Personality profiling of South African rugby union players

This study aimed to investigate whether differences exist in the personality profiles of professional and semi-professional rugby union players. Participants were 73 male rugby players, 52 professional players and 21 semi-professional players. All participants completed the NEO Five-Factor Personality Inventory (NEO-FFI) as part of the WebNeuro Sport online assessment. An independent sample t-test showed a statistically significant difference in neuroticism between the professional and semi-professional players. The magnitude-based inference method confirmed the results of the independent sample t-test with a moderate effect. The potential practical value of these findings is that the Neuroticism scale of the Big Five personality dimensions can be used as a screening tool for indicating which players a team would want to recruit and invest time and money in since these players will most likely be capable of progressing to the top level in their sport.     

Models of Educational Career With and Without IQ Measurements

Path models of educational careers do not usually contain information about phenotypical intelligence levels. This may lead to an overestimation of direct environmental effects such as the educational level of the parents on the education attained by the children. This phenomenon was investigated on the basis of data describing educational level, occupational status, and intelligence measurements of 2,847 father-son pairs. The IQ was determined during testing for military service by means of a shortened version of Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. The results were twofold. When the son's IQ was included in the model describing his educational career, environmental effects due to the influence of the father were reduced. Adding the father's IQ to the model, however, did not affect the path coefficients of the variables that were predicted to be relevant for the son's education.     

Developing an outcome-based assessment for family therapy training: the Rochester Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation (ROSCE)

This paper addresses a growing need for cost-effective, outcome-based assessment in family therapy training. We describe the ROSCE, a structured, evidence-informed, learner-centered approach to the assessment of clinical skills developed at the University of Rochester Medical Center. The ROSCE emphasizes direct observation of trainees demonstrating clinical competencies. The format integrates both formative and summative assessment methods. It can readily be adapted to a wide variety of educational and training settings.     

Designing for Trust: A Case of Value-Sensitive Design

In this paper, we consider the meaning, roles, and uses of trust in the economic and public domain, focusing on the task of designing systems for trust in information technology. We analyze this task by means of a survey of what trust means in the economic and public domain, using the model proposed by Lewicki and Bunker, and using the emerging paradigm of value-sensitive design. We explore the difficulties developers face when designing information technology for trust and show how our analysis in conjunction with existing engineering design methods provides means to address these difficulties. Our main case concerns a concrete problem in the economic domain, namely the transfer of control from customs agencies to companies. Control of individual items is increasingly untenable and is replaced by control on the level of companies aimed at determining whether companies can be trusted to be in control of their business and to be in compliance with applicable regulations. This transfer sets the task for companies to establish this trust by means of information technology systems. We argue that this trust can be achieved by taking into account philosophical analyses of trust and by including both parties in the trust relationship as clients for whom the information technology systems are to be designed.     

Effects of country size and language similarity on international attitudes: a six-nation study

Linguistically similar neighbouring nations that differ in size are often asymmetrical in their attitudinal relations towards each other: Citizens of smaller nations tend to see larger nations as less likeable and less similar than vice versa. We hypothesized that the smaller nations' reaction is the consequence of a threatened identity due to its relative size combined with too much similarity on a vital part of its identity, namely language. To test this hypothesis, 832 high‐school students from six different ethnic/national entities (France, Germany, Austria, the French‐ and German‐speaking parts of Switzerland, the French‐ and Dutch‐speaking parts of Belgium, and The Netherlands) completed a questionnaire on liking and similarity ratings. The results—to a large extent—showed that differences in size, in combination with linguistic similarity with another nation, pose a threat to the identity of the smaller nation or ethnic group. Differences in size, in combination with linguistic similarity, were associated with asymmetries in mutual liking on one hand and asymmetrical perceptions of similarity to the other country on the other hand. The conclusions of this study are consistent with findings of earlier research and stress the importance of language for a nation's identity. Moreover, the findings support social identity theory as a useful theory for understanding intergroup and international relations.     

Spheres of Justice within Schools: Reflections and Evidence on the Distribution of Educational Goods

This article argues that there are distinct spheres of justice within education and examines a range of justice norms and distribution rules that characterize the daily life of schools and classrooms. Moving from the macro to micro level, we identify the following five areas: the right to education, the allocation of (or selection into) learning places, teaching–learning practices, teachers’ treatment of students, and student evaluations of grade distribution. We discuss the literature on the beliefs by students and teachers about the just distribution of educational goods in these five domains, and on the practices used in the actual allocation of these goods. In line with normative ‘spheres of justice’ arguments in social theory, we conclude that the ideals of social justice within schools vary strongly according to the particular resource to be distributed. Moreover, these ideals often do not correspond with the practices that actually guide resource distribution in education, which may go some way toward explaining explicit or latent conflicts in this sphere. Justice is a human construction, and it is doubtful that it can be made in only one way – Michael Walzer (1983, p. 5)