The relative influence of attitudes and subjective norms from childhood to adolescence: between-participant and within-participant analyses

Children and adolescents (ages 8-16) were asked to indicate their behavioral intentions, attitudes, and subjective norms for 34 behaviors. Between-participant and within-participant analyses demonstrated that attitudes and subjective norms were good predictors of behavioral intentions both singly and in combination. In addition, attitudes generally were better predictors than were subjective norms both across behaviors and across participants. Most importantly, however, there were no differences in the relative importance of attitudes and subjective norms in predicting behavioral intentions across age groups.     

Morphological analysis by child readers as revealed by the fragment completion task

Ten-year-old children performed a fragment completion task. Target fragments (e.g., T_ _N) were preceded by four types of study conditions. The identity condition consisted of the target (TURN). Themorphological condition included a related form (TURNED). The orthographic condition consisted of morphologically unrelated words (e.g., TURNIP). Finally, no similar word was presented in the study phase of the no-prime condition. Morphological relatives included orthographically transparent (TURNED-TURN) and orthographically opaque (RIDDEN-RIDE) forms. The results indicated that performance of child readers on the fragment completion task was sensitive to morphological relationships. Completion rates following opaque, as well as transparent, morphological relatives were significantly greater than those following orthographically similar forms. In sum, the fragment completion task provides a viable new tool for examining morphological processing in children and for differentiating morphological effects from effects of similar form.     

Measuring Professional Ethics in Coaching: Development of the PISC-Q

Sport is commonly lauded as the ideal place for participants to learn life skills. However, concerns related to the “win-centered” sport culture has spurred research into ethical behaviors in sport. The purpose of the present study was to create a measure of professional ethics in coaching. Students enrolled in a collegiate coaching education course (N = 766) responded to a series of vignettes related to common situations in the coaching profession. Results indicate the Professional Issues in Sport Coaching Questionnaire is an acceptable measure of situation specific professional ethics. Conclusions and directions for future research are discussed.     

Lessons learned from using shadowing as a qualitative research technique in Education

While shadowing is known in disciplines such as Organizational Studies, there is little reference to shadowing as a qualitative research technique in Education or other social science fields. This paper explores shadowing in the research literature and my experience collecting data using shadowing. Using my researcher journal and reflections, I present five lessons learned as a qualitative shadowing researcher in Education: shadowing is difficult, tiring and time consuming; shadowing is high stakes emotionally for the participants; participants have control during data collection, researchers have control with the results; shadowing researchers must manage relationships with the participants; and ethics in shadowing can be murky and researchers must make continuous ethical judgements while in the field.     

The Perspective of Islamic Fundamentalists and the Limits of Rational Choice Theory

How can we best understand Islamic fundamentalism? As fundamentalism has become an increasingly significant political force, many different interpretations have been offered, with fundamentalism explained as both a rational reaction against modernity and as a pathological retreat from reality. We argue here that part of the scholarly failure to understand and deal with the growth of religious fundamentalism results from a failure to recognize the importance of cognitive differences in worldviews held by fundamentalists. By providing an empirical analysis of how fundamentalists see the world—what we identify as a fundamentalist perspective—we hope to supply an important missing piece in the literature on fundamentalism. To do so, we utilized a narrative and survey interview technique to contrast the worldviews of fundamentalists with those of comparable Muslims who are not fundamentalists. Our analysis suggests Islamic fundamentalism attracts because it provides a basic identity, an identity which in turn provides the foundation for daily living. The fundamentalist perspective itself is best understood through reference to a worldview which makes no distinction between public and private, in which truth is revealed by revelation, and reason is subservient to religious doctrine. Religious dictates dominate on all basic issues, and only within the confines of the fundamentalist identity are choices decided by a cost/benefit calculus.     

School Context and Genetic Influences on Aggression in Adolescence

Genetic and environmental contributions to variation in aggression were examined using adolescents' self-reports of aggressive behavior. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health provided a sample of 1,515 pairs of adolescents in five genetically informative groups (i.e., monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, full siblings, half siblings, and unrelated siblings reared together). The analysis, a DeFries-Fulker regression within a hierarchical linear model, yielded findings on individual-level heritability (h2), shared environmental effects (c2), school-level effects, and school-level moderation of h2 and c2. The estimate of h2 for aggression in the full sample was .32, and c2 was .05. In the moderating effect, h2 increased and c2 decreased with greater school-level family warmth. Two effects on school means were found: Those schools with greater ethnic-racial heterogeneity had higher mean levels of aggression, and schools where students perceived greater family warmth had lower mean levels of aggression.     

Failed back surgeries and minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI) profiles

MMPI profiles were evaluated for 105 prospective surgical patients who had previously undergone surgery or other procedures for treatment of back pain. Patients were classified into groups having undergone zero, one, two, three, or four or more previous surgeries. While all groups demonstrated a characteristicsomatogenic profile, none of the MMPI validity or clinical scales significantly differentiated the groups and there was no relationship between increased number of surgeries and MMPI scale characteristics. These results support the nonoptimistic prognostication of thesomatogenic MMPI profile for surgical intervention for back pain but show no clear relationship of MMPI profile characteristics to degree of experience of previously failed surgery.     

Using behavior contracts to improve behavior of children and adolescents in multiple settings

Research has shown that behavior contracts, a form of contingency management, can promote a wide range of behavior changes for individuals in varied populations; however, relatively few studies have been conducted in nonacademic settings. In the context of two service projects, we evaluated the extent to which behavior contracts improved problem behavior for 11 children and adolescents in residential treatment facilities and foster homes using nonconcurrent multiple baseline across participants’ designs with three or more tiers and supplemental statistical analysis for each tier. Practitioners in each setting implemented individualized behavior contracts for 5 to 59 weeks. Results show that behavior improved substantially for six participants but was relatively unchanged for the other five participants. We discuss the limitations of this clinically driven study, as well as clinical implications of our mixed findings.