Immigrant perpetrators in the news: A terror management approach to resultant hostility,perceived vulnerability,and immigration issue judgment

This study found that mortality salience in TV news activated more hostile attitude toward the perpetrators and negative judgment on the immigration issue. Social group difference influenced news viewers’ immigration issue judgment, but did not affect their resultant hostility and perceived vulnerability. More negative attitudes emerged toward the immigration issue when immigrant perpetrators were portrayed negatively in the news. News viewers with exposure to mortality salience in TV news reported more negative toward immigrants. Exposure to mortality-related elements in TV news could lead to social conflicts that were viewed as a severe threat by U.S. government and policymakers.     

Ubiquitous Computing in the Library:Indiana State University Library s Experience

1 Introduction New technologies and other developments haye changedthe information seeking behaviors of the academic communityand the general public.Nowhere is this more evident than inthe exponential growth of the World Wide Web and cellularphone usage.Responding to these user needs and newtechnologies,libraries are moving from being InformationWarehouses to becoming Information Portals.Full-text     

What makes a youth-produced film good? The youth audience perspective

In this article, we explore how youth audiences evaluate the quality of youth-produced films. Our interest stems from a dearth of ways to measure the quality of what youth produce in artistic production processes. As a result, making art in formal learning settings devolves into either romanticized creativity or instrumental work to improve skills in core content areas. We conducted focus groups with 38 youth participants where they viewed four different films produced by the same youth media arts organization that works with young people to produce short-form, autobiographical documentaries. We found that youth focused their evaluations on identifying the films' genre and content and on assessing how well the filmmakers' creative decisions fit with identifications of genre and content. Evaluations were mediated by audiences' expectations and seemed to inform judgments of quality and creativity. We hope that our work can inform the design of formal learning spaces where young people are producing narrative art.     

Towards an adolescent friendly methodology: accessing the authentic through collective reflection

The re-emergence of student voice presents a challenge to schools and researchers to become more responsive to the voice of adolescents in education and in research. However, the poor articulation of the nature of student voice to date is confirmation of the complex and important nature of the personal advocacy and human agency that is involved in all student voice activities. This lack of clarity leads to interpretations of student voice that range in authenticity from token to active and meaningful (Hart, R. 1997. Children's Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care. Earthscan Publications. London: UNICEF). Researchers who are guided by more traditional methodologies may implement methods that are appropriate for adults yet are not sensitive to the needs and interests of the young person whose perspectives are usually the focus of the research. This research found that while an advocacy and empowerment worldview supports student voice research, adolescents also prefer a methodology that is agentic, socially based, reflective and embodied (Dempster, N., A. Lizzio, M. Keeffe, J. Skinner, and D. Andrews. 2010. “The Contributions of Research Design and Process Facilitation in Accessing Adolescent views of Leadership.” Leading and Managing 16 [2]: 77–89). Adolescent perspectives on research processes and methods are valuable in helping researchers to choose more responsive approaches to sharing understandings with adolescents, so that research designs may be challenging, meaningful and rewarding for all participants.     

Instrument adaptation in cross-cultural studies of students’ mathematics-related beliefs: learning from healthcare research

Much comparative research into education-related beliefs has exploited questionnaires developed in one culture for use in another. This has been particularly the case in mathematics education, the focus of this paper. In so doing, researchers have tended to assume that translation alone is sufficient to warrant a reliable and valid instrument for cross-cultural research, prompting concerns that a number of necessary equivalences are unlikely to have been addressed. In this paper, we consider the nature of these equivalences before examining the literature of a different field, healthcare research, to synthesise an approach to instrument adaptation that is pragmatic but rigorous. Finally, we demonstrate how this pragmatic approach, incorporating extensive cognitive interviews, enabled us to adapt and refine a mathematics-related beliefs questionnaire, developed in Flanders, for use with students aged 14–15 in England and Spain. Analyses indicate that the instrument so developed is multidimensional, reliable and cross-culturally valid. Some implications are discussed.