A Mandate for Honesty: Jeff Young's No Bullshit Therapy

Jeff Young talks about having been trained to be formal with clients, and his gradual realisation that he could return to the more direct ways of speech he learned as a child, and combine that with warmth. He found that clients and fellow professionals welcomed a therapist who did not ‘beat around the bush’. Together, Jeff and Ron talk about when directness is appropriate, and how directness needs to be modified for particular clients.     

Contemporary Political Communications: Audiences, Politicians and the Media in International Research

Research into political communication has grown rapidly in the past three decades, shifting from specific, quantitative and utilitarian studies to include a broad variety of research questions, methods and theoretical frameworks. Interdisciplinary work in political communication takes audiences, political actors (such as governments and politicians), and media content and media institutions as central foci. Research has traditionally focused on election campaign-specific studies within national contexts. Emerging research, however, is now addressing broader questions about media texts and organisations and also about representations and power. This research is working to trace technological changes and developments in an era of globalised media and political communication and developing new, complex conceptions of audience agency and reception.     

Ethnic Violence,Local Security and Return Migration: Enclave communities in Kosovo

Forced migration has become commonplace in the international political landscape. In 2015, 60 million people were displaced by violence, more than ever before recorded (UNHCR, 2015). While we know that violence leads to displacement, we know little about return migration after conflict – who comes back and where they settle. This article seeks to engage and supplement the literature on return migration after conflict, advocating for a broader understanding of the security choices made by displaced people. Emphasized here is the importance of a local understanding of safety and the role played by enclave communities in providing a secure context in which people can enjoy the society of their co‐ethnics.     

A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility,Best Practices,and Theory‐Building

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.     

Bias of maximum likelihood estimators of the response standard deviation in regression

The bias of maximum likelihood estimators of the standard deviation of the response in location/scale regression models is considered. Results are obtained for a very wide family of densities for the response variable. These are used to propose point estimators with improved mean square error properties and to demonstrate the importance of bias correction in statistical inference when samples are moderately small.