Ethnic,Familial, and Religious Identity of Roma Adolescents in Bulgaria,Czech Republic,Kosovo, and Romania in Relation to Their Level of Well‐Being

This study examines ethnic, national, familial, and religious identity and well‐being of 632 Roma minority and 589 majority adolescents (age: M = 15.98 years, SD = 1.34) in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Kosovo, and Romania. Results indicated that Roma showed lower endorsement of national identity but stronger religious identity than their majority counterparts. Path models showed positive associations of familial and religious identities with well‐being, whereas Roma identity was negatively associated with well‐being, particularly for Roma in Bulgaria and Kosovo (countries with a less active policy toward improving conditions of Roma). In the latter countries, Roma ethnic identity is less relevant and weakly associated with psychological well‐being of youth.     

Interpersonal Neural Synchrony During Father–Child Problem Solving: An fNIRS Hyperscanning Study

Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) has been previously evidenced in mother–child interactions, yet findings concerning father–child interaction are wanting. The current experiment examined whether fathers and their 5- to 6-year-old children (N = 66) synchronize their brain activity during a naturalistic interaction, and addressed paternal and child factors related to INS. Compared to individual problem solving and rest, father–child dyads showed increased INS in bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left temporo-parietal junction during cooperative problem solving. Furthermore, the father’s attitude toward his role as a parent was positively related to INS during the cooperation condition. These results highlight the implication of the father’s attitude to parenting in INS processes for the first time.     

Development of Math Attitudes and Math Self-Concepts: Gender Differences,Implicit–Explicit Dissociations,and Relations to Math Achievement

Three hundred and ninety-one children (195 girls; M_age = 9.56 years) attending Grades 1 and 5 completed implicit and explicit measures of math attitudes and math self-concepts. Math grades were obtained. Multilevel analyses showed that first-grade girls held a strong negative implicit attitude about math, despite no gender differences in math grades or self-reported (explicit) positivity about math. The explicit measures significantly predicted math grades, and implicit attitudes accounted for additional variance in boys. The contrast between the implicit (negativity for girls) and explicit (positivity for girls and boys) effects suggest implicit–explicit dissociations in children, which have also been observed in adults. Early-emerging implicit attitudes may be a foundation for the later development of explicit attitudes and beliefs about math.     

All good readers are the same,but every low-skilled reader is different: an eye-tracking study using PISA data

PISA results show that a considerable number of 15-year-old pupils after 8 to 10 years of schooling have a low level of functional reading literacy, as defined in the PISA framework. While PISA results help identify the level of reading competency, they do not reveal what might be the reasons why some students fail to solve the tasks. One way to explore the difficulties students encounter while solving PISA reading tasks is to track their eye movements during reading. The main aim of this study was to explore the similarities and differences in eye movement patterns between students with high and low scores on PISA reading tasks. A sample of 92 students took part in the pre-test, which was based on PISA items, and administered to identify groups of students with high and low PISA reading scores. Based on student pre-test results, 20 students were selected for the main, eye-tracking test—10 participants with low scores and 10 with high scores. The eye-tracking test consisted of four different released PISA reading tasks, three of them continuous and one non-continuous. The continuous items were followed by one multiple-choice question each at L1, L2, and L3 levels of difficulty. The non-continuous text was followed by three multiple-choice questions (also L1–L3).Three main findings were the following: regarding saccadic amplitudes, the reading was found to be less fluent for the low-skilled group; according to the heat maps, they had difficulty finding the relevant material; and taking into account standard deviations of eye-tracking measures, the variability was found to be larger in this group. Taken together, the findings of this study show that the PISA results differentiating low- and high-scoring groups go hand in hand with insights from more fine-grained eye-tracking measurements.     

Research Circles: Supporting the Scholarship of Junior Faculty

This article describes and assesses “Research Circles” as a mechanism for enhancing faculty collegiality and research. Recently established on our campus, these circles, composed of three to four faculty members, have had a particularly powerful effect on the new faculty members' adjustment to their tenure track positions, especially since they entered a context that might otherwise have been challenging: a new interdisciplinary upper-division campus with high expectations for teaching excellence. Based on the end-of-year evaluations, journals, and focus groups, the co-authors described themes that emerged from their participation in these circles. Circle participation not only facilitated faculty writing throughout their first year, but it also fostered the development of an interdisciplinary community which nurtured creativity and risk taking in writing. All authors are currently teaching in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (IAS) at The University of Washington, Bothell (UWB). Except for Diane Gillespie, Professor and Associate Director of IAS, all other authors are Assistant Professors in IAS. Diane Gillespie received her Ph.D. in cultural and psychological studies in education from The University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her interests include critical pedagogy, narrative psychology, and cultural diversity. Nives Dolšak received a joint Ph.D. in public policy and political science from Indiana University. Her interests include public policy, environmental policy, and international relations. Bruce Kochis, received his Ph.D. in Slavic languages & literatures at the University of Michigan. He focuses on global human rights policy, discourse analysis, and political theory. Ron Krabill received his Ph.D. in sociology and historical studies from New School for Social Research. His interests include comparative media, politics and social movements with a special emphasis on South Africa, as well as the study of peace, conflict, social justice, and human rights. Kari Lerum received her Ph.D. in sociology from The University of Washington. Her interests include culture, organizations, sexuality, qualitative methods, and visual studies. Anne Peterson received her Ph.D. from Washington University. Her interests include urban politics and policy and the distribution of natural resources at the local level. Elizabeth Thomas received her Ph.D. in psychology from The University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign. Her interests include community-based resources for adolescent development, cultural psychology, and the social context of learning.     

Power in Bayesian Mediation Analysis for Small Sample Research

Bayesian methods have the potential for increasing power in mediation analysis (Koopman, Howe, Hollenbeck, & Sin, 2015; Yuan & MacKinnon, 2009). This article compares the power of Bayesian credibility intervals for the mediated effect to the power of normal theory, distribution of the product, percentile, and bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals at N ≤ 200. Bayesian methods with diffuse priors have power comparable to the distribution of the product and bootstrap methods, and Bayesian methods with informative priors had the most power. Varying degrees of precision of prior distributions were also examined. Increased precision led to greater power only when N ≥ 100 and the effects were small, N < 60 and the effects were large, and N < 200 and the effects were medium. An empirical example from psychology illustrated a Bayesian analysis of the single mediator model from prior selection to interpreting results.     

Retirement lifestyle conceptualization and well-being in recent retirees

ABSTRACT

The retirement literature contains four distinct conceptualizations of retirement lifestyle. Retirement can be seen as an opportunity to make a new start, the continuation of a pre-retirement lifestyle, an unwelcome imposed disruption, and a transition to old age. This research examines the conceptualizations of retirement lifestyle and how they relate to retirement adjustment and well-being in recent retirees (N = 173). A factor analysis confirmed the existence of four factors identifying four retirement conceptualizations. Although previous studies have presented retirement conceptualizations as mutually incompatible, significant relationships were found between them in this research, indicating that recent retirees can synchronously conceptualize seemingly distinct lifestyles. The cluster analysis identified three types of retirees in the sample. These types were labeled to reflect the prevailing retirement lifestyle concepts. The first type of retiree (N = 90) is “New beginning and continuation,” the second (N = 44) is “Imposed disruption without hope,” and the third is (N = 39) “Accepted disruption and ending.” The analysis of variance revealed the three types differ significantly in the level of satisfaction in retirement, subjective happiness, and life meaningfulness – with the highest level being found in the first retiree type and the lowest level in the second retiree type. The findings suggest that conceptualizations of retirement lifestyle change over time and affect psychological well-being in the recent retiree cohort. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are outlined.     

Contradictions in practising distributed leadership in public primary schools in New South Wales (Australia) and Slovakia

The concept of distributed leadership has been widely accepted and scrutinised in research and practice since the beginning of the new millennium. Nonetheless, there is a lack of academic research on how school staff members perceive the term and to what extent they are willing to employ it as part of their daily practices. This article aims to explore these understandings and attitudes in two public primary schools – one in New South Wales (Australia) and one in Slovakia – whilst using qualitative research methods based on semi-structured interviews with staff members. The findings of this study reveal that participants often present very contradictory attitudes towards employing distributed leadership in practice. On the one hand, they require maximising the processes of distributed leadership and, on the other hand, they welcome various instances of solo/autocratic leadership practices by the principal. They also often conflated the concepts of distributed leadership and democratic leadership. In addition, the article discusses how wider social and political context may shape these perceptions and attitudes towards distributed leadership.     

雅鲁藏布江中上游地区暴雨与旱涝及暴雨天气系统分析

根据日喀则地区1979～2002年沿江各站逐日降水资料，分析了汛期暴雨日数、相当暴雨日数与旱涝级别、汛期降水量之间的关系，得出：相当暴雨日数与汛期总降水量的相关性较好；与暴雨日数相关性差。高原西部低涡与沿江切变线、印度低压及各系统的不同组合是造成沿江暴雨的主要天气系统。     

Social inequalities in access to higher education in Croatia: five decades of resilient findings

This article provides a panoramic view of research findings on social inequalities in access to higher education in Croatia since the 1960s, guided by the question of what has changed in the findings. Our review shows that there is stark continuity over the last five decades: students from better educated family backgrounds tend to be overrepresented in higher education; students from better educated and white-collar family backgrounds are more likely to enrol in academic as opposed to professional study courses; students at one Croatian university in particular stand out in terms of their more privileged social background; and medicine seems to be the prime academic field for observing social reproduction. We note that these persistent findings run parallel to a dramatically changing political, economic and social context in Croatia, including transformations in the 1990s resulting from social ownership of the means of production to widespread private ownership, as well as transformations from a one-party political system to the establishment of a multi-party political system. The article maps possible theoretical explanations for the resilience of social inequalities in access to higher education in the context of dynamic times. It also questions the role of educational policies in this process.