Religion and children with disabilities

Religion as a personal coping resource used by parents of infants and toddlers with disabilities has received some attention in recent literature. This exploratory study involved indepth interviews of 12 parents who had children with disabilities ranging in age from 15 months to 30 years. The ways in which religion can be used as a coping resource across the life-cycle are exemplified through excerpts from these interviews. Prayer, church attendance, and specific religious beliefs were identified as sources of support which helped some parents feel a growing sense of hope and strength. Suggestions for future research are discussed.Tess Bennett, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the University of Illinois College of Education, Department of Special Education; Deborah A. Deluca, B.A., is in the Department of Educational Psychology, and Robin W. Allen, M.S.W., is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Work at the same university.     

Private Announcements on Topological Spaces

In this work, we present a multi-agent logic of knowledge and change of knowledge interpreted on topological structures. Our dynamics are of the so-called semi-private character where a group G of agents is informed of some piece of information \(\varphi \), while all the other agents observe that group G is informed, but are uncertain whether the information provided is \(\varphi \) or \(\lnot \varphi \). This article follows up on our prior work (van Ditmarsch et al. in Proceedings of the 15th TARK. pp 95-102, 2015) where the dynamics were public events. We provide a complete axiomatization of our logic, and give two detailed examples of situations with agents learning information through semi-private announcements.     

Verbal Working Memory as a Longitudinal Mechanism of Vocabulary Problems in Preschoolers with ADHD

Elucidation of early potential risk factors of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is important to allow for early identification of ADHD and targeted early intervention for children with ADHD. Delayed language skills, particularly poor vocabulary, is an early-developing potential risk factor that is thought to be involved in developmental pathways to ADHD; however, mechanisms explaining the relationship between poor vocabulary skills and ADHD symptoms are unclear and warrant investigation. The present study examines the relationship between poor vocabulary skills and ADHD symptoms by testing cognitive mechanisms, namely verbal working memory (WM), that might account for this link. Participants were 109 young children between the ages of three and six and their primary caregivers. Diagnostic information on ADHD symptoms was available from parents and teachers/daycare providers via standardized rating forms. Vocabulary skills and WM were measured through child performance on laboratory tasks. Mediation analyses found poor verbal working memory significantly partially explained the vocabulary-ADHD association for both parent and teacher-rated ADHD symptoms. Further, effects of verbal WM on the association between poor vocabulary and increased ADHD symptoms largely held at one-year follow-up. Development of early interventions targeting verbal WM may be a promising new direction for early ADHD intervention work.     

He's a Laker; She's a “Looker”: The Consequences of Gender-Stereotypical Portrayals of Male and Female Athletes by the Print Media

Although an extensive qualitative literature shows that coverage of women's sport often focuses on female athletes' attractiveness (to the exclusion of their athleticism), there is a dearth of quantitative research examining exactly what effect this coverage has on people's perceptions of athletes. As part of a 2 (Gender of the Athlete: Female or Male) × 2 (Gender of the Participant: Female or Male) × 2 (Focus of the Article: Physical Attractiveness or Athleticism) between-subjects design, 92 predominantly White undergraduates (40 men, 52 women) read a fictitious newspaper profile about an Olympic athlete in which the article focused on the athlete's attractiveness (as coverage of female athletes often does) or on the athlete's athleticism (as coverage of male athletes often does). Interestingly, participants neither had favorable impressions of nor liked articles about female and male athletes when attractiveness was the main focus of an article. These findings suggest that the media should be cognizant of the harmful and erroneous impressions that can result from portraying athletes in terms of their personal attributes rather than their athletic accomplishments.     

Factor Structure of the Burden Interview

Zarit's Burden Interview is the most commonly used measure of burden among family caregivers for demented older adults, but has been criticized for its diverse item content and lack of correspondence to theoretically based multidimensional burden scales. The factor structure of this measure of burden was examined in a sample of 220 family caregivers of demented elderly. The implied 1-factor model and a 2-factor model proposed in the literature were not good fits to the data. Fourteen of the 21 nonglobal items were found to tap three underlying factors of Embarrassment/Anger, Patient's Dependency, and Self-criticism. This factor structure was replicated in a second sample of 108 caregivers. The relationship of these factors to latent factors identified in other multifactorial burden scales suggests a greater degree of convergence across measures than has been assumed.     

Family and Neighborhood Fit or Misfit and the Adaptation of Mexican Americans

In this study, a person-environment fit model was used to understand the independent and combined roles of family and neighborhood characteristics on the adjustment of adults and children in a sample of 750 Mexican American families. Latent class analysis was used to identify six qualitatively distinct family types and three quantitatively distinct neighborhood types using socioeconomic and cultural indicators at each level. The results showed that members of single-parent Mexican American families may be particularly at-risk, members of the lowest-income immigrant families reported fewer adaptation problems if they lived in low-income neighborhoods dominated by immigrants, members of economically successful immigrant families may be more at-risk in integrated middle class neighborhoods than in low-income neighborhoods dominated by immigrants, and members of two-parent immigrant families appear to be rather resilient in most settings despite their low socioeconomic status.     

Inspection time and everyday functioning: A longitudinal study

We tested whether level and/or changes in inspection time (IT) in an elderly sample (70–85 years at baseline) predicted future independence in everyday functioning, independent from chronological age. Sixty-eight participants were initially assessed on IT and cognitive abilities in 2003, reassessed on IT in 2005, and then completed the Everyday Problems Test, a test of independence in everyday living, in 2008. Controlling for age, lower fluid reasoning at baseline (Raven’s-subset) and slowing IT over 18 months independently predicted poorer everyday functioning in 2008, together accounting for one-third variance. This supports the proposition that IT has utility as a biomarker for less favourable ageing.     

Stress in youth sport: A developmental investigation of tennis parents

ObjectiveThis study investigated the stage-specific stressors experienced by British tennis parents whose children were situated either in the sampling, specializing or investment stages of participation in the sport [Côtè, J. (1999). The influence of the family in the development of talent in sport. The Sport Psychologist, 13, 395–417].Design and methodA qualitative design was employed with semi-structured interviews conducted with twenty two British tennis parents; six parents representing each of the first two stages of sports participation and ten representing the investment stage. Data was analyzed through a process of inductive content analysis following the method proposed by Miles and Huberman [Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis. London: Sage]. Data matrices were developed for each category of parent to allow for the comparison of the data between themes.Results and conclusionThree general dimensions of parental stressor emerged: Organizational, Competitive and Developmental. Organizational stressors included demands related to finance, time, training and coaching, and governing body systems; competitive stressors related to behavior, performance and morality-related issues associated with their child's matches; and developmental stressors centered on educational issues, uncertainty of tennis transitions, and future decision making. While sampling stage parents encountered few developmental stressors compared to later stage parents, a range of competitive stressors were highly prominent. Organizational stressors were particularly foremost for specializing and investment stage parents. Implications are discussed with reference to further research into the parental stress process and to the importance of stage-specific parent education initiatives.     

A video‐based procedure for the assessment of prospective memory

Prospective memory, or the everyday activity of remembering to remember, is frequently deficient in persons with brain injuries. However, few clinically useful measures of this ability are available. We report the results of three studies using student participants, conducted to examine the psychometric credentials of a video‐based method of assessing prospective remembering. This procedure requires participants to watch a video segment recorded moving through a shopping precinct and to recall preassigned instructions (e.g. ‘Buy a Big Mac at McDonald's’) in response to cues appearing on the videotape. Study 1 showed that the video procedure is reliable and easier to complete when the video footage is set in a familiar location. Study 2 confirmed that familiarity enhances recall and demonstrated that pre‐exposure to the unfamiliar video stimuli could partially attenuate this effect. In Study 3 it was found that performance on the video‐based task was correlated with performance on an equivalent real life memory task providing evidence for criterion validity. The findings from these studies demonstrate that clinical and experimental measures of prospective memory with high ecological validity can be constructed based on video recordings of everyday activities. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.