Infant-mother attachment: factors related to its development and changes over time

As part of a large longitudinal study, assessments of attachment relationships in high-risk mother-infant pairs were conducted at 12 and 18 months. With data collected prenatally and during the infant's first 2 years of life, this study attempted to discriminate among 3 major attachment classifications and to account for qualitative changes in attachment relationships. The data included maternal and infant characteristics, mother-infant interactions, life-stress events, and family living arrangements. Several patterns seemed to emerge. Mothers of securely attached infants were consistently more cooperative and sensitive with their infants as observed in a feeding and play situation than mothers of anxiously attached infants. Anxious/resistant infants tended to lag behind their counterparts developmentally and were less likely to solicit responsive caretaking. Anxious/avoidant infants, although robust, tended to have mothers who had negative feelings about motherhood, were tense and irritable, and treated their infants in a perfunctory manner. Male babies were somewhat more vulnerable to qualitative differences in caretaking, while, for girls, maternal personality showed a stronger relationship to security of attachment. Changes from secure to anxious attachments were characterized by initially adequate caretaking skills but prolonged interaction with an aggressive and suspicious mother. Changes toward secure attachments tend to reflect growth and increasing competence among young mothers.     

The northern light: from mystery to modern space science

As the name implies, the northern light is visible only at high latitudes, and it is therefore not surprising that Scandinavian scientists have been prominent in research on its origin and nature. This article reviews the history of its observation and the development of an understanding of its true origin.     

Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud,London, and the importance of place

While recent debate has often focused on a reified “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage. Through ethnographic research in London's electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip hop), it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality. London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago. Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network. This finding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music. While there are reasons for the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy. That London should appear so supremely privileged reflects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UK's cultural economy.     

Interaction of race with other variables on achievement in school

This study was concerned with academic performance in black and white children and the interactions of race with other variables on school achievement. Subjects were 334 blacks and 637 whites in grades three to six. Data consisted of general background information and grade equivalent scores on the California Achievement Tests. They were analyzed using multiple re- gression analysis of variance. Results indicated that blacks scored lower than whites and fell farther behind as they progressed from grade to grade. Significant interactions were revealed for sex, social class, family structure, and teachers. Means for black children were generally less variable than for white children.     

Aspects of ‘relevance’ in the alignment of curriculum with educational standards

With over 60,000 US K-12 science and mathematics education standards and a rapid proliferation of Web-enabled curriculum, retrieving curriculum that aligns with the standards to which teachers must teach is a key objective for educational digital libraries. However, previous studies of such alignment use single-dimensional and binary measures of the alignment concept. As a consequence, they suffer from low inter-rater reliability (IRR), with experts agreeing about alignments only some 20–40% of the time. We present the results of an experiment in which the alignment variable was operationalized using the Saracevic model of relevance ‘clues’ taken from the everyday practice of K-12 teaching. Results show high IRR across all clues with IRR on several specific alignment dimensions significantly higher than on overall alignment. In addition, a model of overall alignment is derived and estimated. The structure and explanatory power of the model as well as the relationships between alignment clues differ significantly between alignments of curriculum found by users themselves and curriculum found by others. These results illustrate the usefulness of clue-based relevance measures for information retrieval and have important consequences for both the formulation of automated retrieval mechanisms and the construction of a gold standard or benchmark set of standard-curriculum alignments.     

Teachers' perceptions of behavior problems in children from intact,single-parent,and stepparent families

This study examined differences in the incidence of behavior problems between children living with both natural parents and those in single-parent or in stepparent families. Subjects were 3,644 white children in kindergarten through eighth grade; 2,991 were living with both of their own parents; 312 with mother only; 43 with father only; 264 with mother and stepfather; and 34 with father and stepmother. Teachers provided background information and Behavior Problem Checklist ratings on the youngsters. Compared to children from intact homes, those living with mother only had more problems checked on all five scales of the checklist; those with father only, more Socialized Delinquency; those with mother and stepfather, more Conduct Problems and Socialized Delinquency; and those with father and stepmother, more Conduct Problems. Interactions were found for sex, social class, and grade in school.