African American women’s attitudes. Other themes that emerged were that condom use is more strongly associated with pregnancy prevention than HIV prevention and that sexual partners were perceived to have negative condom use attitudes. Recommendations centered on increasing exposure of HIV prevention messages by placing messages on the Internet and including a funny phrase or jingle in the message so that it is easy to remember and could potentially serve as a conversation starter for discussing safe sex with partners.     

Understanding African American Students' Experiences in STEM Education: An Ecological Systems Approach

Promoting racial and ethnic minority students' interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers remains a primary workforce goal. To advance this goal, this study examined, through an ecological lens, 18 African American high school seniors' perceptions of their experiences related to their aspirations for STEM careers. All students were enrolled in STEM programs. Using a phenomenological approach to analyze the outcomes of focus group interviews, the authors identified themes at the ontogenic, microsystem, and macrosystem levels. Environmental factors, such as counseling, family expectations, and available resources, played a substantial role in influencing the students' interests, experiences, and perceptions in their pursuits of STEM careers. Implications highlight the importance of counselors in encouraging students of diverse backgrounds to pursue STEM courses and for policy makers to provide resources that support students' STEM goals. Future research is needed to examine the longitudinal effects of high school STEM programs on diverse populations.     

Home Environment,But Not Socioeconomic Status,is Linked to Differences in Early Phonetic Perception Ability

Infants perceptually tune to the phonemes of their native languages in the first year of life, thereby losing the ability to discriminate non‐native phonemes. Infants who perceptually tune earlier have been shown to develop stronger language skills later in childhood. We hypothesized that socioeconomic disparities, which have been associated with differences in the quality and quantity of language in the home, would contribute to individual differences in phonetic discrimination. Seventy‐five infants were assessed on measures of phonetic discrimination at 9 months, on the quality of the home environment at 15 months, and on language abilities at both ages. Phonetic discrimination did not vary according to socioeconomic status (SES), but was significantly associated with the quality of the home environment. This association persisted when controlling for 9‐month expressive language abilities, rendering it less likely that infants with better expressive language skills were simply engendering higher quality home interactions. This suggests that infants from linguistically richer home environments may be more tuned to their native language and therefore less able to discriminate non‐native contrasts at 9 months relative to infants whose home environments are less responsive. These findings indicate that home language environments may be more critical than SES in contributing to early language perception, with possible implications for language development more broadly.     

Piecewise Cox models with right-censored data

We study a general class of piecewise Cox models. We discuss the computation of the semi-parametric maximum likelihood estimates (SMLE) of the parameters, with right-censored data, and a simplified algorithm for the maximum partial likelihood estimates (MPLE). Our simulation study suggests that the relative efficiency of the PMLE of the parameter to the SMLE ranges from 96% to 99.9%, but the relative efficiency of the existing estimators of the baseline survival function to the SMLE ranges from 3% to 24%. Thus, the SMLE is much better than the existing estimators.     

Dads care too! Participation in paid employment and experiences of workplace flexibility for Australian fathers caring for children and young adults with disabilities

This study uses Australian survey data to explore whether caring for children and young people with disabilities affects paid employment participation of fathers who identify as the secondary caregiver. More fathers in the study were in full-time employment than those in the general Australian population, but they worked fewer hours, often in jobs they did not enjoy or roles with less responsibility. Over one third of fathers reported that caring had impacted on their job opportunities or career progression, particularly those whose children had more severe disabilities. The financial costs of raising a child with disabilities and their caring obligations informed many of the decisions fathers made in relation to employment. Fixed hours of work, lack of understanding from their employer, an income tied to hours worked and staff resources were cited as reasons why almost half of the fathers felt they were unable to access flexible working conditions to assist with their child’s care. Self-employment was seen by many fathers as desirable, but the perceived increase in flexibility may be accompanied by an increase in work hours. Implications for paternal well-being are discussed, along with the lifelong implications of caring on employment and financial security for families in the Australian context.