The Next Generation of Diversity and Intergroup Relations Research

Recent court decisions and cultural shifts have led to a new focus for work on equity and equality of outcomes in educational settings. This article reviews the contributions of recent diversity studies and then focuses on a longitudinal study of 4,403 college students attending nine public universities. Results show that student interaction with diverse peers during college results in changes in student cognitive, social, and democratic outcomes by the second year of college. Campus efforts to provide opportunities for students to learn about diverse groups inside and outside the classroom have an appreciable impact on students.     

A global optimisation approach to range-restricted survey calibration

Survey calibration methods modify minimally sample weights to satisfy domain-level benchmark constraints (BC), e.g. census totals. This allows exploitation of auxiliary information to improve the representativeness of sample data (addressing coverage limitations, non-response) and the quality of sample-based estimates of population parameters. Calibration methods may fail with samples presenting small/zero counts for some benchmark groups or when range restrictions (RR), such as positivity, are imposed to avoid unrealistic or extreme weights. User-defined modifications of BC/RR performed after encountering non-convergence allow little control on the solution, and penalisation approaches modelling infeasibility may not guarantee convergence. Paradoxically, this has led to underuse in calibration of highly disaggregated information, when available. We present an always-convergent flexible two-step global optimisation (GO) survey calibration approach. The feasibility of the calibration problem is assessed, and automatically controlled minimum errors in BC or changes in RR are allowed to guarantee convergence in advance, while preserving the good properties of calibration estimators. Modelling alternatives under different scenarios using various error/change and distance measures are formulated and discussed. The GO approach is validated by calibrating the weights of the 2012 Health Survey for England to a fine age–gender–region cross-tabulation (378 counts) from the 2011 Census in England and Wales.     

Stress Pattern Preference in Spanish‐Learning Infants: The Role of Syllable Weight

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English‐ and German‐, but not French‐learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish‐learning infants' lexical stress preferential patterns and the role of syllable weight at 9 months of age. Spanish is a syllable‐timed language with no vowel reduction and variable stress. Around 50% of the word types in Spanish are disyllabic, with a superior proportion of trochees than iambs (60% and 40%, respectively). Experiment 1 with CV.CV pseudo‐words failed to reveal a clear trochaic bias in 9‐month‐old Spanish‐learning infants. However, when preference was explored with items containing a heavy syllable (CVC.CV and CV.CVC, respectively), both a trochaic (Experiment 2) and an iambic preference (Experiment 3) could be elicited. These results suggest that knowledge about the close and highly regular link between heavy syllables and stress assignment in Spanish can be easily acquired and determines infants' preference at 9 months of age, while for CV.CV items, the trochaic bias appears to be weak. Our results broaden the current knowledge on the factors that determine the emergence of rhythmic biases.     

Distributional Phonetic Learning at 10 Months of Age

Infant phonetic perception reorganizes in accordance with the native language by 10 months of age. One mechanism that may underlie this perceptual change is distributional learning, a statistical analysis of the distributional frequency of speech sounds. Previous distributional learning studies have tested infants of 6–8 months, an age at which native phonetic categories have not yet developed. Here, three experiments test infants of 10 months to help illuminate perceptual ability following perceptual reorganization. English‐learning infants did not change discrimination in response to nonnative speech sound distributions from either a voicing distinction (Experiment 1) or a place‐of‐articulation distinction (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, familiarization to the place‐of‐articulation distinction was doubled to increase the amount of exposure, and in this case infants began discriminating the sounds. These results extend the processes of distributional learning to a new phonetic contrast, and reveal that at 10 months of age, distributional phonetic learning remains effective, but is more difficult than before perceptual reorganization.     

Postural analysis of eight university student wheelchair users when performing written exercises in their classroom: a case study in Santiago de Cali, Colombia

In students with physical disabilities, the more energy and time required and invested into finding a good posture, the longer the learning process takes. For this reason, the objective of this study was to characterize the posture in the act of writing of wheelchair users in a classroom. Eight students, (three women) aged 18-40, of some of the main universities of the city of Santiago de Cali participated. An observational field study filming of approximately 10 minutes was done while they took notes in their classes. Posture of the head, trunk, and upper extremities was analyzed with respect to its axis and the type of movement in each joint. The postures were classified depending on the location of support surface finding five different postures in the eight students. In these five postures some biomechanical risk factors, usually present in wheelchair users, are increased when they are associated with those postures. Those associated risk factors are: possible disc spine deformation, muscular stress and causing of pressure ulcer. In conclusion, in four of these five postures a poor interaction among person, task and work desk was observed. Therefore, seven of the eight students in this study were found to have a posture that could be considered risky.     

From Bureaucratic Administration to Network Administration? An Empirical Study on E-Government Focus on Catalonia

This article aims to (1) analyse the extent to which there is a movement from a Weberian bureaucratic administration towards a new organisational model that we call network-administration and (2) consider whether the premises of New Public Management (NPM) theory are present in this process of transformation. The study centres on the analysis of the channels for citizen attention and the processes of technological innovation around these channels carried out by the Catalonian Government. Our initial conclusions indicate that while there is a change in Public Administration (PA), this change is incremental and has several nuances: a slight evolution towards network-administration is observed as currently existing alongside the traditional hierarchical and compartmentalised bureaucracy. In parallel, the private sector is increasingly involved in a relationship that tends to be more controlled by the public sector. We should add that there is also a new emphasis being placed on the relationship with the citizen as a service-user.

Everyday Disputes and Negotiations: A Video Observational Analysis of Mexican‐origin Mother–Daughter Conversations

Little is known about the nature of normative mother–daughter everyday disagreements in Mexican family contexts in which daughters are socialized to avoid conflict out of respect and deference to authority. Observations of videotaped conversations of 130 Mexican‐origin mothers and their adolescent (13‐ to 16‐year‐old) daughters discussing their disagreements were systematically coded. Analyses of the conversations showed that the most frequently recurring conflicts involved autonomy privileges (appearance, friendships, going out, media use), household responsibilities (chores, sibling caretaking), and family dynamics (sibling tensions, sibling differential treatment, mutual respect in communication). Daughters from traditional immigrant families who had lived longer in Mexico were just as assertive in expressing their viewpoints as daughters from less traditional families, although they were less likely to display negative affect.     

Understanding Multiple Group Identities: Inserting Women into Cultural Transformations

The study of cultural transformations in the United States has been studied predominantly from an assimilation/acculturation framework. There are several drawbacks to this theoretical perspective, chief among them being the exclusion of gender in examining what happens to different ethnic/racial groups when they come into contact. Feminist writings in the last twenty years provide a rich discussion of how inserting women into this social process would enrich our knowledge about human behavior in general and cultural change specifically. This paper reviews the literature on the assimilation/acculturation framework and integrates the most recent developments in feminist theory to provide a new alternative to studying cultural transformations. The social engagement model takes into account gender as well as other significant social identities like ethnicity/race, class, and sexuality to study how groups change as they come into contact with each other.     

Is the scheduling task context-dependent? A survey investigating the presence of constraints in different manufacturing contexts

Abstract

Most studies regarding real scheduling constraints only consider the constraints related to the specific manufacturing environment studied, limiting the possibility of drawing general conclusions. A survey of 50 companies was conducted in order to discover which constraints were present and what their relationship was with the scheduling context. This paper investigates which practical scheduling constraints are present in the manufacturing industry and whether the scheduling task is context-dependent. Results of this study show that some practical production constraints are context-dependent.     

The education of children and adolescents in out-of-home care: a problem or an opportunity? Results of a longitudinal study

The education of children in care is an issue that often falls into a no man’s land in which responsibility always seems to be attributed to the other ‘department’. Furthermore, all too often, teachers, educators and foster parents find themselves working with these children with no support, as if they were isolated cases. The aim of this study is to get to know the school situation of children in different types of out-of-home care: residential, kinship and non-kinship care. Systematic data on the school situation of 11–16-year-olds (on class attendance, school behaviour, academic results and guidance towards post-compulsory education) were gathered over a period of 5 consecutive school years. A 3-year longitudinal study on the same items (N?=?391) was made and time-series data were gathered for 5 years (N?=?1841). Results show that the in-care population is at a clear disadvantage and inequality of opportunities compared to the general population in relation to their educational pathways and outcomes; the most disadvantaged being the population in residential care. Recommendations are included, posing the challenge that what has to date been considered a ‘problem’ should become an opportunity for these children.