Telling and Re‐telling Stories: The Use of Narrative and Drawing in a Group Intervention with Parents and Children in a Remote Aboriginal Community

The Let's Start Parent‐Child Program is a manualised parent‐child program which aims to improve educational, social and emotional outcomes for Aboriginal parents and their four‐ to seven‐year‐old children. It has been implemented in the Northern Territory, Australia on the Tiwi Islands and in Darwin since 2005. This paper outlines the adaptation of the program to include narrative approaches, the sharing of stories and the use of expressive arts as a way to build understanding between program leaders and participating families. An example from a recent program is used to illustrate how the sharing of stories and expressive use of art engages and binds group participants together. It supports parents to tell their own stories, to speak about their lived experience, to reconsider aspects of their own and their children's experiences and to achieve an increased awareness of their personal resources and a sense of self‐empowerment. The program is designed and delivered with sensitivity to individual parents, children and families, where cultural and interpersonal differences and different developmental and family situations can be taken into account.     

An Agent‐Based Model for Pathogen Persistence and Cross‐Contamination Dynamics in a Food Facility

We used an agent‐based modeling (ABM) framework and developed a mathematical model to explain the complex dynamics of microbial persistence and spread within a food facility and to aid risk managers in identifying effective mitigation options. The model explicitly considered personal hygiene practices by food handlers as well as their activities and simulated a spatially explicit dynamic system representing complex interaction patterns among food handlers, facility environment, and foods. To demonstrate the utility of the model in a decision‐making context, we created a hypothetical case study and used it to compare different risk mitigation strategies for reducing contamination and spread of Listeria monocytogenes in a food facility. Model results indicated that areas with no direct contact with foods (e.g., loading dock and restroom) can serve as contamination niches and recontaminate areas that have direct contact with food products. Furthermore, food handlers’ behaviors, including, for example, hygiene and sanitation practices, can impact the persistence of microbial contamination in the facility environment and the spread of contamination to prepared foods. Using this case study, we also demonstrated benefits of an ABM framework for addressing food safety in a complex system in which emergent system‐level responses are predicted using a bottom‐up approach that observes individual agents (e.g., food handlers) and their behaviors. Our model can be applied to a wide variety of pathogens, food commodities, and activity patterns to evaluate efficacy of food‐safety management practices and quantify contamination reductions associated with proposed mitigation strategies in food facilities.     

The Salience of Perceived Societal Conflict in Europe: A 27 Country Study on the Development of a Measure for Generalized Conflict Thinking

Social Indicators Research - Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises (e.g., the Great Recession, the refugee crisis) which had a tremendous impact on (some)...     

Technical and vocational education and training in Uganda: A critical analysis

This article undertakes a diagnostic study of the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sub‐sector in Uganda, with a view to characterizing the sub‐sector and identifying its potential strengths and weakness. We undertook a cross‐sectional pre‐survey of purposively selected key stakeholders in the TVET sub‐sector. We selected performance indicators following their importance in influencing the TVET reform process. Both qualitative and quantitative data was solicited from the stakeholders. Quantitative data was collected through stakeholder‐specific structured questionnaires, whilst qualitative data was collected through desk review and field visits, individual focused interviews and focus group discussions. Our findings indicate that financing and planning constraints have resulted in poor quality equipment, under‐ and ill‐trained staff, limited adoption of a competence‐based education and training (CBET) curriculum, not to mention the supervision inadequacies of TVET institutions. Besides, the limited TVET sub‐sector interaction with the private sector has incapacitated TVET curriculum development to nurture skills demanded by the private sector. Furthermore, backward technology use in the private sector has equally inhibited the success of student attachment programmes. Finally, legal ambiguities have perpetuated a qualification jungle and overlapping curricula.     

Information Seeking about Global Climate Change among Adolescents: The Role of Risk Perceptions, Efficacy Beliefs and Parental Influences

Global climate change is likely to have significant impacts on public health. Effective communication is critical to informing public decision making and behavior to mitigate climate change. An effective method of audience segmentation, the risk perception attitude (RPA) framework has been previously tested with other health behaviors and classifies people into 4 groups on the basis of their perceptions of risk and beliefs about personal efficacy. The 4 groups - indifference (low risk, weak efficacy), proactive (low risk, strong efficacy), avoidance (high risk, weak efficacy), and responsive (high risk, strong efficacy) - are hypothesized to differ in their self-protective behaviors and in their motivations to seek information. In this paper, we extend the RPA framework in two ways. First, we use it at the household level to determine whether parental classifications into the 4 groups are associated with their teenage children's classification into the same 4 groups. Second, we predict adolescent information-seeking behaviors on the basis of their and their parents' membership in the 4 RPA groups. Results (N = 523 parent-adolescent pairs) indicated that parental membership in the 4 RPA groups was significantly associated with children's membership in the same 4 groups. Furthermore, the RPA framework was a significant predictor of adolescent information-seeking: those in the responsive and avoidance groups sought more information on climate change than the indifference group. Family communication on global warming was positively associated with adolescents' information-seeking. Implications for interventions are discussed.     

Using the contradiction paradigm to assess ageism

Ageism is an important topic in our society, considering the burgeoning older adult population. Ageism is often measured using explicit questionnaires; however, given the impact of social desirability, implicit measures of ageism have been developed. In this study, the contradiction paradigm, an implicit measure of stereotypes (Lassonde, under review) was used to measure age-related stereotypes in passages describing older adults. Participants read passages with target sentences more slowly when these sentences described behaviors that were inconsistent rather than consistent with age-related stereotypes. Participants also completed a series of self-report questionnaires measuring ageism. Results demonstrated that reading times using the contradiction paradigm were not related to outcomes on the self-report questionnaires. A comparison of the contradiction paradigm to a social desirability scale revealed that it was not vulnerable to social desirability. This confirms the contradiction paradigm's use as an implicit measure of age-related stereotypes. Although there is no clear relation between the contradiction paradigm and popular explicit measures, a next important step would be to determine the point in which implicit knowledge and intentional behavioral responses interact.     

Volunteer Reliability in Nonprofit Organizations: A Theoretical Model

The reliability of volunteers is a major concern for many nonprofit organizations. To address this problem in more detail, we develop a theoretical model of volunteer reliability based on psychological contract theory. By taking this perspective as a starting point, we explore how individual volunteer characteristics, organizational factors, and sociological developments shape the exchange of inducements and contributions between volunteers and nonprofit organizations. We discuss how these factors can create tensions in the psychological contract and determine the extent to which volunteers behave reliably. As such, we develop a theoretical framework for addressing the reliability problem in volunteer management.