Longitudinal Links Between Fathers’ and Mothers’ Harsh Verbal Discipline and Adolescents’ Conduct Problems and Depressive Symptoms

This study used cross‐lagged modeling to examine reciprocal relations between maternal and paternal harsh verbal discipline and adolescents’ conduct problems and depressive symptoms. Data were from a sample of 976 two‐parent families and their children (51% males; 54% European American, 40% African American). Mothers’ and fathers’ harsh verbal discipline at age 13 predicted an increase in adolescent conduct problems and depressive symptoms between ages 13 and 14. A child effect was also present, with adolescent misconduct at age 13 predicting increases in mothers’ and fathers’ harsh verbal discipline between ages 13 and 14. Furthermore, maternal and paternal warmth did not moderate the longitudinal associations between mothers’ and fathers’ use of harsh verbal discipline and adolescent conduct problems and depressive symptoms.     

Students' Perspectives on Gatekeeping in Counselor Education: A Case Study

Through in‐depth interviews, the authors examined 10 master's‐level counseling students' perceptions of gatekeeping. Case analysis resulted in 3 major themes pertaining to the necessity of gatekeeping, vital components, and counseling student characteristics. Implications of the findings are also discussed.     

Libraries in the shadow of history: the Dominican Republic

This paper focuses on problems of accelerated staff turnover by looking in retrospect at the staffing phases that the University of Zimbabwe Library went through. Between 1991 and 1993, staff turnover culminated in a loss of over 55% of the professional staff from an establishment of 25 (professional staff). The paper discusses three categories of problems and situations that led to the accelerated staff turnover, and the turnover's impact on the library service. Suggestions are made on ways in which the situation could be remedied and possibly prevented from recurring. Staff retention strategies discussed include among others, human resources planning and development, staff motivation, organizational redesign, and competitive remuneration packages. This paper concludes that human resources are perhaps the most vital resource required to run an institution, and as such, should be given a corresponding priority in the strategic planning process.     

Making the Critical Appraisal for Summaries of Evidence (CASE) for evidence-based medicine (EBM): critical appraisal of summaries of evidence

Objectives:

Standards for evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM) point-of-care (POC) summaries of research are lacking. The authors developed a “Critical Appraisal for Summaries of Evidence” (CASE) worksheet to help assess the evidence in these tools. The authors then evaluated the reliability of the worksheet.

Methods:

The CASE worksheet was developed with 10 questions covering specificity, authorship, reviewers, methods, grading, clarity, citations, currency, bias, and relevancy. Two reviewers independently assessed a random selection of 384 EBM POC summaries using the worksheet. The responses of the raters were then compared using a kappa score.

Results:

The kappa statistic demonstrated an overall moderate agreement (κ = 0.44) between the reviewers using the CASE worksheet for the 384 summaries. The 3 categories of evaluation questions in which the reviewers disagreed most often were citations (κ =  0), bias (κ = 0.11), and currency (κ = −0.18).

Conclusions:

The CASE worksheet provided an effective checklist for critically analyzing a treatment summary. While the reviewers agreed on worksheet responses for most questions, variation occurred in how the raters navigated the tool and interpreted some of the questions. Further validation of the form by other groups of users should be investigated.

Highlights

• Few critical appraisal tools have been evaluated with inter-rater reliability testing.
• The ways that users of evidence-based medicine (EBM) point-of-care (POC) tools interpret how to appraise an evidence summary—particularly when defining the grading of evidence, currency, and bias—may vary even when a standard evaluation sheet is used.
• The Critical Appraisal for Summaries of Evidence (CASE) worksheet had a moderate level of inter-rater reliability, similar to previous evaluative studies of critical appraisals tools.

Implications

• Medical librarians can develop tools useful for librarians, students, and clinicians to guide them in appraising clinical evidence summaries.
• The CASE worksheet can be a valuable tool to consider the quality of individual evidence summaries and to see patterns of overall quality in EBM POC tools.

     

Diet of disparagement: the racial experiences of black students in a predominantly white university

As an unintended consequence of the Civil Rights Movement and the integrationist vocabulary that it engendered, otherwise progressive thinkers have been unable to describe the adverse impact of actions, attitudes and policies that are not necessarily intended as racist, but function that way nonetheless. Because racism has come to be popularly understood as the product of individual irrationality—aberrant behavior that society abhors—supposedly race neutral actions, attitudes and policies that systematically and predictably benefit whites and adversely impact people of color escape effective critique. This has created a problem on college campuses, where many black students continue to feel alienated and mistreated because of their race. This article argues that issues of race and racism remain important considerations in the lives of black students on predominantly white campuses.     

The effectiveness of a learning disabilities inservice program

Forty-three regular classroom teachers were provided with four one-hour inservice sessions related to the field of learning disabilities. Pre- and posttest administrations of the Learning Disabilities Information Inventory were utilized to measure change resulting from these sessions. Twenty-four control subjects did not participate in these sessions but did complete the dependent measure. An analysis of covariance with pretest scores serving as the covariate indicated that the inservice treatment did result in improved performance on the dependent measure. Approximately 50% of the experimental subjects completed a follow-up questionnaire and most indicated that the sessions increased their knowledge of learning disabilities and provided them with techniques and materials useful in their classroom settings. It is concluded that such inservice sessions are a viable means of increasing classroom teachers' information concerning learning disabilities and the Learning Disabilities Information Inventory is sensitive to the effects of such inservice.