Standards and Separatism: The Discursive Construction of Gender in English Soccer Coach Education

Affirmative action is a problematic, but common, organizational approach to redressing gender discrimination as it fails to address discourses underlying organizational definitions and practices in highly masculinized sites like English football. Unstructured interviews with 27 key personnel and participants in coach education in the north of England within a regional “division” of the organization regulating English football (“The FA”) were conducted to explore the gendered construction and enactment of football and coaching, and the framing of women-only (separatist) coaching courses. Critical discourse analysis identified the deployment of discourses concerning the undermining of standards and the privileging of women as strategies used to neutralize the significance of gender and previous gender discrimination, while re/producing the centrality of masculinity for key definitions and identities. This paper is based on Beth Fielding-Lloyd’s Ph.D. dissertation undertaken at the Centre for Human Communication, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK under the supervision of Dr. Lindsey Mean. Authors are listed alphabetically.     

Unpacking Prevention Capacity: An Intersection of Research-to-practice Models and Community-centered Models

Capacity is a complex construct that lacks definitional clarity. Little has been done to define capacity, explicate components of capacity, or explore the development of capacity in prevention. This article represents an attempt to operationalize capacity and distinguish among types and levels of capacity as they relate to dissemination and implementation through the use of a taxonomy of capacity. The development of the taxonomy was informed by the capacity literature from two divergent models in the field: research-to-practice (RTP) models and community-centered (CC) models. While these models differ in perspective and focus, both emphasize the importance of capacity to the dissemination and sustainability of prevention innovations. Based on the review of the literature, the taxonomy differentiates the concepts of capacity among two dimensions: level (individual, organizational, and community levels) and type (general capacity and innovation-specific capacity). The proposed taxonomy can aid in understanding the concept of capacity and developing methods to support the implementation and sustainability of prevention efforts in novel settings.     

Is aversive learning a marker of risk for anxiety disorders in children?

Aversive conditioning and extinction were evaluated in children with anxiety disorders (n=23), at-risk for anxiety disorders (n=15), and controls (n=11). Participants underwent 16 trials of discriminative conditioning of two geometric figures, with (CS+) or without (CS-) an aversive tone (US), followed by 8 extinction trials (4 CS+, 4 CS-), and 8 extinction re-test trials averaging 2 weeks later. Skin conductance responses and verbal ratings of valence and arousal to the CS+/CS- stimuli were measured. Anxiety disordered children showed larger anticipatory and unconditional skin conductance responses across conditioning, and larger orienting and anticipatory skin conductance responses across extinction and extinction re-test, all to the CS+ and CS-, relative to controls. At-risk children showed larger unconditional responses during conditioning, larger orienting responses during the first block of extinction, and larger anticipatory responses during extinction re-test, all to the CS+ and CS-, relative to controls. Also, anxiety disordered children rated the CS+ as more unpleasant than the other groups. Elevated skin conductance responses to signals of threat (CS+) and signals of safety (CS-; CS+ during extinction) are discussed as features of manifestation of and risk for anxiety in children, compared to the specificity of valence judgments to the manifestation of anxiety.     

The impact of the social context on resistance to persuasion: Effortful versus effortless responses to counter-attitudinal information

Past research has demonstrated that the presence of attitudinal diversity within a person’s social network increases his or her openness to attitude change. The current research explores whether this increased openness to attitude change is the result of relatively thoughtful or nonthoughtful processes. A nationally representative sample of US adults was exposed to a counter-attitudinal persuasive message that contained either strong or weak arguments. Attitudinal diversity within participants’ social networks was associated with greater argument quality differentiation: people embedded in networks that included a variety of views were more likely than those in attitudinally homogenous networks to carefully scrutinize attitude-relevant information, modifying their attitudes in response to strong but not weak arguments.     

Infant Distress During Immunization: A Multimethod Assessment

The purpose of this study was to comprehensively describe infant procedural distress and pain across assessment modalities, and to compare similarities and differences across measures. A multimethod assessment of distress was conducted to investigate infants (N = 37) undergoing routine immunizations. Measures of infant distress included Parent report, nurse report, infant heart rate, and an observational measure of infant distress. Parents rated their infant's distress and pain significantly higher than did nurses. Observational and physiological ratings of infant distress were found to vary significantly by phase, and there were no correlations between adult ratings of pain and distress and physiological ratings. Findings suggest that infant procedural distress can be assessed in a number of manners. The discordance between these measures emphasizes the need for multimethod assessment of pediatric procedural distress in both research and clinical settings. Given the differences between parent and nurse ratings, clinicians should be aware that different assessment methods might lead to different conclusions about infant procedural distress.     

Choosing to Enter or Avoid Diagnostic Social Situations

ABSTRACT— Three studies suggest that people control the nature of their relationships, in part, by choosing to enter (or avoid) situations providing feedback about other people's social interest. In Study 1 , chronically avoidant individuals (but not others) preferred social options that would provide no information about other people's evaluations of them over social options that would, but did not prefer nondiagnostic situations more generally. In Study 2 , chronically avoidant students (but not others) in a methods class preferred to have their teacher assign them to working groups (a nondiagnostic situation) over forming their own groups (a diagnostic situation). In Study 3 , individuals experimentally primed to feel avoidant were less likely than those primed to feel secure to choose to receive feedback about how another person felt about them. Overall, the research suggests that choices of socially diagnostic versus socially nondiagnostic situations play an important role in guiding people's social relationships.     

Offering more support than we seek

Two studies provide evidence that, in friendships, people offer support to partners more often than they request identical support for themselves. In one study, people reported being more likely to offer different types of support (e.g., a ride to a train station) than to request identical support. This effect was more pronounced for casual than established friendships. In a second study, people assigned randomly to be in a position to give support or to seek identical support from a friend gave more support than they sought. The observed asymmetry is attributed to people balancing desires to establish and strengthen communal relationships against desires to protect the self from rejection, not to people being inherently more unselfish than selfish.     

A Social Disorganization Perspective on Bullying-Related Attitudes and Behaviors: The Influence of School Context

Social disorganization theory suggests that certain school-level indictors of disorder may be important predictors of bullying-related attitudes and behaviors. Multilevel analyses were conducted on bullying-related attitudes and experiences among 22,178 students in 95 elementary and middle schools. The intraclass correlation coefficients indicated that 0.6–2% of the variance in victimization, 5–10% of the variance in retaliatory attitudes, 5–6% of the variance in perceptions of safety, and 0.9% of the variance in perpetration of bullying was associated with the clustering of students within schools. Although the specific associations varied somewhat for elementary schools as compared to middle schools, the hierarchical linear modeling analyses generally suggested that school-level indicators of disorder (e.g., student–teacher ratio, concentration of student poverty, suspension rate, and student mobility) were significant predictors of bullying-related attitudes and experiences. Student-level characteristics (i.e., sex, ethnicity, status in school) were also relevant to students’ retaliatory attitudes, perceptions of safety, and involvement in bullying. Implications for school-based research and violence prevention are provided.     

Patient inquiry into mental hospitalization: a quantitative analysis.

In this section we have assembled a small collection of data concerned with the issue of whether or not adolescents would profit from reflective inquiry into the closed area of mental health care. We have analyzed, arranged and interpreted the data from our study and conclude it demonstrates that adolescent inpatients did profit substantially from a reflective inquiry into mental health care. The number of subjects involved in this experimental program was small. The subjects of the experimental program were not selected randomly. Moreover, the researcher could not control for a number of intervening variables. For this particular group the intervening variables were many: changes in the subjects' individual treatment program, level of tranquilizing medication, attitude of other staff toward the experimental program, relations with parents or relatives, et cetera. This list covers some of the more important weaknesses of the experimental design. In the account of the experiment we reported the influence of other significant intervening variables as they emerged during the course of the study. Even with these important limitations the total push of the results in the direction of our argument compels us to conclude that it is clearly profitable for adolescent inpatients to reflectively inquire into the closed area of mental health care. Although the data reported here are not of predictive value, we believe they indicate the importance of having adolescent inpatients reflectively examine their social situation.     

Perfectionism, depression, and academic performance

In samples of 30 Canadian and 117 American undergraduates, academic performance was more strongly correlated with perfectionism scores (Revised Almost Perfect Scale) (r = .20 and -.17) than with those on self-reported depression (CES-Depression) (r = -.09).