Young Children’s Positive and Negative Parasocial Relationships with Media Characters

There is a scarcity of research on how young children form short- and long-term emotional connections with popular media characters. Preexisting research on young children’s parasocial relationships (PSR) with media personae has traditionally operationally defined PSR exclusively in terms of friendship and focused on television characters. However, a growing body of research suggests the need for a wider survey of children’s media platforms. Scholarship also actually points to two distinct constructs of PSR: positive PSR (friendly feelings or amicability) and negative PSR (unfriendly feelings or antipathy). This study engaged 88 children ages 5–7 in open- and closed-ended questions designed to measure both positive and negative PSR. Our research reveals a more nuanced understanding of young children’s PSR.     

What Journals are the Most Cited Journals in Criminology and Criminal Justice’s “Big Three” Journals?

Recently, scholars have sought to learn more about scholarly activity within the fields of criminology and criminal justice (CCJ). Research in this area has examined which departments have the most productive faculty, which scholars are the most productive, and which journals are the most prestigious. However, no study of which we are aware has determined what journals criminologists are most likely to cite in their scholarly research. In this study, we rank the most influential journals by the number of times those journals were cited between 2009 and 2013 in Criminology, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and Justice Quarterly. Our analyses suggest that Criminology is clearly the most influential CCJ journal in terms of citations, while the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and the American Journal of Sociology remain influential in CCJ as well.     

Interventions in schools’ curricula to achieve quality in learning: experiences from the Commonwealth Caribbean

Abstract

For some four decades governments in Commonwealth Caribbean (CC) countries have been introducing interventions in their school systems to provide quality education for all. Examples of these are learner-centred teaching pedagogy and the integration of technology into teaching and learning. The data for the paper is based on published research and evaluation studies of these interventions. How successful have these interventions been? Following a discussion of how quality in education and learning has been interpreted, this paper seeks to answer this question through a review of selected interventions in schools in three CC countries. Challenges that CC countries need to address as they pursue goals relating to quality education are: the intersection of quality with access and equity, limitations in teacher training which have militated against change in teaching pedagogy, and resources and infrastructure.     

Race and the Educated Imagination: Outlining a Pedagogy of Belonging

Abstract

A teaching life can be a powerful intervention into the structures of racial antagonism that shape the West, but only if we can find a way to overturn our colonial legacies and draw the dominant trajectories of Western educational institutions toward more life giving ends. A life that teaches in this racially agonistic moment must be angled in a new direction beyond simply building intellectual capacities, toward presenting an embodied desire to learn from and join others. To be teachers who live by faith at this moment is to be those who speak a word of belonging not simply by their words but by their lives.     

Functional literacy of Young Guyanese Adults

Functional literacy is interpreted as the ability of the individual to apply skills in reading, writing, calculation and basic problem-solving in those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his/her own group and community. The paper describes the rationale, development and administration of the test used for measuring levels (high, moderate, low) of achievement in functional literacy in three domains (document, prose and quantitative). An assumption of the study was that a high level of functional literacy was required for the individual to function effectively in his/her own group and community. The context of the study is Guyana the most underdeveloped and impoverished country in the English-speaking Caribbean. The subjects are out of school youth in Guyana aged 14–25.Amongst the main findings are: only approximately 11% of the young people show a high level of functional literacy; females tend to have a higher level of functional literacy than males: and most of those at the low level never went beyond primary and low status secondary schools and usually end up unemployed or in semi- or unskilled jobs.Attention is drawn to the difficulty of attracting funding for literacy programmes from international aid agencies, given the inflated adult literacy rate which is reported for Guyana in international statistics. While they credit Guyana with an adult literacy rate of 97.5%, the study suggests that a more realistic figure is in the 70s. The importance of adult and continuing education is underscored in view of the need to help those who are out of school to meet the ever-changing demands of society for improved skills in literacy and numeracy.     

An Application of an Innovative Cost-Benefit Analysis Tool for Determining the Implementation Costs and Public Safety Benefits of SORNA with Educational Implications for Criminology and Criminal Justice

Sex offending is a considerable public health and criminal justice system concern. While the research is fairly mixed at best with most pointing toward a general lack of an appreciable deterrent benefit for these polices, no prior evaluation has made a rigorous attempt to determine and define the vast array of implementation costs and public safety benefits of these policies, specifically the Sex Offender and Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). As such, our proposed research strategy involves the development and application of an innovative Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) tool. The results from this innovative and dynamic CBA tool with hypothetical data suggests that the 10-year financial benefit for SORNA ranges from $1.01 to $3.91 for every dollar spent when considering the reduction in sex crime specifically, and any crime more generally. This tool holds promise as a mechanism for generating jurisdiction/site-specific cost-benefit analyses. Policy implications are also discussed.