Parental investment in schooling: Evidence from a subsistence farming community in South Africa

Interviews were carried out amongst a cohort of 488 parents who lived as subsistence farmers in a remote and very poorly resourced region of South Africa. The majority of respondents had invested heavily in the education of their children, contrary to what might have been predicted from large family sizes and the economic and ecological pressures that families faced. There was little evidence of child specialization, in which educational investment might have been targeted more to some children than others in a family. However, relatively wide birth spacing may have made the financial and opportunity costs of schooling more manageable. This speculation is given some support by two findings: first, that the number of grades of schooling children complete before leaving increases significantly as birth spacing increases; second, that children who are still in school progress more rapidly as birth interval increases. Greater opportunities for the schooling of sons (made possible by low rates of migrant labour in the community), coupled with high opportunity costs associated with the schooling of daughters, made it likely that sons would be educated to a higher level than daughters. However, there was consistent evidence for gender equity in schooling patterns. This is attributed to the lower risk of financial and opportunity losses that are associated with rearing daughters in this particular community. Birth order exerted only modest effects on the decisions parents made about schooling their offspring. The investment strategy as a whole could be interpreted as “bet‐hedging” under conditions where events outside parental control prevented them from targeting investment to children who could be readily identified as having favourable educational and employment prospects. It is concluded that parents invest in their sons and daughters in a manner that can only be understood when the complexities of their particular social, economic, and ecological contexts are taken into account.     

Hilary Putnam's Dialectical Thinking: An Application to Fallacy Theory

In recent and not so recent years, fallacy theory has sustained numerous challenges, challenges which have seen the theory charged with lack of systematicity as well as failure to deliver significant insights into its subject matter. In the following discussion, I argue that these criticisms are subordinate to a more fundamental criticism of fallacy theory, a criticism pertaining to the lack of intelligibility of this theory. The charge of unintelligibility against fallacy theory derives from a similar charge against philosophical theories of truth and rationality developed by Hilary Putnam. I examine how Putnam develops this charge in the case of the conception of rationality pursued by logical positivism. Following that examination, I demonstrate the significance of this charge for how we proceed routinely to analyse one informal fallacy, the fallacy of petitio principii. Specifically, I argue that the significance of this charge lies in its issuance of a rejection of the urge to theorise in fallacy inquiry in general and petitio inquiry in particular. My conclusion takes the form of guidelines for the post-theoretical pursuit of fallacy inquiry.     

Exploring Community Mobilization in Northern Quebec: Motivators,Challenges, and Resilience in Action

Nunavimmiut (people of the land) are the Indigenous peoples of the northern peninsula of the province of Quebec. Communities of Nunavik and its regional organizations have been making concerted efforts in implementing community‐based strategies to support family wellbeing. These community strategies are grounded in many of the values underpinning community psychology: favoring empowerment‐oriented approaches, fostering community capacity, and transforming organizational cultures to allow for new modes of interaction, as well as new policies and practices that are grounded in community and culture. Despite the growing support and expectation for community mobilization, there is still very little research on the processes and challenges to such mobilization. In this study, we explored the unique challenges and facilitators to community endeavors in northern Quebec in order to better understand the complex dynamics and the strengths that Inuit build upon. We first used a focused ethnographic approach in the context of a 5‐year community mobilization project in Nunavik. We then conducted 12 individual interviews and two small group interviews with Inuit working on community‐based wellbeing‐oriented mobilization projects in four additional communities. Results expose how sociogeographical realities and colonialism influence the process of community mobilization. They also highlight the values and motivational factors that lead community members to move beyond these influences.     

Using the model statement to elicit verbal differences between truth tellers and liars amongst Arab interviewees: A partial replication of Leal,Vrij, Deeb,and Jupe (2018)

Leal, Vrij, Deeb, and Jupe (2018) found—with British participants—that a model statement elicited (a) more information and (b) a cue to deceit: After exposure to a model statement, liars reported significantly more peripheral information than truth tellers. We sought to replicate these findings with Arabs living in Israel. Truth tellers and liars reported a stand‐out event that they had (truth tellers) or pretended to have (liars) experienced in the last 2 years. Half of the participants were given a model statement in the second phase of the interview. Replicating Leal et al. (2018a), (a) truth tellers reported more core details than liars initially and (b) a model statement resulted in more additional core and peripheral details in the second phase of the interview. Unlike in Leal et al. (2018a), a model statement did not have a differential effect on truth tellers in the current experiment.     

Training needs among nonmental health professionals working with service members: A qualitative investigation

Though many service members will not directly seek mental health care due to stigma and other factors, they may interact with the healthcare system in other ways including contact with first responders, nurses, and allied health care professionals. However, little attention has been spent in this regard on the educational needs of these professionals whose contact with service members and Veterans may provide the opportunity to assist Veterans in need with overcoming barriers to accessing mental health care. This qualitative study investigates the educational training needs of first responders and health care professionals in contact with military families and trauma survivors to determine whether, and what type, of additional training is needed. A sample of 42 first responders and health care professionals including emergency medical technicians, police officers, fire fighters, speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and nurses were recruited to participate in 1 of 6 focus groups. Sessions were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Data analysis was guided by a thematic analysis approach. Thematic analyses suggest there is a significant knowledge gap with unmet educational needs of these professionals such as information on the invisible wounds of war, military culture, and screening and referring patients who present symptoms falling outside professionals’ scope of practice. Findings point to a need and desire for more robust education for first responders and health care providers around mental health concerns of military populations, including topics such as trauma, military culture, and screening tools. Efforts to develop curricula addressing these concerns are warranted.     

Debating brain drain: Three objections that complicate the picture

In my contribution to this brain drain debate sparked by Brock and Blake’s book, Debating Brain Drain, I respond only to Brock’s position, and raise three objections which I suggest complicate the picture that she sketches. First, I take issue with the way in which she frames the moral question, namely by limiting her focus to what home countries may legitimately do to address the problems associated with the brain drain. I argue that the way in which she frames the question has important ideological consequences, because she does not adequately account for the larger context, in particular, by leaving out the moral obligations of the host countries who are the main beneficiaries of the brain drain. My second objection is rooted in the distinction between technical knowledge and practical knowledge found in the work of Habermas – an important distinction which gets obscured in Brock’s analysis in precisely the kind of ideological ways that Habermas was concerned about. She namely attempts to solve what are mainly practical (political) problems through purely instrumental, technical means. Several distortions accompany this fundamental confusion. My third point of critique has to do with the problem that an ethics of care (an ethics of responsibility and obligation) encounters within a liberal paradigm strongly shaped by an ethics of rights. Drawing on the work of Kroeger-Mappes, I argue that Brock arbitrarily singles out a group of people and holds them to an ethics of care which is strictly supererogatory within her own liberal paradigm.     

The role of working memory in decoding emotions

Decoding facial expressions of emotion is an important aspect of social communication that is often impaired following psychiatric or neurological illness. However, little is known of the cognitive components involved in perceiving emotional expressions. Three dual task studies explored the role of verbal working memory in decoding emotions. Concurrent working memory load substantially interfered with choosing which emotional label described a facial expression (Experiment 1). A key factor in the magnitude of interference was the number of emotion labels from which to choose (Experiment 2). In contrast the ability to decide that two faces represented the same emotion in a discrimination task was relatively unaffected by concurrent working memory load (Experiment 3). Different methods of assessing emotion perception make substantially different demands on working memory. Implications for clinical disorders which affect both working memory and emotion perception are considered.