From Victim to Perpetrator of Trauma: Lived Experiences of Gang-Involved Urban Refugee Youth in Kenya

Somali children and youth in displacement are exposed to prolonged trauma and chronic violence. In spite of a striking link among trauma, gang activities, victimization, and perpetration of violence, however, few studies have been conducted with Somali refugee youth in low-resource urban settings. This qualitative study demonstrates how prolonged trauma shapes ecological conditions of refugee life that induce vulnerable youth to forge support systems through gang membership and violence. The accession of the challenges, from loss of family, to discrimination and police brutality, and to chronic impoverishment, forces the high-risk refugee youth to replicate the various forms of violence to which they have been exposed to survive. Undergoing such chronic and cumulated trauma, these youth continue to normalize and become further desensitized to violence. The systems perspective of this study expands understanding of the intersection of trauma and gang membership and implies the need for an expanded approach to trauma and understanding of the complexities of gang involvement, beyond posttraumatic stress disorder treatment and clinical intervention.     

DARMA: Software for dual axis rating and media annotation

Continuous measurement systems provide a means of measuring dynamic behavioral and experiential processes as they play out over time. DARMA is a modernized continuous measurement system that synchronizes media playback and the continuous recording of two-dimensional measurements. These measurements can be observational or self-reported and are provided in real-time through the manipulation of a computer joystick. DARMA also provides tools for reviewing and comparing collected measurements and for customizing various settings. DARMA is a domain-independent software tool that was designed to aid researchers who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of behavior and experience. It is especially well-suited to the study of affective and interpersonal processes, such as the perception and expression of emotional states and the communication of social signals. DARMA is open-source using the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is available for free download from http://darma.jmgirard.com.     

Deciding between accounts of the selection task: A reply to Oaksford (2002)

In this paper we report on our attempts to fit the optimal data selection (ODS) model (Oaksford & Chater, 1994; Oaksford, Chater, & Larkin, 2000) to the selection task data reported in Feeney and Handley (2000) and Handley, Feeney, and Harper (2002). Although Oaksford (2002b) reports good fits to the data described in Feeney and Handley (2000), the model does not adequately capture the data described in Handley et al. (2002). Furthermore, across all six of the experiments modelled here, the ODS model does not predict participants' behaviour at the level of selection rates for individual cards. Finally, when people's probability estimates are used in the modelling exercise, the model adequately captures only 1 out of 18 conditions described in Handley et al. We discuss the implications of these results for models of the selection task and claim that they support deductive, rather than probabilistic, accounts of the task.     

The reliability and validity of Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices for Irish apprentices

The Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) is a 'test of a person's capacity at the time of the test to apprehend meaningless figures presented for his observation, see the relations between them, conceive the nature of the figure completing each system of relations presented and, by so doing, develop a systematic method of reasoning' (Raven et al., 1983, p. 2). It was developed in Britain in the mid-1930s (see Penrose and Raven, 1936) as a non-verbal measure of Spearman's 'g' factor, eduction of relations among abstract items.