Searching for Safety Online: Managing "Trolling" in a Feminist Forum

A common phenomenon in online discussion groups is the individual who baits and provokes other group members, often with the result of drawing them into fruitless argument and diverting attention from the stated purposes of the group. This study documents a case in which the members of an online community--a feminist web-based discussion forum--are targeted by a "troll" attempting to disrupt their discussion space. We analyze the strategies that make the troller successful and the targeted group largely ineffectual in responding to his attack, as a means to understand how such behavior might be minimized and managed in general. The analysis further suggests that feminist and other nonmainstream online forums are especially vulnerable, in that they must balance inclusive ideals against the need for protection and safety, a tension that can be exploited by disruptive elements to generate intragroup conflict.     

Midsession reversals with pigeons: visual versus spatial discriminations and the intertrial interval

Discrimination reversal learning has been used as a measure of species flexibility in dealing with changes in reinforcement contingency. In the simultaneous-discrimination, midsession-reversal task, one stimulus (S1) is correct for the first half of the session, and the other stimulus (S2) is correct for the second half. After training, pigeons show a curious pattern of choices: They begin to respond to S2 well before the reversal point (i.e., they make anticipatory errors), and they continue to respond to S1 well after the reversal (i.e., they make perseverative errors). That is, pigeons appear to be using the passage of time or the number of trials into the session as a cue to reverse, and are less sensitive to the feedback at the point of reversal. To determine whether the nature of the discrimination or a failure of memory for the stimulus chosen on the preceding trial contributed to the pigeons’ less-than-optimal performance, we manipulated the nature of the discrimination (spatial or visual) and the duration of the intertrial interval (5.0 or 1.5 s), in order to determine the conditions under which pigeons would show efficient reversal learning. The major finding was that only when the discrimination was spatial and the intertrial interval was short did the pigeons perform optimally.     

The Dominance Concept Inventory: A Tool for Assessing Undergraduate Student Alternative Conceptions about Dominance in Mendelian and Population Genetics

Despite the impact of genetics on daily life, biology undergraduates understand some key genetics concepts poorly. One concept requiring attention is dominance, which many students understand as a fixed property of an allele or trait and regularly conflate with frequency in a population or selective advantage. We present the Dominance Concept Inventory (DCI), an instrument to gather data on selected alternative conceptions about dominance. During development of the 16-item test, we used expert surveys (n = 12), student interviews (n = 42), and field tests (n = 1763) from introductory and advanced biology undergraduates at public and private, majority- and minority-serving, 2- and 4-yr institutions in the United States. In the final field test across all subject populations (n = 709), item difficulty ranged from 0.08 to 0.84 (0.51 ± 0.049 SEM), while item discrimination ranged from 0.11 to 0.82 (0.50 ± 0.048 SEM). Internal reliability (Cronbach''s alpha) was 0.77, while test–retest reliability values were 0.74 (product moment correlation) and 0.77 (intraclass correlation). The prevalence of alternative conceptions in the field tests shows that introductory and advanced students retain confusion about dominance after instruction. All measures support the DCI as a useful instrument for measuring undergraduate biology student understanding and alternative conceptions about dominance.     

Multiple Copies of Bestsellers in Public Libraries: How Much Is Enough?

How do public libraries develop their collections of high-demand materials for the “I want it now” generation? Ten public libraries’ holdings of fiction and nonfiction bestseller titles were observed over a four-week period. The number of copies rose fairly consistently, with the five fiction titles having roughly about twice the number of copies as the five nonfiction titles. The ratio of holds to copies averaged 2.7:1 and ranged from 0.8:1 to 6.5:1. Demand for e-books was consistently higher than the number of copies available, averaging more than 4:1 across all libraries.     

Exploring Trajectories of Young Mothers’ Parenting Stress in Early Childhood: Associations with Protective Factors and Psychological Vulnerabilities

SYNOPSIS

Objective . Most parents manage some degree of parenting stress without serious concerns, but young mothers experience parenting stress at higher levels than adult mothers; high parenting stress is problematic due to its association with children’s socioemotional and behavior problems and the increased likelihood of maltreatment. Understanding the circumstances that precipitate or mitigate parents’ stress can have lasting impacts for child well-being. Extant research fails to account for both longitudinal and individual variation in young mothers’ parenting stress, leading to equivocal findings about the nature of mothers’ parenting stress trajectories across early childhood. Design . The present study used growth mixture modeling (GMM) to model the trajectories of 544 first-time young mothers’ parenting stress from children’s infancy to school-age. We considered how protective factors (i.e., social support) and psychological vulnerabilities (i.e., depression) experienced during the transition to parenthood were associated with parenting stress trajectories and variation within trajectories when children were of school-age. Results . GMM identified three trajectories of parenting stress: “low stable”, “high increasing”, and “high decreasing.” Protective factors were related to low and decreasing patterns of parenting stress, whereas psychological vulnerabilities were associated with higher parenting stress patterns. Conclusions . This study has implications for programs and services that help young mothers cope with the demands of parenting and reduce parenting stress.