Developing Measures of Community-Relevant Outcomes for Violence Prevention Programs: A Community-Based Participatory Research Approach to Measurement

Community-Based Participatory Research is a research paradigm that encourages community participation in designing and implementing evaluation research, though the actual outcome measures usually reflect the “external” academic researchers’ view of program effect and the policy-makers’ needs for decision-making. This paper describes a replicable process by which existing standardized psychometric scales commonly used in youth-related intervention programs were modified to measure indicators of program success defined by community partners. This study utilizes a secondary analysis of data gathered in the context of a community-based youth violence prevention program. Data were retooled into new measures developed using items from the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire, the Hare Area Specific Self-Esteem Scale, and the Youth Asset Survey. These measures evaluated two community-defined outcome indicators, “More Parental Involvement” and “Showing Kids Love.” Results showed that existing scale items can be re-organized to create measures of community-defined outcomes that are psychometrically reliable and valid. Results also show that the community definitions of parent or parenting caregivers exemplified by the two indicators are similar to how these constructs have been defined in previous research, but they are not synonymous. There are nuanced differences that are important and worthy of better understanding, in part through better measurement.     

Psychological Aspects of Aging Edited by John E. Anderson

Supervision and training groups have advantages over dyadic supervision and training that include factors to promote group learning and interaction within a sociocultural context. This article focuses on the gender aspects of group supervision and training. It provides a review of feminist theoretical developments and presents their application to group supervision and training in the form of eight guidelines that are illustrated by clinical examples.     

Cancer survivors’ and partners’ key concerns and quality of life

Objective: Understanding the concerns of cancer survivors is essential for effective interventions. This study was designed to identify the primary concerns of dyads coping with cancer, how concerns differed by role and sex, and whether concerns expressed during counselling were associated with survivors’ psychosocial well-being and adjustment.

Design: Forty-three dyads with breast and prostate cancer (N = 86 participants) were enrolled in an interpersonal telephone counselling intervention. Audio recordings of 228 counselling sessions were transcribed and content analysed qualitatively to identify major themes and key concerns. A total of three 30-min sessions were coded for each study participant. Quantitative data and statistical analyses were used to predict changes in survivors’ quality of life.

Main Outcome Measures: Participants completed psychosocial well-being measures (depression, positive/negative affect, and relationship satisfaction), pre- and post-counselling.

Results: Survivors’ concerns focused on cancer- and treatment-related issues, whereas partners’ concerns centred on the well-being of their spouse/partner with cancer, and what they were doing to help their loved one cope with his/her illness. Key concerns for all consisted of relationship maintenance and communication issues. Further, discussion of these concerns was predictive of significant improvements in adjustment post-counselling for women with breast cancer.

Conclusion: Discussion of interpersonal concerns may play a more important role in the well-being of women, than men, coping with cancer.     

A three-phase model of retirement decision making

The present article organizes prominent theories about retirement decision making around three different types of thinking about retirement: imagining the possibility of retirement, assessing when it is time to let go of long-held jobs, and putting concrete plans for retirement into action at present. It also highlights important directions for future research on retirement decision making, including perceptions of declining person-environment fit, the role of personality traits, occupational norms regarding retirement, broader criteria for assessing older workers' job performance, couples' joint decision making about retirement, the impact of self-funded and self-guided pension plans on retirement decisions, bridge employment before total withdrawal from the work force, and retirement decisions that are neither entirely forced nor voluntary in nature.     

The learnability of abstract syntactic principles

Children acquiring language infer the correct form of syntactic constructions for which they appear to have little or no direct evidence, avoiding simple but incorrect generalizations that would be consistent with the data they receive. These generalizations must be guided by some inductive bias – some abstract knowledge – that leads them to prefer the correct hypotheses even in the absence of directly supporting evidence. What form do these inductive constraints take? It is often argued or assumed that they reflect innately specified knowledge of language. A classic example of such an argument moves from the phenomenon of auxiliary fronting in English interrogatives to the conclusion that children must innately know that syntactic rules are defined over hierarchical phrase structures rather than linear sequences of words (e.g., [Chomsky, 1965] , [Chomsky, 1971] , [Chomsky, 1980] and [Crain and Nakayama, 1987] ). Here we use a Bayesian framework for grammar induction to address a version of this argument and show that, given typical child-directed speech and certain innate domain-general capacities, an ideal learner could recognize the hierarchical phrase structure of language without having this knowledge innately specified as part of the language faculty. We discuss the implications of this analysis for accounts of human language acquisition.     

Secondary migration and relocation among African refugee families in the United States

The purpose of this study was to understand the secondary migration and relocation of African refugees resettled in the United States. Secondary migration refers to moves out of state, while relocation refers to moves within state. Of 73 recently resettled refugee families from Burundi and Liberia followed for 1 year through ethnographic interviews and observations, 13 instances of secondary migration and 9 instances of relocation were identified. A family ecodevelopmental framework was applied to address: Who moved again, why, and with what consequences? How did moving again impact family risk and protective factors? How might policies, researchers, and practitioners better manage refugees moving again? Findings indicated that families undertook secondary migration principally for employment, affordable housing, family reunification, and to feel more at home. Families relocated primarily for affordable housing. Parents reported that secondary migration and relocation enhanced family stability. Youth reported disruption to both schooling and attachments with peers and community. In conclusion, secondary migration and relocation were family efforts to enhance family and community protective resources and to mitigate shortcomings in resettlement conditions. Policymakers could provide newly resettled refugees jobs, better housing and family reunification. Practitioners could devise ways to better engage and support those families who consider moving.     

Effect of different external attention of focus instruction on learning of golf putting skill

The effect of different sources of external attentional focus on learning a motor skill was assessed in the present study. 30 students (12 men, 18 women) participated voluntarily and were divided, according to type of external focus, into target, club swing, and target-club swing groups. The task was a golf putting skill. The target focus group attended to the target (hole), the club swing focus group attended to the execution of the club's swing, and the target-club swing focus group attended to both. All participants performed 50 trials of the putting skill in the acquisition phase and 10 trials in the 24-hr. delayed retention phase. The dependent variable was the error in the putting skill measured as the distance from the hole to the ball after each strike. Results showed the target-club swing focus group had better scores in the acquisition and retention phases than the other groups. It was concluded that external focus instruction helped the learners to integrate target cue with action cue and is more effective in skill learning than other external-focus instructions. These results support the claims of ecological psychology theorists concerning the effects of external focus of attention.     

Psychometric Properties of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales in an Undergraduate Sample: Classical Test Theory,Item Response Theory,and Differential Item Functioning

The Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales are widely used for assessing schizotypy in nonclinical and clinical samples. However, they were developed using classical test theory (CTT) and have not had their psychometric properties examined with more sophisticated measurement models. The present study employed item response theory (IRT) as well as traditional CTT to examine psychometric properties of four of the schizotypy scales on the item and scale level, using a large sample of undergraduate students (n = 6,137). In addition, we investigated differential item functioning (DIF) for sex and ethnicity. The analyses revealed many strengths of the four scales, but some items had low discrimination values and many items had high DIF. The results offer useful guidance for applied users and for future development of these scales.