Explaining Post-War Cinema Attendance in Great Britain

This paper models the interaction between cinema admissions and cinema supply in response to changes in exogenous variables, chiefly competition from television viewing. The relationship is estimated empirically by applying near Vector Autoregression (VAR) techniques to a long run of British annual data from 1950 to 1997. The results indicate that sustained negative shocks to cinema demand throughout most of the period reduced the supply of screens, inducing further falls in admissions and closures until a new equilibrium was attained. More recently, the introduction of multiplex cinemas has interrupted and partially reversed this downward demand-supply spiral.     

Linked lives: stability and change in maternal circumstances and trajectories of antisocial behavior in children

Drawing on the notion of linked lives, this study examined the effects of stability and change in maternal circumstance on developmental trajectories of antisocial behavior in children 4 to 7 years of age. Using data from a national sample of young mothers and growth curve analysis, the study demonstrated that early maternal circumstances influences early antisocial behavior, whereas stability and change in these circumstances both exacerbate and ameliorate behavior problems. Of particular note, meaningful escape from poverty attenuates antisocial behavior whereas persistence in poverty or long-term movement into poverty intensifies such problems. These findings highlight the importance of structural context for parenting practices and the need to consider child development in light of dynamic and changing life-course fortunes of parents.     

Rhyme and reading: a critical review of the research methodology

There is debate over whether children’s early rhyme awareness has important implications for beginning reading instruction. The apparent finding that pre‐readers are able to perform rhyme tasks much more readily than phoneme tasks has led some to propose that teaching children to read by drawing attention to rime units within words is ‘a route into phonemes’ (Goswami, 1999a, p. 233). Rhyme and analogy have been adopted as an integral part of the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE, 1998), a move which appears to have been influenced by three major research claims:1) rhyme awareness is related to reading ability, 2) rhyme awareness affects reading achievement, and 3) rhyme awareness leads to the development of phoneme awareness. A critical examination of the experimental research evidence from a methodological viewpoint, however, shows that not one of the three claims is sufficiently supported. Instructional implications are discussed.     

Knowledge creating theory in retrospect and prospect

Knowledge creating theory has become one of the major frameworks used widely in the fields of knowledge management and other management studies. However, the knowledge creating theory was not just simply a made-in-Japan theory. It has emerged from a series of English and Japanese publications. Therefore, research questions and arguments in this study are identified and reviewed to portray the development of knowledge creating theory and to synthesise their arguments with organisational and managerial studies. This article reviews the content and process of the knowledge creating theory along with discussions from different streams in management and organisation studies. The result of this study sheds light on how the knowledge creating theory developed as well as perceiving its future development.