Child sexual abuse: victim age, victim gender, and observer gender as factors contributing to attributions of responsibility

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of victim age, victim gender, and observer gender on the tendency to attribute responsibility for extrafamilial child sexual abuse to the victim and the nonoffending parents.Method: A 2 (Victim Age) × 2 (Victim Gender) × 2 (Observer Gender) between-subjects design was employed. Undergraduate students (N = 145) read a vignette describing a sexually abusive interaction between an adult male neighbor and a child. In this vignette, the child’s gender and age (6 years old, 13 years old) varied. After reading the vignette, participants used a 5-point scale to indicate the degree to which they believed the victim and the parents (a) were responsible for, (b) were to blame for, (c) caused, and (d) could have prevented the abuse.Results: Greater responsibility was assigned to older than younger victims. Both parents were ascribed similar levels of responsibility, and were ascribed greater responsibility when the child victim was younger than older. Male observers attributed greater responsibility and causality to the victim and the parents than did female observers.Conclusions: The results indicate that responsibility attributions directed toward the victim and the nonoffending parents may be a function of the victim’s age. In addition, the findings support previous research suggesting that male observers may tend to hold victims more responsible for their abuse than female observers. Implications for treatment and research are discussed.Spanish abstract was not available at time of publication.     

What benefits does team sport hold for the workplace? A systematic review

Physical inactivity is proven to be a risk factor for non-communicable diseases and all-cost mortality. Public health policy recommends community settings worldwide such as the workplace to promote physical activity. Despite the growing prevalence of workplace team sports, studies have not synthesised their benefits within the workplace.

A systematic review was carried out to identify articles related to workplace team sports, including intervention, observational and qualitative studies. Eighteen studies met the inclusion criteria.

The findings suggest team sport holds benefits not only for individual health but also for group cohesion and performance and organisational benefits such as the increased work performance. However, it is unclear how sport is most associated with these benefits as most of the studies included poorly described samples and unclear sports activities.

Our review highlights the need to explore and empirically understand the benefits of workplace team sport for individual, group and organisational health outcomes. Researches carried out in this field must provide details regarding their respective samples, the sports profile and utilise objective measures (e.g., sickness absence register data, accelerometer data).     

Implementation of the cognitive apprenticeship model for enhancement of advanced searching skills in a pharmacy academia rotation

Background:Pharmacy students are primarily taught literature searching skills didactically during their Doctor of Pharmacy curriculum. To effect change in the area of advanced literature searching skills, a pharmacy librarian joined with two Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience (APPE) preceptors to design and implement a crash course on applied systematic searching skills for a cohort of four students.Case Presentation:Through the cognitive apprenticeship model, a Systematic Searching Crash Course (SSCC) was implemented among a cohort of four academic APPE students. Students developed search strategies using controlled vocabulary and free text, translated their searches into multiple databases, and used citation management software to build libraries of evidence. Additionally, the cohort blindly peer reviewed each other''s search strategies, wrote literature reviews, and finally conducted a search together without input from the pharmacy librarian.Conclusions:Review of the pre-/post-course self-assessment taken by the cohort indicates the SSCC is a success in terms of improving student confidence in accessing and synthesizing primary literature. As the crash course is further refined and implemented, there may be more opportunity to embed the course into didactic curriculum and residency programs and to potentially reproduce it for other health science disciplines.     

Higher Education Internationalization Strategies: Of Marginal Significance or All-Pervasive? The International Vision in Practice: A Decade of Evolution

The author, who is the Executive Director of the European Association for International Education, reflects on the relationship between the idea of the internationalization of higher education and its concrete expression in terms of professional organization and practice with special emphasis upon the role of her own organization. She traces the ways in which a progressive broadening of areas of attention in the internationalization of higher education have reached out to new activities and programmes, strategic integration, policy articulation, the juxtaposition of internationalization with Europeanization and globalization, and increased awareness of the possibilities of transnational education driven partly by the NICTs. Older conceptions of internationalization will co-exist with new conceptions of globalization and Europeanization.     

Post-abyssal ethics in education research in settings of conflict and crisis: Stories from the field

This article draws heavily on the post-abyssal philosophy of Boaventura de Sousa Santos in order to theorise new ways of thinking about research ethics in settings affected by armed conflict and crisis, and to put them into practice. Our article explores the dilemmas and tensions faced by four graduate students and a supervisor across diverse international settings. For some of us, these are places we call home, for others these are places that provide refuge to our people: Afghanistan, Jordan, Lebanon and India. We seek to deepen standard understandings of ethics as institutionalised in university forms, arguing that tidy checklists for safety and risk mitigation do not adequately address the complex affective and socio-political struggles permeating research, and the bodies of researchers, in these settings. Our main focus here is on how we can synthesise our various experiences in order to offer something of value to others who may be about to go into the field in settings affected by armed conflict and crisis. The question that we address, then, is: how can researchers avoid the limitations, obfuscations and silences of traditional institutional ethics in order to adopt a situated, embodied, post-abyssal research ethic that might open up new spaces for emotion, encounter, and engagement with struggle, risk and voicing? We use an autoethnographic approach that enables congruence with the aims of this article, and that supports our aspirations for enhanced impact through powerful narrative. We end with discussion that contains suggestions for institutions, supervisors, researchers, and for funding and professional bodies.     

Community Engagement Project for Preservice Early Childhood Students

This article describes how a preservice early childhood program collaborates with a local agency in a community engagement project. The project was implemented in a family–community partnership class for preservice teachers. There were three purposes for this project. First, to build a partnership between the University of Alaska Anchorage Bachelor of Arts in Early Childhood (BAEC) program and a local child care center; second, to provide support for the child care center’s administration and teachers based on their needs and interests; and third, to offer authentic opportunities and experiences for preservice BAEC students to work with the children and their families. This project was a semester-long endeavor, which evolved through rich collaborative experiences.     

Learning to teach: new times,new practices (2nd ed.), by Gloria Latham,Mindy Blaise,Shelley Dole,Julie Faulkner and Karen Malone,South Melbourne,Oxford, 2011, 387 pp., AUD$92.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-195-56179-1

In the present article, you will read three different voices and their perspectives on the "What Keeps Teachers Going in Spite of Everything?" project that took place in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Sonia Nieto, a university researcher who initiated the project, provides the introduction and explanations for what evolved. Stephen Gordon and Junia Yearwood, two high school teachers in the Boston Public Schools, contribute their own reflections about the project. A different font represents each voice.     

Sea Country: navigating Indigenous and colonial ontologies in Australian environmental education

In this paper, we contribute to land education research by focusing on the Torres Strait Islands in the Coral Sea at the far north of tip of Cape York, Australia. We describe the Torres Strait Islander concept of Sea Country and Torres Strait Ailan Kastom (translated as ‘Island Custom’). We then analyse some of the ways in which settler colonisation has challenged these ways of knowing and being. Our inquiry looks at how Sea Country is positioned within two contemporary Australian examples of environmental education: firstly, within the new Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities that mandate that special attention be given to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures and also to the concept of sustainability; and secondly, within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s Sea Country Guardians programme This analysis of environmental education curriculum and practice identifies the ways in which the concept of Sea Country and the Indigenous cosmology it represents are simultaneously supported and ignored in the current Australian environmental education context.