Virtuality,Technology Use,and Engagement Within Organizations

Multinational organizations are turning to collaborative technology to enable virtual organizational structures. While collaborative technology provides distributed workers with new affordances to form relationships and share knowledge, collaborative technology also has complex, interwoven implications for virtual organizing. To disentangle these concerns, this study considers four key dimensions of virtuality—spatial dispersion, temporal dispersion, dynamic structure, and functional diversity—in relation to technology use and engagement with peers within an organization. Survey data were collected in a multinational organization that facilitates work through extensive use of collaborative technology. The results of structural equation modeling reveal connections between two dimensions of virtuality, use of collaborative technology and peer engagement in the organization. Findings suggest that understanding interactions in virtual organizations requires a more nuanced approach to virtuality and active management of technology implementation. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that managers need to actively manage the deployment of new collaborative technology by focusing on specific characteristics of work groups.     

Sharing the Stories of Racism in Doctoral Education: The Anti-Racism Project

Racism Project. Through shared journaling and group discussions, participants explored and interrogated experiences of racism related to doctoral education. A thematic analysis of qualitative data surfaced several themes: experiences with racism as a doctoral student, noticing the presence of White privilege, learning to teach as an anti-racist educator, and anticipating the job market. Through critical reflection, participants identified ways that schools of social work can better support doctoral students and prepare leaders committed to promoting racial justice.     

Multiple dimensions of family engagement in early childhood education: Evidence for a short form of the Family Involvement Questionnaire

The primary aim of this study was to develop and validate a short form of the 42-item Family Involvement Questionnaire (FIQ) for use in preschool. Empirical evidence derived from a representative sample of preschool programs in a large city in New York State with the original version of the FIQ was used to select the items for a 21-item short form. A representative sample of 590 Head Start families was also identified from a large Head Start program in Pennsylvania to serve to validate the short form. Confirmatory factor analysis of the short form substantiated the three robust dimensions of family involvement from the original FIQ. Concurrent measures of parental satisfaction and assessments of children's literacy and mathematics skills along with an examination of family demographic variables supported the validity of the confirmed dimensions. Implications for the use of this multidimensional, short form of family involvement in large-scale program evaluation were discussed.     

What’s in a Name: Differential labelling of plant and animal photographs in two nationally syndicated elementary science textbook series

This study investigated plant and animal photographs in elementary science textbooks to discern whether there were disparities in the number of plant and animal photographs or in how those photographs were labelled. We examined the Life Science sections of two nationally syndicated (USA) textbook series. For each text, we identified the photographs with plant and/or animal content and evaluated them for two features: (1) the subject of the photograph, and (2) the specificity of the label (name) provided. We found that photographs with animal subjects were more numerous than those with plant subjects; they also represented a greater diversity of animals and had a higher instance of repetition than did plant photographs. We also found a significant naming disparity: animal photographs were three times more likely to be provided with a specific label (common name) than were plant photographs. Not only were plant photographs less likely to be provided with a specific name for the plant (e.g. orchid or dandelion), but also they were commonly identified only by the name for a plant part (such as flower or leaf) or life‐form (e.g. tree or shrub). To address the disparity revealed by this study, and to encourage student interest in and knowledge about plants, we recommend that educators go beyond textbooks to expose students to a diversity of named plants, and present plants as distinct organisms rather than as a collection of parts.     

Creating Persuasive Messages Advocating Organ Donation

Most people state that they would be willing to be organ donors, however only a small percentage of the population has actually signed an organ donor card. These studies focused on persuasive messages that encourage people to sign organ donor cards. In the first study, people reported their attitudes and knowledge involving organ donation. Results indicated that donor card signing was related to overall knowledge about donation. When only considering those people with positive attitudes toward organ donation, their overall knowledge about donation explained their willingness to sign organ donor cards. In the second study, people read a message involving organ donation before they were asked to sign an organ donor card. The content of the message (i.e., narrative vs. statistics) and the affect of the message (i.e., humorous vs. sad) were manipulated. Results indicated that narrative messages were more effective than statistical messages. Additionally, humorous messages were more effective than sad messages.     

Meta-Analysis of Meta-Analyses in Communication: Comparing Fixed Effects and Random Effects Analysis Models

Thirty-nine meta-analyses obtained from the past 10 years of communication research (1997–2007) were reanalyzed using fixed effects (FE), random effects (RE), and Hunter and Schmidt (HS) meta-analytic methods. The majority of studies (62%) reported use of the HS model in the original analysis. Differences identified between models include (a) greater propensity for Type 1 error under the FE approach, (b) episodes of inflated effect size (ES) under the RE approach, and (c) high levels of heterogeneity in population ESs across studies. Recommendations are made for scholars to appropriately choose and implement meta-analytic models in future research.     

Developmental Trajectories in Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders: The First 3 Years

Retrospective studies indicate 2 major classes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) onset: early and later, after a period of relatively healthy development. This prospective, longitudinal study examined social, language, and motor trajectories in 235 children with and without a sibling with autism, ages 6–36 months. Children were grouped as: ASD identified by 14 months, ASD identified after 14 months, and no ASD. Despite groups' initial similar developmental level at 6 months, ASD groups exhibited atypical trajectories thereafter. Impairment from 14 to 24 months was greater in the Early‐ASD than the Later‐ASD group, but comparable at 36 months. Developmental plateau and regression occurred in some children with ASD, regardless of timing of ASD diagnosis. Findings indicate a preclinical phase of varying duration for ASD.     

The Crux of Crucial Experiments: Duhem's Problems and Inference to the Best Explanation

Going back at least to Duhem, there is a tradition of thinkingthat crucial experiments are impossible in science. I analyseDuhem's arguments and show that they are based on the excessivelystrong assumption that only deductive reasoning is permissiblein experimental science. This opens the possibility that someprinciple of inductive inference could provide a sufficientreason for preferring one among a group of hypotheses on thebasis of an appropriately controlled experiment. To be sure,there are analogues to Duhem's problems that pertain to inductiveinference. Using a famous experiment from the history of molecularbiology as an example, I show that an experimentalist versionof inference to the best explanation (IBE) does a better jobin handling these problems than other accounts of scientificinference. Furthermore, I introduce a concept of experimentalmechanism and show that it can guide inferences from data withinan IBE-based framework for induction.

1. Introduction
2. Duhem onthe Logic of Crucial Experiments
3. ‘The Most BeautifulExperiment in Biology’
4. Why Not Simple Elimination?
5. SevereTesting
6. An Experimentalist Version of IBE

   6.1 Physiologicaland experimentalmechanisms

   6.2 Explaining the data

   6.3IBE and the problemof untested auxiliaries

   6.4 IBE-turtlesall the way down

7. Van Fraassen's ‘Bad Lot’ Argument
8. IBE and Bayesianism
9. Conclusions

     

International research orientation of Swiss universities: self-regulated or politically imposed?

International openness is essential to science in small modern countries. The modernization of Swiss science and economy in the nineteenth century was promoted largely by foreigners: newly founded Swiss universities were staffed to a large extent by foreign professors, but students also came from abroad. Up to the middle of this century, the development of Swiss universities was marked by distinct successive phases of inviting in or shutting out international influence, depending mainly on changes in the political context. The international landscape of knowledge and science since the 1950s has undergone dynamic change. University structures were installed as a reaction to this dynamism. Patterns of international research orientation emerging in different universities and in the disciplinaryfields of business administration, chemistry and history are discussedin a comparative perspective.     

Infant Attachment Insecurity and Baseline Physiological Activity and Physiological Reactivity to Interpersonal Stress: A Meta-Analytic Review

This meta-analytic review (k = 5–10; N = 258–895) examined links between attachment insecurity and physiological activity at baseline and in response to interpersonal stress elicited by separation–reunion procedures in the early life course (1–5 years). Insecurity was trivially, nonsignificantly associated with baseline physiological activity (heart rate [HR]: g = −.06; respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]: g = −.06; cortisol: g = .01) and nonsignificantly associated with physiological reactivity to separation from parents (HR: g = −.001; RSA: g = .24). However, insecurity was moderately associated with heightened RSA (g = .26) and cortisol (g = .27) reactivity upon reunion with parents. Findings provide insight into the biobehavioral organization of attachment, suggesting that early insecurity is associated with heightened physiological reactivity to interpersonal stress.