Latent Structure of the Sources of Mathematics Self-Efficacy

General social cognitive theory and its career-specific elaborations posit four primary sources through which self-efficacy beliefs are acquired and modified: personal performance accomplishments, vicarious learning, social persuasion, and physiological states and reactions. We present two studies exploring the dimensionality of these sources within the context of career-relevant mathematics activities. In Study 1, 295 college students completed measures of the source variables. Testing two- through five-factor models, we found strongest support for a four-factor latent structure of the efficacy sources. In Study 2, involving 481 high school students, a five-factor model fit the data well. We also found evidence of a higher order factor structure in both samples. Several directions for further research on the sources of efficacy information are considered, along with implications for career and academic interventions.     

The effects of life crisis on psychological adjustment

In this survey study the question was asked how "life crisis," social conditions, and ratings of quality of life are related to psychological adjustment. The survey included 454 residents, and data were collected on five social conditions: income, education, age, marital status, and religious participation; four ratings of life quality: family, personal life, income, and overall quality of life; the number of recent changes in the lives of the respondents; and two indicators of psychological adjustment. These data were analyzed with multivariate analyses of variance and stepwise regression. Life crisis was associated directly with psychological adjustment. Social conditions and life quality ratings also had significant effects. People with high life-crisis scores reported more psychological distress, and poor social conditions appeared to further exacerbate their adjustment problems. Regardless of the magnitude of the crisis, quality of life ratings had sizable effects on reports of psychological adjustment.     

Predicting the Everyday Life Events of Older Adults

Predicting the everyday life events of people is a relatively unexplored topic, although several major theoretical approaches deal with related issues. The dispositional approach would assign a causal role to personality, while the situational approach would locate causation in the person's environment. Variations on these two extreme themes invoke an interactionist interpretation. Beyond this, a genuinely transactional approach focuses on the enduring person-environment relationship established as people deal with major and everyday life events. This study investigated a wide range of predictors of daily positive, negative, and ill-health events over time in a sample of 206 older adults. Results showed that personality variables played only a minor role in predicting daily events, although an interaction between extraversion and social network size was significant. Background demographic variables and the major stressors of recent conjugal bereavement and physical disability played a role in daily event occurrences. Overall, the strongest degree of predictability of events came from the events themselves: The high degree of event stability over time indicated the value of a genuinely transactional model in understanding the occurrence of everyday events.     

Hopelessness in community-residing aged persons: a viable construct?

Previous work with the Geriatric Hopelessness Scale (GHS; Fry, 1984, 1986) suggests that it may be a useful measure of pessimism for a variety of domains among elderly persons. One hundred seven community-residing aged persons were individually administered the GHS and a variety of personality and cognitive functioning measures in an effort to further refine and validate the GHS. Results suggest very modest internal consistency and a poorly defined factor structure for the GHS, in contrast to earlier findings. Although the GHS failed to differentiate elderly persons by age, it was nonetheless related to self-esteem, depression, self-rated health, internality, morale, and life satisfaction. Taken together, these data indicate that the research and clinical utility of the GHS with community-residing aged persons may be more limited than previously believed.     

Some effects of positive life events on community mental health

Measures of positive and negative events were derived from a life-event inventory to test the predictions of an equilibrium model and a positive mental health model of psychological well-being. These measures were related to indicators of individual and community well-being with data obtained through a household survey of 454 residents. Residents who reported more negative events also reported more psychological distress and less positive adjustment. Positive events were associated with reports of positive adjustment. An analysis of census tract scores on life events revealed that the relative absence of positive events in census tracts was associated with higher service utilization rates to the community mental health center serving those tracts. The number of negative events was unrelated to service rates for census tracts but was related to several demographic indicators of well-being.     

Child performance on discrimination tasks: Effects of amount of stimulus variation

Two independently conducted studies investigated stimulus variation effects on children's discrimination learning. The stimuli in the first study were generated by a conjunctive rule and were presented in pairs. Mean trials to criterion was significantly lower for the single-feature change treatment (17.4) than for the multiple-feature change treatment (29.9). Single-feature change-treatment transfer scores were significantly higher only for stimuli that differed in terms of one of the features. The second study not only replicated the initial finding concerning the single-feature change treatment but also found that students made more errors in reaching criterion when stimuli were generated by an exclusive disjunctive rule and were presented singly. For all tasks, the single-feature change treatment with stimuli presented in pairs was accompanied by fewer errors to criterion than the other treatments.     

Walk the Talk: Financial Fairness in European Club Football

UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations represent the most restrictive regulatory intervention European club football has ever seen. Put simply, it demands from clubs to operate on the basis of their own football-related incomes. While the policy has attracted considerable attention from the economic and social sciences, very few contributions systematically investigate it from a philosophical-ethical perspective. The present paper fills this research gap by posing questions on FFP in relation to fair play as a normative concept. We draw on sport economic assessments concerning potential outcomes of FFP and argue that the policy should go beyond the mere pragmatic goal of promoting financial sustainability and truly aim for creating a level playing field, otherwise it should not be labeled ‘fair play’.     

Accuracy of Clinician Predictions of Future Self‐Harm: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis of Predictive Studies

Assessment of a patient after hospital‐treated self‐harm or psychiatric hospitalization often includes a risk assessment, resulting in a classification of high risk versus low risk for a future episode of self‐harm. Through systematic review and a series of meta‐analyses looking at unassisted clinician risk classification (eight studies; N = 22,499), we found pooled estimates for sensitivity 0.31 (95% CI: 0.18–0.50), specificity 0.85 (0.75–0.92), positive predictive value 0.22 (0.21–0.23), and negative predictive value 0.89 (0.86–0.92). Clinician classification was too inaccurate to be clinically useful. After‐care should therefore be allocated on the basis of a needs rather than risk assessment.