Non-finite loss and challenges to communication between parents and professionals

Elizabeth Bruce PhD, a psychologist in private practice, and Cynthia Schultz PhD, honorary associate at LaTrobe University, both live and work in Australia. Their work on supporting parents who have children with special needs, however, has been published around the world. In this article Bruce and Schultz explore the notion of 'non-finite loss', defined as the ongoing sense of grief experienced by parents caring for children with severe disabilities. The authors discuss the issues that professionals need to consider when working with parents in these circumstances. The article closes with a set of recommendations for promoting more effective partnerships between parents and professionals.     

The Emergence Model: An Alternative Pedagogy for Facilitating Self‐Reflection and Theoretical Fit in Counseling Students

The author presents a critical review of counselor education literature that has focused on student acquisition of theoretical orientations in order to identify the potential of these practices to facilitate critical self‐reflection and theoretical fit among students. Two reflective, awareness‐based pedagogical models—radical constructivism (E. von Glasersfeld, 1984) and transformative learning (J. Mezirow, 1997)—are also examined. The author concludes by briefly outlining an alternative pedagogical framework called the “Emergence Model,” which may enhance the ability of counselor educators to facilitate self‐reflection and theoretical fit among counseling students.     

Analysis of Statistical Question Classification for Fact-Based Questions

Question classification systems play an important role in question answering systems and can be used in a wide range of other domains. The goal of question classification is to accurately assign labels to questions based on expected answer type. Most approaches in the past have relied on matching questions against hand-crafted rules. However, rules require laborious effort to create and often suffer from being too specific. Statistical question classification methods overcome these issues by employing machine learning techniques. We empirically show that a statistical approach is robust and achieves good performance on three diverse data sets with little or no hand tuning. Furthermore, we examine the role different syntactic and semantic features have on performance. We find that semantic features tend to increase performance more than purely syntactic features. Finally, we analyze common causes of misclassification error and provide insight into ways they may be overcome.     

Explaining Media Choice: The Role of Issue-Specific Engagement in Predicting Interest-Based and Partisan Selectivity

This study analyzes the predictors of 2 types of media selectivity: interest-based (i.e., choice of entertainment over politics) and partisan (i.e., choice of pro-attitudinal over counter-attitudinal or balanced news). Relying on a large survey-based experiment, we find that issue-specific engagement variables, including perceived issue understanding, issue importance, and issue attitude strength, predict interest-based and partisan selectivity above and beyond the influence of general political knowledge, news interest, and strength of political leanings. These results show that the drivers of selectivity are more complex than general political attributes; rather, they are contextual and reflect people’s engagement with particular issues.     

Becoming Fathers: Initial Exploration of a Support Program for New Fathers

Emerging fathers experience a variety of stressors, including identity and role transitions, changes in their relationships, and challenges in developing caregiving skills. Increasing expectations for father involvement in childcare are emphasizing the importance of the father role, but social supports for new fathers remain scarce. Nineteen expectant and new fathers participated in a pilot 5-week group intervention aimed at improving stress coping and involvement attitudes using a combination of mindfulness practices and skill-building for parenting and partner communication. We administered surveys pre- and postintervention to assess efficacy in the areas of stress, depressive symptoms, father involvement attitudes, and mindfulness. Within-participant differences were compared across participants as well as examining individual reliable change. Results indicated initial reductions in stress and depressive symptoms and increases in the mindfulness constructs of nonjudgment and nonreactivity. No significant changes were found in father involvement attitudes. Perinatal intervention specific to fathers holds promise as an underexplored avenue for supporting families across the transition to parenthood.     

A historical analysis of academic development using the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu

This paper provides a history of academic development by examining how a South African institution coped with the potent social forces confronting it before the collapse of apartheid. Theoretically, it draws on the framework of Pierre Bourdieu and engages with a paper written a decade ago by Naidoo, who also used Bourdieu to understand institutional change in South Africa in the late 1980s. Through contrasting the habitus of two professors, it is argued that academic development helps to preserve the autonomy of the university field by refracting forces impinging on it from the economic and political realms.