Assessing the Helpfulness of One Parenting Assistance Helpline

This study examined the services provided by one statewide warmline established to assist parents and caregivers of children from birth through adolescence. Warmlines offer telephone-based, non-crisis support for individuals experiencing diverse issues that include parenting questions and concerns. The University of Alabama Child Development Resources collaborated with the Alabama State Department of Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention to institute the Parenting Assistance Line to provide information and support to parents and caregivers of children, age birth through adolescence. Overall, the staff of the Parenting Assistance Line responded to 9487 calls during the 6 years of data reported here. Through a secondary data analysis of calls to the Parenting Assistance Line from June 2007 to July 2013, this study describes the concerns of callers in relation to the ages of the children about whom they are calling and also evaluates the perceptions of the helpfulness of the information and support provided by the warmline. We found that frequently calls involved parent support and parental stress for parents and caregivers of children from infancy through adolescence. The findings suggest that telephone assistance lines offer a viable choice for parents and caregivers seeking affordable and accessible resources when stressed by the responsibilities of caring for children and adolescents and/or seeking information related to parenting issues. The study identified the limitations of research involving secondary data collected for purposes other than research that program administrators and evaluators should consider when planning and implementing services of this nature.     

Complementary and supplementary fit: a theoretical and empirical integration

Complementary and supplementary fit represent 2 distinct traditions within the person-environment fit paradigm. However, these traditions have progressed in parallel but separate streams. This article articulates the theoretical underpinnings of the 2 traditions, using psychological need fulfillment and value congruence as prototypes of each tradition. Using a sample of 963 adult employees ranging from laborers to executives, the authors test 3 alternative conceptual models that examine the complementary and supplementary traditions. Results show that an integrative model dominates the other two, such that both traditions simultaneously predict outcomes in different ways.     

Assessing Parenting Skills and Attitudes: A Review of the Psychometrics of Parenting Measures

There are many measures that assess parenting skills or practices, such as behavior, beliefs, coping mechanisms, reactions to stress, or discipline. However, little is known about the psychometric quality of these parenting measures. This information is essential for practitioners and researchers to aide in the selection of the most valid and reliable measures to assess parenting behavior or attitudes. This study examined the psychometric quality among parenting measures published from 1985 to 2009. After the initial search 164 measures were identified, but were reduced to 25 measures that supplied some degree of psychometric information, were published in the United States or Canada, and were in English. Measures were compared across numerous categories including respondent type, norming data, administration type, and ten psychometric variables such as internal consistency, content validity, and predictive validity. Out of the 25 measures, seven had no acceptable psychometric properties, seven had only 1–2 acceptable ratings on psychometric properties, six had between 3 and 4 acceptable psychometric ratings, none had between 5 and 6 acceptable ratings, and only five had strong psychometric properties in seven or more of the 10 categories. Likewise, only five measures provided and norming information and 14 measures provided scoring procedures. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Recruiting (Dis)Advantage: Men’s Versus Women’s Evaluations of Gender-Based Targeted Recruitment

Sex Roles - Organizations use targeted recruitment to attract applicants with specific demographic characteristics to diversify the workforce. Research reports mixed findings regarding the extent...     

Estimates of the Validity and Utility of the Conners’ Continuous Performance Test in the Assessment of Inattentive and/or Hyperactive-Impulsive Behaviors in Children

This study evaluated the validity and classification utility of the Conners' Continuous Performance Test (CCPT) in the assessment of inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive behaviors in children. Significant, positive correlations between the CCPT parameters and behavioral ratings of ADHD behaviors were hypothesized. In addition, it was hypothesized that the CCPT parameters would perform better than a random test (chance) and show fair to moderate utility of classification across the different indices. Participants were 104 children between 6 and 12 years of age who were referred for evaluation of attention problems. The first hypothesis was not supported. There were no significant, positive correlations between the CCPT parameters and parent and teacher ratings of inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive behaviors. The second hypothesis was only partially supported. The CCPT Overall Index and the Omission Errors (84th percentile cutoff) performed better than a random test; however, the utility of the CCPT Overall Index only ranged from poor to slight. Receiver operating characteristic analyses showed the accuracy of the CCPT to be low. The implications and limitations of this study and future research directions are discussed.     

Testing the generality of the zoom-lens model: Evidence for visual-pathway specific effects of attended-region size on perception

There are volumes of information available to process in visual scenes. Visual spatial attention is a critically important selection mechanism that prevents these volumes from overwhelming our visual system’s limited-capacity processing resources. We were interested in understanding the effect of the size of the attended area on visual perception. The prevailing model of attended-region size across cognition, perception, and neuroscience is the zoom-lens model. This model stipulates that the magnitude of perceptual processing enhancement is inversely related to the size of the attended region, such that a narrow attended-region facilitates greater perceptual enhancement than a wider region. Yet visual processing is subserved by two major visual pathways (magnocellular and parvocellular) that operate with a degree of independence in early visual processing and encode contrasting visual information. Historically, testing of the zoom-lens has used measures of spatial acuity ideally suited to parvocellular processing. This, therefore, raises questions about the generality of the zoom-lens model to different aspects of visual perception. We found that while a narrow attended-region facilitated spatial acuity and the perception of high spatial frequency targets, it had no impact on either temporal acuity or the perception of low spatial frequency targets. This pattern also held up when targets were not presented centrally. This supports the notion that visual attended-region size has dissociable effects on magnocellular versus parvocellular mediated visual processing.