Applying Routine Activity Theory to Cybercrime: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

The central question of this article is whether routine activity theory (RAT) can be used as an analytical framework to study cybercrimes. Both a theoretical analysis and an analysis of empirical studies have thus far failed to provide a clear answer. The multivariate analysis presented in this article tries to avoid some of the limitations of other RAT-based studies. Based on a large sample (N = 9,161), the effects of value, visibility, accessibility, and guardianship on victimization of six cybercrimes have been studied. Analysis shows some RAT elements are more applicable than others. Visibility clearly plays a role within cybercrime victimization. Accessibility and personal capable guardianship show varying results. Value and technical capable guardianship show almost no effects on cybercrime victimization.     

Friendship as a moderating factor in the pathway between early harsh home environment and later victimization in the peer group. The Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group

Two prospective investigations of the moderating role of dyadic friendship in the developmental pathway to peer victimization are reported. In Study 1, the preschool home environments (i.e., harsh discipline, marital conflict, stress, abuse, and maternal hostility) of 389 children were assessed by trained interviewers. These children were then followed into the middle years of elementary school, with peer victimization, group social acceptance, and friendship assessed annually with a peer nomination inventory. In Study 2, the home environments of 243 children were assessed in the summer before 1st grade, and victimization, group acceptance, and friendship were assessed annually over the next 3 years. In both studies, early harsh, punitive, and hostile family environments predicted later victimization by peers for children who had a low number of friendships. However, the predictive associations did not hold for children who had numerous friendships. These findings provide support for conceptualizations of friendship as a moderating factor in the pathways to peer group victimization.     

“They Dumped Me Like Trash”: The Social and Psychological Toll of Victimization on Latino Day Laborers' Lives

Although recent rhetoric links undocumented immigrants to criminality, reports indicate undocumented immigrants commit less crime than their native-born counterparts and that this vulnerable group may be at increased risk for criminal victimization. Immigrants living in new immigrant settlement cities may be particularly at risk for exposure to criminal victimization due to the vulnerabilities associated with a lack of an established Latino community and limited availability of culturally appropriate social services to provide support. This ethnographic study examines the experiences of victimization and its social and psychological toll of a street-recruited sample of Latino day laborers (LDLs) (N = 25) living and working in Baltimore, a new immigrant settlement city. Findings elucidate and describe the specific types of victimization experienced by LDLs, including workplace victimization (wage theft, abandonment at the jobsite, poor working conditions, verbal abuse) and street-level victimization (assault and robbery), as well as reveal the social and psychological toll of victimization (sociocultural alienation, despair or desesperación, and problem drinking) on their lives. Findings have implications for community psychology, through research and practice, as they provide insights for prevention and intervention within the intersection of structural vulnerability (i.e., undocumented immigration status), violence, and mental health.     

Making meaning of parenting from the perspective of alienated parents

More than 13% of parents identify as being alienated by at least one of their children. Parental alienation often occurs after divorce when one parent (un)intentionally persuades his or her children to distance themselves from or reject the other parent. This study, couched in relational dialectics theory, explores the meaning of parenting from the perspective of 40 alienated parents. This analysis yielded two competing discourses: the culturally dominant discourse of parental norms (DPN) and the culturally marginalized discourse of parental victimization (DPV). Throughout the narrative interviews, the DPV resisted the DPN in four ways (diachronic separation, entertaining, countering, and negating). This study's findings provide insights into the perspective of the alienated parents, advance what we know about family distancing, and provide practical implications.     

The road not taken: creative solutions require avoidance of high-frequency responses

To investigate individual differences in creativity as measured with a complex problem-solving task, we developed a computational model of the remote associates test (RAT). For 50 years, the RAT has been used to measure creativity. Each RAT question presents three cue words that are linked by a fourth word, which is the correct answer. We hypothesized that individuals perform poorly on the RAT when they are biased to consider high-frequency candidate answers. To assess this hypothesis, we tested individuals with 48 RAT questions and required speeded responding to encourage guessing. Results supported our hypothesis. We generated a norm-based model of the RAT using a high-dimensional semantic space, and this model accurately identified correct answers. A frequency-biased model that included different levels of bias for high-frequency candidate answers explained variance for both correct and incorrect responses. Providing new insight into the nature of creativity, the model explains why some RAT questions are more difficult than others, and why some people perform better than others on the RAT.     

Looking forward and back: Sexual victimization prevention

The field of sexual victimization prevention has been greatly shaped by societal movements of the past forty years. The social forces that have driven the study of sexual victimization have led to major research gaps which may be viewed as opportunities for new focuses. This paper will: (1) review these social movements in light of the opportunities that have arisen, (2) re-evaluate the information that has been collected in light of the research purpose, preventing harm to potential victims through providing tailored prevention messages, victim sensitive avenues of reporting, and individualized intervention tactics based on personality characteristics, and (3) provide a framework with which to conceptualize normative personality in relation to the process of victimization-related trauma. Although research has provided many insights into the basic principles of prevention, much remains to be explored.     

Search/ing for missing people: Families living with ambiguous absence

Families of missing people are often understood as inhabiting a particular space of ambiguity, captured in the phrase ‘living in limbo’ (Holmes, 2008). To explore this uncertain ground, we interviewed 25 family members to consider how human absence is acted upon and not just felt within this space ‘in between’ grief and loss (Wayland, 2007). In the paper, we represent families as active agents in spatial stories of ‘living in limbo’, and we provide insights into the diverse strategies of search/ing (technical, physical and emotional) in which they engage to locate either their missing member or news of them. Responses to absence are shown to be intimately bound up with unstable spatial knowledges of the missing person and emotional actions that are subject to change over time. We suggest that practices of search are not just locative actions, but act as transformative processes providing insights into how families inhabit emotional dynamism and transition in response to the on-going ‘missing situation’ and ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999, 2013).     

Tracing memories and meanings of festival landscapes during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has deeply affected mass gatherings and travel and, in the process, has transformed festivals, festival landscapes, and people's sense of place in relation to such events. In this article we argue that it is important to better understand how people's memories of festival landscapes are affected by these larger shifts. We worked from the premise that information-rich cases could provide some initial insights in this respect. To that end, we interviewed seven individuals who are regular and longstanding in their engagement with festivals in one place, lutruwita/Tasmania, the island state of Australia. Key findings suggest that pandemic experiences mediate the range of meanings participants give to festival landscapes and their interpretations of such landscapes can be described as attachments and detachments, encounters, and reorientations. We conclude by proposing that participants' efforts to draw on memories, reflect on emotional geographies, and recast autobiographies help them adjust to crises, rethink their ways of moving to and from festival sites, and reframe their sense of place in relation to significant cultural events. Such insights have application beyond both the island state and the participants involved.     

Psychometric Evaluation of an Alternate Scoring for the Remote Associates Test

The Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962; Mednick & Mednick, 1967) is a commonly employed test of creative convergent thinking. The RAT is scored with a dichotomous scoring, scoring correct answers as 1 and all other answers as 0. Based on recent research into the information processing underlying RAT performance, we argued that the dichotomous scoring may lead to a loss of potentially relevant information. Thus, we proposed an alternate scoring based on semantic similarity between the answer given by the participant and the correct solution using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais, 1997). We evaluate the psychometric properties of the alternate LSA scoring and found evidence of construct validity for the LSA scoring which was comparable to findings for the standard scoring, but not better as we would have expected. Thus, our expectations that LSA-based scoring of the RAT counteracts potential information loss were not met. However, LSA based scorings appear to be a promising alternative for hardly solvable RAT items. We conducted additional analyses comparing different RAT item types with regard to their validity as well as evaluating the information uniquely contained in the LSA scoring. Implications of all finding for existing research using RAT items are discussed.     

Characteristics and Personality Styles of Women Who Seek Incarcerated Men as Romantic Partners: Survey Results and Directions for Future Research

Results are presented from a survey of 89 women who sought and entered into a relationship with a man who was incarcerated. Demographic, clinical, and relationship characteristics revealed a diverse group of women with a moderate degree of childhood/family victimization and family member’s involvement with the legal system. Results from the Jesness Inventory-Revised, a measure of personality functioning, revealed two predominant personality subtypes among the women: the Manipulator/Pragmatist (31%) and the Neurotic, Anxious/Introspective (25%). The results are compared to existing traditional and nontraditional theories of mate selection and thoughts for a systematic program of research in this area are offered.     

Multiple victimization of Spanish adolescents: a multilevel analysis

Multiple victimization in adolescence is an issue that has received little research attention. Furthermore, adolescents are particularly vulnerable to victimization in different contexts. The aim of this study is to analyze correlates of multiple victimization in three contexts (home, school, and street). The following forms of victimization were considered: stealing, hitting, insulting, threatening, blackmailing, and weapon intimidation. Multiple victimization correlates explored were: sex, age, public/private school, socioeconomic status, quality of family relationships, and antisocial behavior. A probabilistic sample of 1,908 adolescents (ages 13 to 18) was used. Multilevel analyses were conducted to separate correlates at the individual level from those operating at the contextual level. Results show that gender, quality of family relationships, and deviant behavior were related to multiple victimization in adolescence.     

Family therapy in treatment of the deaf: a case report.

Deaf patients with psychological problems have developmental handicaps and clinical characteristics that reduce the effectiveness of traditional modes of psychotherapy. Attempts have been made to utilize individual and group therapy, but family therapy has been largely overlooked as a method of alleviating problems of the deaf. Clinical and research writings provide us with rich insights into the family dynamics of the deaf. These data suggest to the authors that the problems of deaf individuals are largely related to family problems, and therefore merit a family orientation as the focus for treatment. This paper describes an attempt to apply family therapy with a range of deaf patients over a period of two years. From a review of their work, the authors conclude that family therapy can be effective, particularly in the treatment of deaf adolescents and children.     

Computationally constructing a repository of compound remote associates test items in American English with comRAT-G

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) has been used to measure creativity, however few repositories or standardizations of test items exist, like the normative data on 144 items provided by Bowden and Jung-Beeman. comRAT is a computational solver which has been used to solve the compound RAT in linguistic and visual forms, showing correlation to human performance over the normative data provided by Bowden and Jung-Beeman. This paper describes using a variant of comRAT, comRAT-G, to generate and construct a repository of compound RAT items for use in the cognitive psychology and cognitive modeling community. Around 17 million compound Remote Associates Test items are created from nouns alone, aiming to provide control over (i) frequency of occurrence of query items, (ii) answer items, (iii) the probability of coming up with an answer, (iv) keeping one or more query items constant and (v) keeping the answer constant. Queries produced by comRAT-G are evaluated in a study in comparison with queries from the normative dataset of Bowden and Jung-Beeman, showing that comRAT-G queries are similar to the established query set.     

Inclusive victim consciousness predicts minority group members’ support for refugees and immigrants

What motivates minority group members to support other minorities, rather than compete for resources? We tested whether inclusive victim consciousness —i.e., perceived similarities between the ingroup's and outgroups’ collective victimization—predicts support for other minority groups; and whether personal and family experiences of group‐based victimization moderate these effects. Study 1 was conducted among members of historically oppressed groups in India. As hypothesized, inclusive victim consciousness predicted support for refugees. Personal experiences of group‐based victimization moderated this effect. Conceptually replicating these findings, in Study 2 (among Vietnamese Americans, mostly second‐generation immigrants) inclusive victim consciousness predicted less hostility toward other refugees and immigrants, and greater perceived responsibility to help victims of collective violence. This effect was moderated by family experiences of victimization.     

相对到达时间任务中飞行员对客体特征与运动特征的分离

相对到达时间任务(RAT)是判断两个运动客体哪个先到达指定目标, 可用来评估个体动态空间能力。采用RAT任务对飞行员与普通被试进行对照研究, 寻求发现两组在运动客体特征和视觉空间运动特征及其相互关系上的处理差异。设计了3个实验分别考察客体颜色、客体大小、运动方向、速率大小、视线方向以及背景特征对判断的影响。结果显示：(1)客体颜色不影响运动客体的相对时间判断, 客体大小、运动方向、速率大小、视线方向以及背景特征影响判断; (2)控制组对显示屏上从左到右的运动客体的相对时间判断好于从右到左任务, 大速率任务判断更好, 对大客体快速行驶而小客体低速行驶时的相对到达时间更易区分, 且与两眼视线方向不一致的运动方向会使控制组判断更难, 运动背景中的目标线特征改变使控制组判断绩效降低; (3)和控制组比, 飞行员反应快正确率高, 其快速判断优势集中体现在从右到左运动以及小速率任务上, 且在不同运动方向和不同速率上的反应时均无差异, 飞行员的处理优势还表现在不受客体大小、视线方向改变和目标线特征改变的影响。结论：飞行员能在变化的空间中准确处理相对速度、相对距离、相对时间等运动信息, 能分离客体大小、背景、运动方向等因素对相对到达时间判断的影响, 在运动空间中飞行员具有较高场独立性认知特征和动态空间处理能力。     

Profile of the Victimized Aggressor in Child-to-Parent Violence: Differences According to the Type of Victimization

Background/ObjectiveOne of the main predictors of child-to-parent violence (CPV) is childhood victimization. Recent research indicates the need to study different types of CPV aggressors. However, the distinctive characteristics of the profile of the victimized aggressor and whether these characteristics differ according to the type of victimization have not been yet analyzed. Were examined differences between four types of CPV aggressors: with family victimization, with school victimization, with polyvictimization, and without victimization experiences.MethodA total of 1,559 Spanish adolescents aged between 12 and 18 years participated.ResultsCompared to nonvictimized aggressors, victimized aggressors generally exercise more reactive and instrumental CPV and show more insecure parental attachment and less emotional and coping competencies. Additionally, among the types of victimization, polyvictimized aggressors show worse adjustment compared to those with a unique type of victimization. There are also significant differences according to the gender of the aggressor; however, the interaction effect between the type of aggressor and gender is not significant.ConclusionsConsidering the profile of the victimized aggressor and the type of victimization experienced in CPV can provide valuable empirical information for the approach of differential explanatory mechanisms and for the design of prevention and intervention strategies adapted to the needs of this profile.     

Familial Influences on Dating Violence Victimization Among Latino Youth

Despite theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting that the family environment plays a central role in Latino youth development, relatively little is known about how family processes influence dating violence victimization among Latino adolescents. To address this gap in the literature, we used data from 210 Latino parents and their 13- to 15-year-old adolescents to examine associations between several different family processes, including both parenting practices (parent monitoring, parent–adolescent communication) and aspects of the family relational climate (family cohesion, family conflict, acculturation conflict) and psychological, physical, and sexual dating violence victimization. Consistent with expectations, lower levels of family cohesion and higher levels of family and acculturation conflict were associated with risk for dating violence victimization, although associations varied depending on victimization type. In contrast, neither parental monitoring nor parent–adolescent communication was significantly associated with any type of dating violence victimization. In addition, we found that parent, but not teen, Anglo-American acculturation was associated with higher dating violence victimization risk. Findings suggest that family-based dating abuse prevention programs for Latino youth should seek to increase family cohesion and decrease family conflict, including acculturation-based conflict.     

Cross-Cultural Patterns of Student Victimization in Israel and Chile

School violence is a global concern that calls for international research using cross context methods. Although there are several international surveys that compare school violence across countries, they do not clearly address issues of similarities and differences in relative prevalence of different types of victimization and their relations with age, sex, and cultural group. We explored these questions among Israeli-Arab (n?=?13,606), Israeli-Jewish (n?=?10,637), and Chilean students in poor schools in a large Chilean city (n?=?4557), using the same self-report questionnaire that measures verbal-social victimization, victimization by threats, physical victimization, and sexual harassment. As hypothesized, we found similarities in the patterns of relative prevalence of victimization types, as well as study group, sex, and age main effects and interactions. These effects were evident even when the lowest third SES group in Israel was compared with the Chilean students. These findings suggest group differences in prevalence of student victimization, and at the same time cultural invariance in relative prevalence of victimization types and their relations with sex and age. We discuss the need for more international comparative research in this field that takes into account cultural values and the structure and organizations of schools within the different educational systems.     

Blended families/Sarah,Hagar, and all that...

A rabbi/chaplain listens to a 21st century woman tell about some complexities encountered in the blended family dynamics. He reminds her that such stressful phenomena are not as new as many believe, illustrating his point by interpreting the biblical account of Sarah and Hagar, noting particularly that some of the same decisions and actions taken in ancient times may still provide authentic insights to current family dynamics today.