Soziale Integration durch Sport?

In this study the relationship between physical activity and different dimensions of social integration (number of friends, frequency of contact to friends, number of social contexts the individual is taking part in) is analysed using the data of the Partnermarktsurvey 2009. The concept of opportunities for interaction in foci of activity (here physical activity) is used as the theoretical framework. It can be shown that physical activity has an effect on the social integration of individuals: People who engage in physical activity have more friends, meet them more often and are integrated in more social contexts than people who are not physically active. Differences in social integration even exist among physically active people depending on the kind of sport activity and its form of organisation. Further the setting of the sport activity seems to be of importance. Finally it is recommended that longitudinal data used to investigate the exact causal effect of physical activity on social integration.     

Informatik-Patente

Informatik-Patente

Informatik-Patente     

Age of entry,sex, and academic achievement in elementary school children

It was hypothesized that children who enter school at a relatively early age do less well on standard measures of school achievement than do their older peers. One hundred fifty-two children born in 1970 and attending grades one through six in an upper-middle-class, suburban school district were studied. In general, it was found that children born in the later quarters of the year did, in fact, perform less well than children in the same grade born earlier through grades one to four. Analyses of covariance yielded a main effect for birth quartile (p < .05) in most cases. A significant main effect for sex was found for language scores at grades two and three. Implications of these findings for age of school entry, educational programming, and screening procedures are discussed.     

Identifying motivators and barriers to older community-dwelling people participating in resistance training: A cross-sectional study

Participation rates of older people in resistance training (RT) are low despite increasing research showing many health benefits. To increase the number of older people participating in RT it is important to know what would motivate people to become involved, what motivates those who participate to continue, and the factors preventing many older people from commencing participation. To investigate these issues, a questionnaire was mailed to three groups of older people: (1) those receiving home care services, (2) members of a peak non-government seniors’ organisation and (3) those participating in a specific gym-based RT programme. In total, 1327 questionnaires were returned (response rate = 42.5%). To feel good physically and mentally were the main reasons motivating participation among all three groups, and falls prevention was identified as an important motivator for the home care respondents. Pain, injury and illness were the main barriers to participating, or continuing to participate. However, medical advice was a factor influencing participation commencement. The results suggest organisations providing RT programmes for older people should tailor the promotion and delivery of programmes to address key motivators and barriers specific to each group to increase the proportion of older people initiating and continuing to engage in RT.     

Elternvertreter mit Migrationshintergrund an allgemeinbildenden Schulen

Parents with a migration background are underrepresented among parent representatives at schools in Germany. However, increased involvement of these parents is essential for a lively democratic culture. To explore the motivations of parents with migration background regarding their school involvement, interviews with N?=?31 parent representatives with migration background were content analysed, starting deductively from a set of categories according to the theory of planned behaviour. In the analysis, the main category ??attitude?? was deductively subdivided into ??motivation in the course of action/intrinsic value??, ??results and consequences regarding own interests?? and ??results and consequences regarding others/altruistic motivation??. ??Subjective norm?? was inductively differentiated into ??other parents??, ??teachers and leadership team?? and ??other persons/perceived general expectations??; ??perceived behavioural control?? was differentiated into the subcategories ??assertiveness and freedom from anxiety??, ??language competence??, ??socioeconomic background??, ??availability of time??, ??setting in school and school district?? and ??field expertise and know-how??. Additionally, ??habit?? was deductively established and retained as a main category. Analysis of 513 statements resulted in an interrater-agreement of ???=?0.82. Implications for working with parents in an intercultural context are discussed.     

New Approaches to Spoken Document Retrieval

This paper presents four novel techniques for open-vocabulary spoken document retrieval: a method to detect slots that possibly contain a query feature; a method to estimate occurrence probabilities; a technique that we call collection-wide probability re-estimation and a weighting scheme which takes advantage of the fact that long query features are detected more reliably. These four techniques have been evaluated using the TREC-6 spoken document retrieval test collection to determine the improvements in retrieval effectiveness with respect to a baseline retrieval method. Results show that the retrieval effectiveness can be improved considerably despite the large number of speech recognition errors.