Proximal and distal effects of play on child compliance with a brain-injured parent.

Individuals with brain injury may experience severe cognitive and other impairments. For brain‐injured parents, such deficits may be associated with child behavior problems, including noncompliance. We assessed the effects of a play period conducted by a brain‐injured father on the compliance of his son, who had become uncooperative with his father after the injury. The child consistently demonstrated improved compliance during proximal and distal compliance sessions that followed father‐son play periods.     

假装游戏研究:过去、现在及未来

本文全面回顾了儿童假装游戏研究的历史、儿童假装游戏的概念、发展以及普遍性与文化差异性等方面的研究成果,并重点分析与探讨了假装游戏研究的理论争议。最后探讨了这一领域需要进一步研究的问题,对今后研究的走向提出了展望。     

Effects of Group Activity Play Therapy on Problem Behaviors of Preadolescent Ugandan Orphans

This randomized controlled study examined the effectiveness of group activity play therapy (GAPT) with 60 displaced Ugandan orphans, ages 10 to 12 years, exhibiting clinical levels of behavior problems. Teachers and housemothers reported that experimental group children demonstrated statistically significant reductions (p < .025) in behavior problems compared with children in the active control condition and that GAPT demonstrated moderate to large treatment effects. Results support GAPT as an effective intervention for troubled Ugandan orphans.     

To Play or Not to Play: Diverse Motives for Latino and Euro‐American Parent–Child Play in a Children's Museum

A popular social discourse in the United States is that play is important for children's learning and that parental involvement maximizes play's learning potential. Past research has concluded that parents who hold this view of play are more likely to play with their children than those who do not. This study investigated the prevalence of this view among Euro‐American and immigrant Latino parents of young children in order to illuminate the extent to which it uniquely and uniformly motivates parent–child play. Parents' models of play were assessed through interviews and naturalistic observations in a children's museum. Analysis revealed ethnic group differences in parent–child play that corresponded with parental beliefs about play. Within‐group analysis, however, revealed diversity in the ways that these play behaviours and beliefs came together to comprise parents' models of play. Discussion focuses on the social nature of play, the dynamic nature of culture, and the issue of individual subject validity. Implications for the interpretation of parent–child play in early childhood settings are considered. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development ethics and evolving methods: a comparison of fair trade with the Millennium Villages Project

The motivations for rural and agricultural development in the twenty-first century are not different from previous centuries, but evolving technologies in the late twentieth century have altered many methods and institutional arrangements for accomplishing development. The internet has facilitated initiatives that in earlier decades would have required large, complex organizations in both donor and developing countries. We will compare the ethical and institutional strengths and weaknesses of two such initiatives in Malawi: a smallholder farmers organization involved in fair trade and the Millennium Village Project. These are two of a large array of institutions which are currently being used to benefit smallholder agricultural producers. We will examine their relative merits through the lenses of various ethical paradigms and show that the institutional arrangements of the two programs are complimentary in the evolution of agricultural trading systems linking the global north and south.     

A Meta‐Analytic Review of Child‐Centered Play Therapy Approaches

The authors explored the overall effectiveness of child‐centered play therapy (CCPT) approaches through a meta‐analytic review of 52 controlled outcome studies between 1995 and 2010. Hierarchical linear modeling techniques estimated a statistically significant moderate treatment effect size (.47) for CCPT, as well as statistically significant relationships between effect size and study characteristics, including child's age, child's ethnicity, caregiver involvement, treatment integrity, publication status, and presenting issue.     

More than just child’s play: symbolic expressions of illness and spirit

While spiritual well-being is integral to health, little is known about the spiritual lives of children in the context of illness. Because the spiritual is often a hidden domain of life, exploration of the topic can be challenging, especially when dealing with children. Language is not always sufficient for describing such deeply held experiences, even for adults. Therefore, finding creative ways to elicit experiences of the spiritual is important when attempting to gain a more robust understanding of this phenomenon. Drawing from a larger study that used hermeneutic phenomenology to explore spirituality among ill children, this paper provides an interpretation of ill children’s play experiences and describes how these experiences provide a means of uncovering the spiritual in children’s everyday lives as they cope with life-threatening illness. Findings also provide insight into how play can be used in the promotion of spiritual well-being.     

Beyond sincerity and pretense: role-playing and unstructured self in the Zhuangzi

This article engages with a recent view that the Daoist Classic Zhuangzi advances an alternative to the Confucian role-ethics. According to this view, Zhuangzi opposes the Confucian idea that we should play our social roles with sincerity and instead argues that we should take the liberty to detach ourselves from the roles we play and ‘pretend’ them. It is argued in this article that Zhuangzi’s ideal of role-playing is based neither on sincerity nor on pretense. Instead, it is akin to the excellence of theatre actors when they enact a role: they are able, for a limited time, to restructure their personality into a particular role, but de-structure it again when the performance is over. The prerequisite for this ability is to keep one’s self fundamentally unstructured, or, as Zhuangzi puts it, ‘empty’ (xu 虛). This reading of Zhuangzian role-playing provides a fresh perspectives on ‘playing’ or ‘rambling’ (you 遊) as the central philosophical concept in the Zhuangzi.     

Factors Related to Play Therapists' Social Justice Advocacy Attitudes

The authors used a correlational research design to examine how belief in a just world, political ideology, socioeconomic status of family of origin, and percentage of racial minority clients were related to social justice advocacy attitudes among play therapists. A multiple regression was used to analyze the data. Results indicated that belief in a just world and political ideology were related to social justice advocacy. Implications for play therapy training and future directions for research are discussed. Los autores emplearon un diseño correlacional de investigación para examinar cómo la creencia en un mundo justo, la ideología política, el estatus socioeconómico de la familia de origen y el porcentaje de clientes de minorías raciales estaban relacionados con actitudes de apoyo de la justicia social entre consejeros que usan terapia de juego. Se empleó una regresión múltiple para analizar los datos. Los resultados indicaron que la creencia en un mundo justo y la ideología política estaban relacionadas con la defensa de la justicia social. Se discuten las implicaciones para formación en terapia de juego y direcciones futuras para investigación.     

Enacting Actuarial Fairness in Insurance: From Fair Discrimination to Behaviour-based Fairness

ABSTRACT

In line with developments in the personalisation of risk, the idea that insurance products should above all be ‘fair’ to the policyholders is increasingly voiced by commentators. The performativity thesis in Science and Technology Studies usually used to study economic markets can be used to investigate different enactments of ‘actuarial fairness’ in insurance practice. Actuarial fairness functions as a technical economic concept and was coined by the neoclassical micro-economist Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017). Faced with anti-discrimination legislation, the insurance industry has, since the 1980s, advanced the principle of actuarial fairness to legitimise their medico-actuarial technologies to discriminate between risk groups. In the absence of this actuarial fairness, it is assumed that dynamics of adverse selection—derived from neoclassical assumptions about economic actors— will result in the bankruptcy of insurance providers. The paradigmatic case of Fairzekering, a showcase of contemporary behaviour-based personalisation in car insurance, demonstrates an important shift in how actuarial fairness is enacted through behaviour-based calculative devices. Here, policyholders are enacted as being personally in control of their driving style while an interactive discount-infrastructure is set up to provide real-time feedback to incentivize policyholders towards ‘good behaviour.’ This enactment of behaviour-based fairness simultaneously implies a shift in the enactment of the economic actors involved, constitutive of the making of new economic ideas in behavioural economics.