Internet use and attitudes towards illicit internet use behavior in a sample of Russian college students.

This study assessed Internet use and attitudes toward illicit use of the Internet in a sample of Russian college students. A sample comprised of 198 students was recruited from a university in Moscow. Each participant completed a survey assessing demographic characteristics, Internet use, and attitudes towards engaging in illicit behaviors over the Internet. About half of the students reported that they used the Internet at least several times a year, with 8% reporting daily use of the Internet. Among Internet users, most reported having Internet access either at home or at a friends' home, and 16 % reported having Internet access from work, school, or a computer center. Among Internet users, the main purpose was for school-related activities (60%), followed by e-mail (55%), entertainment (50%), chatting (24%), and searching for pornography (6%). Although most students thought it was inappropriate to read someone else's e-mail, use someone else's password or credit card information without their permission, or break into someone's computer, many students did endorse those illicit behaviors. Over a fifth of the students reported that they knew hackers. Forty three percent of students agreed that people make too much fuss about watching videos, movies or downloading music on the Internet without paying. Males were more likely than females to report using the Internet for entertainment purposes (p = 0.006) and were more likely to agree that it was okay to break into someone's computer (p = 0.04). The results of this study suggest that these Russian college students predominately use the Internet to help with their schoolwork, to communicate with others, and for entertainment. These results also suggest that interventions may be useful to change attitudes endorsing illicit uses of the Internet.     

Interracial roommate relationships: an experimental field test of the contact hypothesis

ABSTRACT— This study investigated how automatically activated racial attitudes are affected by relatively long-term interracial relationships. A natural field experiment was conducted in a college dormitory system. Participants were White freshmen who had been randomly assigned to either a White or an African American roommate. Students participated in two sessions during the first 2 and last 2 weeks of their first quarter on campus. During these sessions, they answered questions about their satisfaction and involvement with their roommates and completed an inventory of intergroup anxiety and an implicit measure of racial attitudes. Participants in interracial rooms reported less satisfaction and less involvement with their roommates than did participants in same-race rooms. However, automatically activated racial attitudes and intergroup anxiety improved over time among students in interracial rooms, but not among students in same-race rooms. Thus, the results suggest that interracial roommate relationships, although generally less satisfying and involving than same-race roommate relationships, do produce benefits.     

Perceived importance, enjoyment, and anxiety as correlates of computer attitudes

A sample of 138 students was assessed for their computer attitudes using a Likert-type questionnaire with three subscales: Computer Importance, Computer Enjoyment, and Computer Anxiety. An overall positive attitude towards computers was found. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed no significant differences in computer attitudes by gender although male students reported more positive attitudes towards computers than female students. Implications for educators include managing the perceptions of students that the computers are useful for learning purposes, in addition to using them for leisure and entertainment.     

Computerphobia

Five studies of over 450 university students presented a comprehensive picture of computer-phobia. Three research and clinically based self-report instruments were developed to measure three nearly independent dimensions of computerphobia-computer anxiety, computer attitudes, and computer cognitions and feelings. Results indicated that older students were more computer anxious, but did not have more negative attitudes, cognitions, or feelings, than did younger students. Women had more negative attitudes than did men. Feminine-identity students showed more anxiety and negative attitudes than did masculine-identity students, regardless of gender. White students had more anxiety and more positive attitudes than did nonwhite students. Computerphobia was related to other anxiety measures (mathematics, state, and trait), but was a separate construct. Experience with computer interaction did not reduce anxiety or improve attitudes. Finally, regardless of academic major, computer-anxious students showed less computer aptitude, literacy, and interest. Implications for treating computerphobia are discussed.     

A preliminary study of achievement, attitudes toward success in mathematics, and mathematics anxiety with technology-based instruction in brief calculus

This study was designed to compare achievement, attitudes toward success in mathematics, and mathematics anxiety of college students taught brief calculus using a graphic calculator, with the achievement and attitudes and anxiety of students taught using the computer algebra system Maple, using a technology based text book. 50 men and 50 women, students in three classes at a large public university in the southwestern United States, participated. Students' achievement in brief calculus was measured by performance on a teacher-made achievement test given at the end of the study. Analysis of variance showed no significant difference in achievement between the groups. To measure change in attitudes and anxiety, responses to paper-and-pencil inventories indicated significant differences in favor of students using the computer.     

Socio-ethical Education in Nanotechnology Engineering Programmes: A Case Study in Malaysia

The unique properties of nanotechnology have made nanotechnology education and its related subjects increasingly important not only for students but for mankind at large. This particular technology brings educators to work together to prepare and produce competent engineers and scientists for this field. One of the key challenges in nanotechnology engineering is to produce graduate students who are not only competent in technical knowledge but possess the necessary attitude and awareness toward the social and ethical issues related to nanotechnology. In this paper, a research model has been developed to assess Malaysian nanotechnology engineering students’ attitudes and whether their perspectives have attained the necesary objectives of ethical education throughout their programme of study. The findings from this investigation show that socio ethical education has a strong influence on the students’ knowledge, skills and attitudes pertaining to socio ethical issues related to nanotechnology.     

Change and stability in sexism among college students: A three-year panel study

Results are reported of a 3-year panel study of sex-role attitude changes among Ball State University students. Two questions were posed: (1) To what extent do students change their sex-role attitudes? (2) What types of students are more likely to change their attitudes? Contrary to expectations, students did not become progressively less sexist each year they were in college. Apparently, changes in student sex-role attitudes were more reflective of changes in local public opinion rather than following the Bennington College pattern. An important finding of the study is that those who were initially the most sexist displayed the greatest degree of change in their attitudes. A mixed pattern prevails with regard to relationships between changes in attitudes and background characteristics, personal orientations, and political orientations.     

The Art of Recruitment: The Foundation of Family and Linkage Studies of Psychiatric Illness

Family and linkage studies of psychiatric illness involve special benefits and challenges in the field of scientific investigation. The success of a family or linkage study is dependent on the recruitment process. The most informative and reliable method of data collection in this field of investigation is through direct interviews with as many family members as possible. Although there are circumstances when direct interviewing is not possible, there are other circumstances, such as refusal of relatives to participate, that deserve closer scrutiny. The complexities involved in the recruitment process while conducting medical investigations have been explored in the literature. However, special issues relevant to the recruitment process merit further exploration for working with families in the context of family and linkage studies of psychiatric illness. Careful understanding of this critical topic may minimize the incidence of family nonparticipation in such research endeavors. This article addresses these issues as they relate to recruiting individuals and their families in this field of investigation. These issues include the role of attitudes, values and beliefs, family interaction and the identification of influential members, informal communication networking, informed consent while promoting the research, and ethical concerns.     

Do College Students’ Gender-typed Attitudes About Occupations Predict Their Real-World Decisions?

We investigated US college students’ gender-typed attitudes about occupations for themselves as a predictor of their real-world decisions regarding an academic major and intended future career. We also investigated US college students’ attitudes about the appropriateness of gender-typed occupations for other men and women. The sample (N = 264) was mostly Caucasian and was drawn from a large state university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. An established self-report measure (see Liben and Bigler 2002) was used to assess attitudes about occupations for the self and other people. Gender-typed majors and intended careers were categorized using a coding scheme that was developed for the study. College students preferred gender-stereotypical occupations for themselves. Women’s, but not men’s, preferences for gender-typed occupations predicted their decisions about their academic major and the career they intended to pursue. Both men and women reported that men should only hold masculine occupations, but that women should hold both masculine and feminine occupations. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding the gender gap in occupations in the US, such as the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers and barriers for men in stereotypically female occupations.     

On the consistency between attitudes and behavior: Look to the method of attitude formation

A field study and a laboratory experiment were conducted to test the hypothesis that the method by which an attitude was formed is a crucial variable affecting attitude-behavior consistency. It was predicted that people who form their attitudes on the basis of direct behavioral interaction with the attitude object will demonstrate significantly greater attitude-behavior consistency than individuals whose attitudes were formed by other means. In the field study, students with direct prior experience with a housing crisis demonstrated greater consistency between their attitudes and behavioral attempts to alleviate the crisis than did students with similar attitudes but without prior direct experience. In the laboratory experiment, subjects who indicated their attitude toward a variety of puzzle types after working examples of each demonstrated greater consistency between these attitudes and subsequent behavior in a free play situation than subjects with similar attitudes formed on the basis of information given by the experimenter. It was suggested that direct behavioral experience produces an attitude which is more clearly, confidently, and stably maintained than an attitude formed through more indirect means.     

Attitudes and Experiences of High School Students Living in Turkey

A group of 105 tenth-grade high school students living in Turkey were studied to discover their attitudes toward their host nation and experiences while living away from the United States. It was hypothesized that neither the length of time a student resides in a country nor his sex would have an effect on either the number of experiences related to his host country or his attitude while living in a foreign country. The results indicated that the longer the students live overseas, the more experiences related to the culture of the host country they have. Their attitudes were the same regardless of their sex or length of residence.     

Student Political Campaigners: Who Campaigns and What Effect Does It Have on Them?

What characterizes students who become involved in political campaigns and what effects does their campaigning have on them? During a 2-week election recess, about one-third of the students at Princeton University chose to campaign. Those students who did so were liberal rather than radical in their political orientation. Those who participated seemed predisposed to campaign because they thought campaigning was an effective way of bringing about the changes that they sought. Campaigners were more likely than their fellow students to have engaged in political activity before. Such efforts may be evidence of their beliefs that political activity causes change, or might have been the forming experience for those beliefs. If the candidate for whom the student campaigned won the election, the student by and large strengthened or maintained his original attitudes about the efficacy of campaigning. If his candidate lost, the student became more pessimistic about the efficacy of campaigners whose candidates won also changed in an internal direction on a personal-control subscale of Rotter's (1966) internal-external scale; those whose candidates lost tended to change in an external direction.     

Student Explanations in the Context of Computational Science and Engineering Education

Creating explanations is an important process for students, not only to make connections between novel information and background knowledge, but also to be able to communicate their understanding of any given topic. This article explores students’ explanations in the context of computational science and engineering, an important interdisciplinary field that enables scientists and engineers to solve complex problems. Specifically, this study explores: (a) students’ approaches to create written explanations of programing code and (b) the relationship between students’ explanations and their ability to do computer programing. Students wrote in-code comments for 3 MATLAB^® worked-examples, which were qualitatively analyzed using a coding scheme. Different approaches to self-explain were identified using hierarchical cluster analysis, and differences in students’ ability to do computer programing were identified using analysis of variance. The resulting approaches to self-explain were: original solution, mechanistic, principle-based, limited, and goal-based. The findings suggest that experienced students wrote simple in-code comments to self-explain, but students with lower ability to do computer programing wrote more comprehensive explanations, as they may take this as a learning opportunity.     

Changes in the Social Responsibility Attitudes of Engineering Students Over Time

This research explored how engineering student views of their responsibility toward helping individuals and society through their profession, so-called social responsibility, change over time. A survey instrument was administered to students initially primarily in their first year, senior year, or graduate studies majoring in mechanical, civil, or environmental engineering at five institutions in September 2012, April 2013, and March 2014. The majority of the students (57 %) did not change significantly in their social responsibility attitudes, but 23 % decreased and 20 % increased. The students who increased, decreased, or remained the same in their social responsibility attitudes over time did not differ significantly in terms of gender, academic rank, or major. Some differences were found between institutions. Students who decreased in social responsibility initially possessed more positive social responsibility attitudes, were less likely to indicate that college courses impacted their views of social responsibility, and were more likely to have decreased in the frequency that they participated in volunteer activities, compared to students who did not change or increased their social responsibility. Although the large percentage of engineering students who decreased their social responsibility during college was disappointing, it is encouraging that courses and participation in volunteer activities may combat this trend.     

Attitudes Toward Counselors and Counseling Processes: A Comparison of Chinese and American Graduate Students

Graduate students socialized in separate cultural settings, Taiwan and the United States, but studying at the same large university were surveyed about their (a) preferences for counselor's characteristics, (b) images of a counselor, and (c) attitudes toward counseling and counseling services. Results show that Chinese and American students have different preferences for and images of a counselor. Although both groups have positive attitudes toward seeking counseling, they know very little about the counseling resources and locations available. The groups also differ in their expectations of the counseling process. Some sex differences were indicated, but no clear pattern emerged.     

矛盾的消费者是如何解读多元化口碑信息的?

以消费者态度的矛盾性为基础前提, 来探究消费者自身的矛盾态度与外界的多元化口碑信息之间的交互机制。通过两个现场实验发现, 消费者态度的矛盾性程度稳健地调节着消费者对外界信息的选择和处理。具体而言, 高矛盾性的消费者由于具有显著的减少矛盾的动机, 会选择性注意外界的正面信息和态度, 而低矛盾性的消费者减少矛盾的动机并不显著, 更倾向于选择性注意外界的负面信息和态度; 另一方面, 矛盾消费者的选择性注意效应受从众压力和群体共识的影响很小, 也即那些不处于消费者选择性关注范围内的信息和态度, 即使是多数人形成的共识, 对消费者仍然不会有显著影响。     

Investigation of the computer experiences and attitudes of pre-service mathematics teachers: new evidence from Turkey

This study aimed to investigate the experiences of pre-service mathematics (PSM) teachers with computers and their attitudes toward them. The Computer Attitude Scale, Computer Competency Survey, and Computer Use Information Form were administered to 180 Turkish PSM teachers. Results revealed that most PSM teachers used computers at home and at Internet cafes, and that their competency was generally intermediate and upper level. The study concludes that PSM teachers' attitudes about computers differ according to their years of study, computer ownership, level of computer competency, frequency of computer use, computer experience, and whether they had attended a computer-aided instruction course. However, computer attitudes were not affected by gender.     

Sexual Coercion Among Students at the University of Cape Coast,Ghana

Sexual coercion refers to strategies that result in an individual engaging in sexual activity against his or her will. Ecological factors influence the way sexual interactions occur; however, the relationship between these factors and sexual coercion has not been explored among university students in Ghana. The purpose of this study was to examine sexual coercion among university students in Ghana by specifically examining individual-level factors (age, gender, sexual debut, age differential with first partner, being in an intimate relationship, history of abortion, and past experiences with transactional sex) and the experience of forced and coerced sex. Residential students at the University of Cape Coast were invited to participate and completed a survey on a tablet computer. Questions included demographics; sexual and reproductive health experiences and knowledge; and attitudes and experiences with abortion. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to examine individual-level factors associated with experiences of sexual coercion and forced sex. There were 480 females and 556 males that completed the survey; 26.3 and 16.4% reported having had intercourse either because they were forced or coerced, or when they were “very unwilling”. These students were more likely to be female (OR 3.5), to have had an abortion (OR 2.9), and to have engaged in transactional sex (OR 1.9). Many University of Cape Coast students are experiencing forced or coerced sex. Programs targeting both female and male students as both victims and perpetrators of sexual violence in this population are sorely needed. Primary prevention of sexual violence is one promising field.     

Computer-Assisted Therapies: Examination of Therapist-Level Barriers to Their Use

Despite enthusiasm in the field for their potential ease of dissemination, little work has examined whether practicing clinicians are willing and able to use computer-assisted therapies (i.e., computerized treatments designed to be administered with therapist support). For therapists to use these tools, they require access to computer equipment, the skills needed to use the equipment, and willingness to adopt the technology in treatment. This study examined these three factors using survey data from a national sample of mental health clinicians (N = 1,067). Respondents reported on their access to technology and computer fluency, in addition to completing the Computer-Assisted Therapy Attitudes Scale (CATAS), a measure of therapist attitudes designed for this study. Overall, the majority of therapists (90.7%) reported access to at least one computer at work and self-reported computer fluency levels were high. On average, therapists held positive attitudes towards computer-assisted therapies, although expressed concern that these technologies might damage rapport and did not feel that these technologies would improve treatment outcomes. Predictors of positive attitudes included greater general openness toward new treatments, greater comfort with computers, and easier access to technology at work (all ps < .01). Results suggested that, on the whole, therapists may be likely to integrate computer-assisted therapies into their clinical practice. However, therapists vary both in their ability and willingness to use these tools. Implications for the dissemination of computer-assisted therapies are discussed.     

University students' Internet attitudes and Internet self-efficacy: a study at three universities in Taiwan.

This study was conducted to explore university students' attitudes and self-efficacy toward the Internet. Moreover, the relationships between their attitudes and self-efficacy toward the Internet were also investigated. The sample of this study included 1,313 students, coming from three universities in Taiwan. It was found that male students expressed significantly more positive attitudes than females on their "perceived control" of the Internet. The male students also revealed better Internet self-efficacy than their female counterparts. Moreover, students having more on-line hours per week, in general, displayed more positive Internet attitudes and Internet self-efficacy. In addition, students' grade level also played an important role in their Internet attitudes; graduate students tended to possess more positive Internet attitudes. More importantly, students' Internet attitudes were highly correlated with their Internet self-efficacy. The results in this study seemed to reveal that students' attitudes toward the Internet could be viewed as one of the important indicators for predicting their Internet self-efficacy. It is also suggested that some training programs or courses may be helpful in improving university students' attitudes and self-efficacy toward the Internet.