Studies in Historical Replication in Psychology IV: An Inquiry into the Psychological Research and Life of Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) is well known as an early twentieth century writer, but less well known is her involvement in automatic writing research. Critics of Stein’s literary works suggest that her research had a significant influence on her poetry and fiction, though Stein denied any influence. A partial replication of Stein’s 1896 study was conducted with the goal of addressing three historical questions: (1) What contributed to Stein’s involvement in automatic writing research?; (2) To what extent did Stein believe that she experienced automatic writing?; and (3) To what extent did her automatic writing research influence her later literary works?     

Artifactual dimensions of visual rhetoric: what a content analysis of 114 peer-reviewed articles reveals about data collection reporting

This content analysis examined how the authors of 114 peer-reviewed journal articles explained their empirical approaches to visual rhetoric scholarship. The authors content analysis sought to answer the question: how do scholars engage with the material dimensions of visual culture, specifically in terms of artifact selection and reporting data collection procedures? The answers to this question, the authors argue, are needed urgently as visual rhetoric research continues to expand because inconsistent reporting will hinder replicability and the reader’s access to the author’s argument. The authors use the findings of their content analysis to surface the implicit norms of empirical visual rhetoric research and to develop recommendations for reporting visual data collection procedures.     

Prevention is better than cure: coping skills training for adolescents at school

Children and adolescents today face a plethora of stressful problems, including family and relationship conflict, death of close family members or friends, and academic and social pressures. Such problems have been found to contribute to an increased risk of various emotional–social–cognitive difficulties in adolescence. These include academic failure, social misbehaviour, interpersonal problems, and depression.

Programmes that promote coping with normative stress, delivered to the whole population, have been considered to represent a promising direction for the prevention of social emotional difficulties. The Best of Coping: Developing Coping Skills Program (Frydenberg & Brandon, 2002 Frydenberg E Brandon CM (2002) The best of coping Melbourne: Oz Child [Crossref] [Google Scholar]) was introduced in two school settings on four separate occasions. Evaluation of the results provides modest support for coping skills enhancement but provide a warning about the need for caution when implementing and evaluating the Programme. First, it appeared to have some opposing effects on males and females. Second, improvements in students' coping responses were apparently related to the authenticity of implementation of the Programme.

The findings are discussed with regard to the need to implement programmes through which we can teach adolescents coping responses, which include optimism and problem‐solving skills, so that they may handle problems and stressors more effectively. Additionally, an important feature of such programmes is a focus on the reduction of the use of non‐productive coping skills. With an increase in psycho‐social problems, the need to provide school‐based programmes is discussed, with emphasis placed on programme implementation. In particular, the probable need for ongoing involvement of psychologically trained school counsellors with teachers, through the life of the programme.     

The development and validation of the student engagement scale in an Ethiopian university context

This paper is positioned to make a sound contribution to knowledge of higher education (HE) quality through its study of student engagement in a large university in Ethiopia. We establish that the assessment of student engagement is a valid facet in determining HE quality, contributing holistically alongside quality assurance and university rankings. The authors present an example of this through reporting on a statistical analysis of an adjustment of the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement survey and its administration in the Ethiopian university. The results of factor analysis illustrate empirical support for the nine-factor engagement scale and a number of associated factors related to student demographics and university experience. The results of the multi-validation approach provide specific guidelines to universities using this approach to evaluate the validity and reliability of this construct. The paper provides a supporting tool that can be used by other universities to assist in the evaluation of students’ engagement with their undergraduate programmes.     

Applied utility and the auto-ethnographic short story: persuasions for,and illustrations of,writing critical social science

In some quarters it is argued that, narrative researchers might be classified as being either story-analysts or storytellers. They go on to suggest that one feature of storytellers is that they undertake a form of analysis as the process of writing unfolds. With these sentiments in mind, in the present paper, we consider how auto-ethnographical accounts of traumatic and challenging life events might, through the analysis contained within, demonstrate value within the realm of applied pedagogy. In making our case we embrace and adapt the literary genre of storytelling, more specifically, the short story. The story presented here, ‘Travel Writer’, offers an opaque, multi-contextualised and lifelong view of career transition. The present paper, in more general terms, considers the capacity of auto-ethnography and, more specifically, the short storied version of it, to engender critical reader engagement, to encourage personal reflection in others, and to act as a point of stimulus for the enactment of applied debate through the lens of critical social science. With regards to the assumptions of critical social science, the final discussion also considers how the auto-ethnographic text, as a pedagogic tool, might help others to contest and challenge the meta-narratives that, we argue, risk stagnating established thinking.     

A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction: socialisation and the ‘hidden curriculum’ in professional football

This article draws on the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu to provide an explanatory account of how socialisation and the hidden curriculum within coaching practice contribute toward the formation of social identities and powerful schemes of internalised dispositions. Drawing on a 10 month ethnography within professional football, the research found that day-to-day practice was ideologically laden and served the production, reproduction and incorporation of socialised agents into the prevailing ‘legitimate’ culture. The legitimacies embodied included respect for authority, hierarchical awareness, control, obedience, collectivity, work ethic and winning.     

Eliciting Maltreated and Nonmaltreated Children's Transgression Disclosures: Narrative Practice Rapport Building and a Putative Confession

This study tested the effects of narrative practice rapport building (asking open‐ended questions about a neutral event) and a putative confession (telling the child an adult “told me everything that happened and he wants you to tell the truth”) on 4‐ to 9‐year‐old maltreated and nonmaltreated children's reports of an interaction with a stranger who asked them to keep toy breakage a secret (n = 264). Only one third of children who received no interview manipulations disclosed breakage; in response to a putative confession, one half disclosed. Narrative practice rapport building did not affect the likelihood of disclosure. Maltreated children and nonmaltreated children responded similarly to the manipulations. Neither narrative practice rapport building nor a putative confession increased false reports.     

Multiple Service Use: The impact of consistency in service quality for vulnerable youth

Little is known about the way in which variations in service quality influence outcomes when youth are clients of more than one service system. This article reports on a study of 1,210 adolescents (aged 13–17 years), half were concurrent clients of two or more services and half were not involved in two or more services. Youth completed a self-report questionnaire administered by a trained interviewer. It was hypothesized that youth reporting two positive service experiences would report lower risks, higher resilience, and better outcomes than youth reporting inconsistent or two negative service experiences and that their resilience, risks, and outcomes would be similar to those of youth not involved in two or more services. MANCOVA was used to determine the relationship among service quality and resilience, risk, and outcomes with four covariates that assessed family and neighborhood environments, history of abuse and neglect, and chronic need. Results indicate that service quality had an effect on resilience, risks, and outcomes. These relationships were mediated quite strongly by the influence of the risks youth faced in their neighborhoods and to a lesser extent by the other three covariates. Of the three dependent variables, risk appeared to be the most consistently influenced by all the covariates, and it also differentiated service experience groups. Results point to the importance of services developing strategies to effectively address risks confronted by youth and also to ensure that when more than one service is involved with youth, consistency in service delivery is achieved.     

Exploring the limits of spatial memory in rats,using very large mazes

In Experiment 1, rats foraged for food in six successive phases with 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, and 48 arms attached in random locations to a large radial maze. The percentage of novel choices appeared to be determined more by spatial proximity than by number of arms. In Experiment 2, rats foraged for food in four successive phases with 8, 16, 24, and 48 arms attached to the maze in spread-out or tight configurations. Performance was poor in the tight configurations regardless of the number of arms. Performance was excellent in the 8-arm spread-out condition but declined as 16 and, then again, 24 arms were added. Thus, spatial separation, not number of locations, was the chief determinant of performance in the first two experiments. In Experiment 3, in successive phases, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 16, and 8 food towers were set in a circle on the floor, with the spatial separation between adjacent towers held constant at 33 cm. The percentage of novel choices declined as 8 towers became 16 and did not change again with 24, 32, 40, or 48 towers in place but then increased again as 16 towers became 8. In Experiment 4, in successive phases, 8, 16, 24, and 32 food towers were set in a circle, with the spatial separation between adjacent towers held constant at 66 cm. The percentage of novel choices declined as 8 towers became 16 and again as 16 towers became 24 but did not decline further. These data were discussed in terms of the fundamental problems posed by variations in the number of food locations in the pursuit of the limit of spatial memory in rats.