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Some scholars add authors to their research papers or grant proposals even when those individuals contribute nothing to the research effort. Some journal editors coerce authors to add citations that are not pertinent to their work and some authors pad their reference lists with superfluous citations. How prevalent are these types of manipulation, why do scholars stoop to such practices, and who among us is most susceptible to such ethical lapses? This study builds a framework around how intense competition for limited journal space and research funding can encourage manipulation and then uses that framework to develop hypotheses about who manipulates and why they do so. We test those hypotheses using data from over 12,000 responses to a series of surveys sent to more than 110,000 scholars from eighteen different disciplines spread across science, engineering, social science, business, and health care. We find widespread misattribution in publications and in research proposals with significant variation by academic rank, discipline, sex, publication history, co-authors, etc. Even though the majority of scholars disapprove of such tactics, many feel pressured to make such additions while others suggest that it is just the way the game is played. The findings suggest that certain changes in the review process might help to stem this ethical decline, but progress could be slow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does scientific research affect the world around us? Being able to answer this question is of great importance in order to appropriately channel efforts and resources in science. The impact by scientists in academia is currently measured by citation based metrics such as h-index, i-index and citation counts. These academic metrics aim to represent the dissemination of knowledge among scientists rather than the impact of the research on the wider world. In this work we are interested in measuring scientific impact beyond academia, on the economy, society, health and legislation (comprehensive impact). Indeed scientists are asked to demonstrate evidence of such comprehensive impact by authoring case studies in the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). We first investigate the extent to which existing citation based metrics can be indicative of comprehensive impact. We have collected all recent REF impact case studies from 2014 and we have linked these to papers in citation networks that we constructed and derived from CiteSeerX, arXiv and PubMed Central using a number of text processing and information retrieval techniques. We have demonstrated that existing citation-based metrics for impact measurement do not correlate well with REF impact results. We also consider metrics of online attention surrounding scientific works, such as those provided by the Altmetric API. We argue that in order to be able to evaluate wider non-academic impact we need to mine information from a much wider set of resources, including social media posts, press releases, news articles and political debates stemming from academic work. We also provide our data as a free and reusable collection for further analysis, including the PubMed citation network and the correspondence between REF case studies, grant applications and the academic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration among scientists has a major influence on scientific progress. Such collaboration often results from scientific meetings, where scientists gather to present and discuss their research and to meet potential collaborators. However, most scientific meetings have inherent biases, such as the availability of research funding or the selection bias of professional societies that make it difficult to study the effect of the meeting per se on scientific productivity. To evaluate the effects of scientific meetings on collaboration and progress independent of these biases, we conducted a study of the annual symposia held by the International Milk Genomics Consortium (IMGC) over a 12-year period. In our study, we conducted permutation testing to analyze the effectiveness of the IMGC in facilitating collaboration and productivity in a community of milk scientists who were meeting attendees relative to non-attendees. Using the number of co-authorships on published papers as a measure of collaboration, our analysis revealed that scientists who attended the symposium were associated with more collaboration than were scientists who did not attend. Furthermore, we evaluated the scientific progress of consortium attendees by analyzing publication rate and article impact. We found that IMGC attendees, in addition to being more collaborative, were also more productive and influential than were non-attendees who published in the same field. The results of our study suggest that the annual symposium encouraged interactions among disparate scientists and increased research productivity, exemplifying the positive effect of scientific meetings on both collaboration and progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies showed that scientists’ professional networks contribute to research productivity, but little work has examined what factors predict the formation of professional networks. This study sought to 1) examine what factors predict the formation of international ties between faculty and graduate students and 2) identify how these international ties would affect publication productivity in three East Asian countries. Face-to-face surveys and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of faculty and doctoral students in life sciences at 10 research institutions in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. Our final sample consisted of 290 respondents (84 faculty and 206 doctoral students) and 1,435 network members. We used egocentric social network analysis to examine the structure of international ties and how they relate to research productivity. Our findings suggest that overseas graduate training can be a key factor in graduate students’ development of international ties in these countries. Those with a higher proportion of international ties in their professional networks were likely to have published more papers and written more manuscripts. For faculty, international ties did not affect the number of manuscripts written or of papers published, but did correlate with an increase in publishing in top journals. The networks we examined were identified by asking study participants with whom they discuss their research. Because the relationships may not appear in explicit co-authorship networks, these networks were not officially recorded elsewhere. This study sheds light on the relationships of these invisible support networks to researcher productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In order to make informed decisions about how best to support children and young people with disabilities, effective strategies that facilitate active and meaningful participation in school are required. Clinical factors, diagnosis or impairments somewhat helpful in determining what should be provided in interventions. However, clinical factors alone will not offer a clear view of how to support participation. It is helpful then to look at wider psychosocial and environmental factors. The aim of this review was to synthesise evidence of psychosocial and environmental factors associated with school participation of 4–12 year old children with disabilities to inform the development of participation-fostering interventions. Methods: A systematic search and synthesis using realist methods was conducted of published research. Papers had to include consideration of psychosocial and/or environment factors for school participation of children with disabilities. The review was completed in accordance with the Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Papers were identified via Boolean search of the electronic databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, PhycINFO and ERIC (January 2006-October 2018). Appraisal focussed on contributions in terms of whether the articles are appropriate for the review (relevance) and research quality (rigour). Data were analyzed using content and thematic analysis methods using a realist framework. A narrative synthesis of results was reported. Results and implications: We identified 1828 papers in the initial search. Seventy two papers were included in the final synthesis. Synthesis of findings led to three overarching mechanisms representing psychosocial factors for children (1) identity (2) competence and (3) experience of mind and body. Environmental aspects (context) compromised five interrelated areas: (1) structures and organization, (2) peers, (3) adults, (4) space and (5) objects. Our synthesis provides insights on how professionals may organize efforts to improve children’s participation. Consideration of these findings will help to proactively deal with suboptimal participation outcomes. Development of theoretically determined assessments and interventions for management of school participation are now required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To conduct a time-cost analysis of formatting in scientific publishing. Design: International, cross-sectional study (one-time survey). Setting: Internet-based self-report survey, live between September 2018 and January 2019. Participants: Anyone working in research, science, or academia and who submitted at least one peer-reviewed manuscript for consideration for publication in 2017. Completed surveys were available for 372 participants from 41 countries (60% of respondents were from Canada). Main outcome measure: Time (hours) and cost (wage per hour x time) associated with formatting a research paper for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Results: The median annual income category was US$61,000–80,999, and the median number of publications formatted per year was four. Manuscripts required a median of two attempts before they were accepted for publication. The median formatting time was 14 hours per manuscript, or 52 hours per person, per year. This resulted in a median calculated cost of US$477 per manuscript or US$1,908 per person, per year. Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze the cost of manuscript formatting in scientific publishing. Our results suggest that scientific formatting represents a loss of 52 hours, costing the equivalent of US$1,908 per researcher per year. These results identify the hidden and pernicious price associated with scientific publishing and provide evidence to advocate for the elimination of strict formatting guidelines, at least prior to acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: As a result of global migration, health professionals in destination countries are increasingly being called upon to provide care for women and girls who have experienced female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). There is considerable evidence to suggest that their care experiences are sub-optimal. This systematic review sought to illuminate possible reasons for this by exploring the views, experiences, barriers and facilitators to providing FGM-related healthcare in high income countries, from health professionals’ perspectives. Methods: Sixteen electronic databases/resources were searched from inception to December 2017, supplemented by reference list searching and suggestions from experts. Inclusion criteria were: qualitative studies (including grey literature) of any design, any cadre of health worker, from OECD countries, of any date and any language. Two reviewers undertook screening, selection, quality appraisal and data extraction using tools from the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI). Synthesis involved an inductive thematic approach to identify descriptive themes and interpret these into higher order analytical constructs. Confidence in the review findings was assessed using GRADE-CERQual. The review protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD420150300042015). Results: Thirty papers (representing 28 distinct studies) from nine different countries were included. The majority of studies focused on maternity contexts. No studies specifically examined health professionals’ role in FGM/C prevention/safeguarding. There were 20 descriptive themes summarised into six analytical themes that highlighted factors perceived to influence care: knowledge and training, communication, cultural (mis)understandings, identification of FGM/C, clinical management practices and service configuration. Together, these inter-linked themes illuminate the ways in which confidence, communication and competence at provider level and the existence and enactment of pathways, protocols and specialist support at service/system level facilitate or hinder care. Conclusions: FGM/C is a complex and culturally shaped phenomenon. In order to work effectively across cultural divides, there is a need for provider training, clear guidelines, care pathways and specialist FGM/C centres to support mainstream services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The loss of talented women from senior academic positions has partly resulted from a lower number of published papers and the accompanying reduced visibility of female compared to male scientists. The reasons for these gender-differences in authorship is unclear. One potential reason is a bias in the editorial and review process of scientific journals. We investigated whether patterns of authorship and editorial outcome were biased according to gender and geographic location in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Such potential bias may contribute to inequality in the field. We found patterns of gender differences in authorship, but this was unrelated to the editorial decision of whether to publish the manuscript. Female first-authors (the lead role) were six times less likely to be named as the corresponding author than male first-authors, and female first-authors were more likely to be displaced as corresponding authors by female co-authors than were male first-authors. We found an under-representation of female first- and last-authors compared to baseline populations of members of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (which publishes the Journal of Evolutionary Biology) and of Evolutionary Biology faculty at the world top-10 universities for the Life Sciences. Also, manuscripts from Asia were five times more likely to be rejected on the final decision, independent of gender. Overall our results suggest that the peer review processes we investigated at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology are predominately gender-neutral, but not neutral to geographic location. Editorial gender-bias is thus unlikely to be a contributing factor to differences in authorship in this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Due to the disease’s progressive nature, advance care planning (ACP) is recommended for people with early stage dementia. General practitioners (GPs) should initiate ACP because of their longstanding relationships with their patients and their early involvement with the disease, however ACP is seldom applied. Aim: To determine the barriers and facilitators faced by GPs related to ACP with people with dementia. Data sources: We systematically searched the relevant databases for papers published between January 1995 and December 2016, using the terms: primary healthcare, GP, dementia, and ACP. We conducted a systematic integrative review following Whittemore and Knafl’s method. Papers containing empirical data about GP barriers and/or facilitators regarding ACP for people with dementia were included. We evaluated quality using the Mixed-Method-Appraisal-Tool and analyzed data using qualitative content analysis. Results: Ten qualitative, five quantitative, and one mixed-method paper revealed four themes: timely initiation of ACP, stakeholder engagement, important aspects of ACP the conversation, and prerequisites for ACP. Important barriers were: uncertainty about the timing of ACP, how to plan for an uncertain future, lack of knowledge about dementia, difficulties assessing people with dementia’s decisional capacities, and changing preferences. Facilitators for ACP were: an early start when cognitive decline is still mild, inclusion of all stakeholders, and discussing social and medical issues aimed at maintaining normal life. Conclusion: Discussing future care is difficult due to uncertainties about the future and the decisional capacities of people with dementia. Based on the facilitators, we recommend that GPs use a timely and goal-oriented approach and involve all stakeholders. ACP discussions should focus on the ability of people with dementia to maintain normal daily function as well as on their quality of life, instead of end-of-life-discussions only. GPs need training to acquire knowledge and skills to timely initiate collaborative ACP discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although counts of tweets citing academic papers are used as an informal indicator of interest, little is known about who tweets academic papers and who uses Twitter to find scholarly information. Without knowing this, it is difficult to draw useful conclusions from a publication being frequently tweeted. This study surveyed 1,912 users that have tweeted journal articles to ask about their scholarly-related Twitter uses. Almost half of the respondents (45%) did not work in academia, despite the sample probably being biased towards academics. Twitter was used most by people with a social science or humanities background. People tend to leverage social ties on Twitter to find information rather than searching for relevant tweets. Twitter is used in academia to acquire and share real-time information and to develop connections with others. Motivations for using Twitter vary by discipline, occupation, and employment sector, but not much by gender. These factors also influence the sharing of different types of academic information. This study provides evidence that Twitter plays a significant role in the discovery of scholarly information and cross-disciplinary knowledge spreading. Most importantly, the large numbers of non-academic users support the claims of those using tweet counts as evidence for the non-academic impacts of scholarly research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal motivation is a key factor in the service of foster care, impending both on the welfare of the child and on the satisfaction of the carer. This paper explores the benefits, challenges and dilemmas involved in the job of professional (i.e. state-supported) foster carer in Romania–a country where the issue of child protection has drawn a great deal of international attention over the last thirty years. The principal hypothesis concerns whether the benefits, challenges and dilemmas identified by foster carers are influenced by the factors that led to their taking up this kind of work. Quantitative research was conducted using a questionnaire as the main tool. The paper takes a descriptive, cross-sectional and multifactorial approach. Sampling was carried out by self-selecting method, and the study involved 51 participants. The research project identified a statistically significant variation in the challenges and dilemmas reported by foster carers. Thus, the results of the study show that the majority of the carers indicate a primarily intrinsic motivation for their work. By way of conclusion, it is argued that social workers, operating in collaboration with multidisciplinary teams, can offer carers support in managing more difficult periods in the child–carer relationship, thus enhancing the sustainability of the foster care service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Large numbers of young people die yearly due to homicide, but little is known about homicide during adolescence. Research primarily focuses on youth violence among young men and masks important gender-related factors inherent in the adolescent age group. Although young women are less likely to be victims of homicide, violence against women is an important form of violence experienced during adolescence. In this paper, we describe the prevalence of and gender difference in adolescent homicide in South Africa in 2009. Methods: We conducted a retrospective national mortuary-based study to identify all child homicides (boys and girls < 18 years) in 2009 in a proportionate sample of mortuaries. Victim, perpetrator and crime data were collected in three phases: cases were identified from the mortuary register, the autopsy report and from police interviews. In this paper we focus on the adolescent group, aged 10 to 17 years. Findings: We identified 674 (95% CI: 520–823) adolescent homicides for 2009, with more male (520) than female (154) homicides. This gender disparity increased as children aged, with the male homicide rate 27.9/100 000 population (95% CI: 20.3–35.5), nearly 5 times the female rate (4.5:1) of 6.5/ 100 000 population (95% CI: 4.7–8.2) in older adolescents (15–17 year old). Adolescent males were significantly more likely (61.2%) to die in a public space compared to female adolescents (39.3%) but more adolescent females (48.4%) died at home compared to adolescent males (32.9%). Adolescent females (42.1%) were mainly killed by a family member or intimate partner while adolescent males were predominantly (58%) killed by an acquaintance. Conclusion: We found a distinct gender pattern for adolescent homicide in South Africa. This pattern appears to be driven by gender norms that support violence. South Africa requires an investment in developing evidence informed interventions to reduce violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical inactivity has been identified as a leading risk factor for premature mortality globally, and adolescents, in particular, have low physical activity levels. Schools have been identified as a setting to tackle physical inactivity. Economic evidence of school-based physical activity programmes is limited, and the costs of these programmes are not always collected in full. This paper describes a micro-costing and cost-consequence analysis of the ‘Girls Active’ secondary school-based programme as part of a cluster randomised controlled trial (RCT). Micro-costing and cost-consequence analyses were conducted using bespoke cost diaries and questionnaires to collect programme delivery information. Outcomes for the cost-consequence analysis included health-related quality of life measured by the Child Health Utility-9D (CHU-9D), primary care General Practitioner (GP) and school-based (school nurse and school counsellor) service use as part of a cluster RCT of the ‘Girls Active’ programme. Overall, 1,752 secondary pupils were recruited and a complete case sample of 997 participants (Intervention n = 570, Control n = 427) was used for the cost-consequence analysis. The micro-costing analysis demonstrated that, depending upon how the programme was delivered, ‘Girls Active’ costs ranged from £1,054 (£2 per pupil, per school year) to £3,489 (£7 per pupil, per school year). The least costly option was to absorb ‘Girls Active’ strictly within curriculum hours. The analysis demonstrated no effect for the programme for the three main outcomes of interest (health-related quality of life, physical activity and service use).Micro-costing analyses demonstrated the costs of delivering the ‘Girls Active’ programme, addressing a gap in the United Kingdom (UK) literature regarding economic evidence from school-based physical activity programmes. This paper provides recommendations for those gathering cost and service use data in school settings to supplement validated and objective measures, furthering economic research in this field. Trial registration: -ISRCTN, . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In connection to food insecurity, adaptation of new techniques or alteration of regular behavior is executed that translates to coping strategies. This paper has used data from food security and nutrition surveillance project (FSNSP), which collects information from a nationally representative sample in Bangladesh on coping behaviors associated with household food insecurity. To complement the current understanding of different coping strategies implemented by the Bangladeshi households, the objective of this paper has been set to examine the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the food insecure households which define their propensity towards adaptation of different types of coping strategies. Methodology: FSNSP follows a repeated cross-sectional survey design. Information of 23,374 food insecure households available from February 2011 to November 2013 was selected for the analyses. Coping strategies were categorized as financial, food compromised and both. Multinomial logistic regression was employed to draw inference. Results: Majority of the households were significantly more inclined to adopt both multiple financial and food compromisation coping strategies. Post-aman season, educational status of the household head and household women, occupation of the household’s main earner, household income, food insecurity status, asset, size and possession of agricultural land were found to be independently and significantly associated with adaptation of both financial and food compromisation coping strategies relative to only financial coping strategies. The relative risk ratio of adopting food compromisation coping relative to financial coping strategies when compared to mildly food insecure households, was 4.54 times higher for households with moderate food insecurity but 0.3 times lower when the households were severely food insecure. Whereas, households were 8.04 times and 4.98 times more likely to adopt both food compromisation and financial relative to only financial coping strategies if moderately and severely food insecure respectively when compared to being mildly food insecure. Conclusion: Households suffering from moderate and severe food insecurity, are more likely to adopt both financial and food compromisation coping strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between natural and social sciences, is perceived as crucial to solving the significant challenges facing humanity. However, despite the need for such collaboration being expressed more frequently and intensely, it remains unclear to what degree such collaboration actually takes place, what trends and developments there are and which actors are involved. Previous studies, often based on bibliometric analysis of large bodies of literature, partly observed an increase in interdisciplinary collaboration in general, but in particular, the collaboration among distant fields was less explored. Other more qualitative studies found that interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between natural and social scientists was not well developed, and obstacles abounded. To shed some light on the actual status and developments of this collaboration, we performed an analysis based on a sample of articles on groundwater research. We first identified journals and articles therein that potentially combined natural and social science aspects of groundwater research. Next, we analysed the disciplinary composition of their authors’ teams, cited references, titles and keywords, making use of our detailed personal expertise in groundwater research and its interdisciplinary aspects. We combined several indicators developed from this analysis into a final classification of the degree of multidisciplinarity of each article. Covering the period between 1990 and 2014, we found that the overall percentage of multidisciplinary articles was in the low single-digit range, with only slight increases over the past decades. The interdisciplinarity of individuals plays a major role compared to interdisciplinarity involving two or more researchers. If collaboration with natural sciences takes place, social science is represented most often by economists. As a side result, we found that journals publishing multidisciplinary research had lower impact factors on average, and multidisciplinary papers were cited much less than mono-disciplinary ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: While school-aged children in low- and middle-income countries remain highly exposed to acute infections, programs targeting this age group remain limited in scale and scope. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a new and comprehensive primary school-based health intervention program on student-reported morbidity and anthropometric outcomes in Lusaka, Zambia. Methods: A prospective matched control study identified 12 classes in 7 schools for the intervention and 12 classes in 7 matched schools as controls. Teachers in intervention schools were trained to deliver health lessons and to refer sick students to care. In addition, vitamin A and deworming medication were biannually administered to intervention students. The primary study outcome was student-reported morbidity. Secondary outcomes were weight, height, health knowledge, and absenteeism. Multivariable linear and logistic regression models were used to estimate program impact. Results: 380 students ages 4–16 were enrolled in the study in 2015, and 97% were followed up at endline in 2016. The intervention decreased the adjusted odds of self-reported acute illnesses by 38% (95% CI: 0.48, 0.77) and the adjusted odds of stunting by 52% (95% CI: 0.26, 0.87). It also increased health knowledge by 0.53 standard deviations (95% CI: 0.24, 0.81). No impact was found on weight (adjusted mean difference β = 0.17, 95% CI: - 1.11, 1.44) and student absenteeism (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 0.89, 95% CI: 0.60, 1.33). Conclusion: The results presented in this paper suggest that comprehensive school-based health programs may offer a highly effective way to improve students’ health knowledge as well as their health status. Given their low cost, a more general adoption and implementation of such programs seems recommendable. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of outlaw bikers is growing globally. Despite this, little research exists on these groups and their alleged violent tendencies. To address this, the current paper uses unique data to examine whether gang violence causes outlaw biker violence. The period examined runs from mid-2008 until early 2012 during which violent clashes occurred between outlaw bikers and street gang members involved in an alleged conflict in Copenhagen, Denmark. A precise description of each individual act of violence would make it possible to identify whether specific acts were carried out in furtherance of the alleged conflict. This would allow one to determine whether outlaw bikers commit violence on behalf of their club. However, such knowledge is unavailable. The paper therefore takes a different approach by examining whether acts of violence committed by the two groups are statistically associated. In other words, it considers whether one or more acts can be described as retaliatory during the observation periods. The sample consists of 640 individuals involved with the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club or with non-biker street gangs–both of which are present in Copenhagen. Statistical models are used to predict 143 violent events committed by 196 outlaw bikers. The results suggest that violence committed by gang members predicts violence committed by outlaw bikers. This indicates that violent acts committed by outlaw bikers are at least partly a form of retaliation carried out on behalf of their club. The paper expands the literature on the kinds of inter-group, micro-level processes that can lead to reciprocal violence by including outlaw bikers in a literature that has previously focused on non-biker street gangs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between women’s social class and their levels of self- and other-objectification. Two online studies comprising of multiple questionnaires were conducted: Study 1 examined the association between the social class (both objective and subjective) of 198 non-student British women and their self-objectification levels, while Study 2 turned towards the relationship between social class and other-objectification among 82 non-student British women. Our results indicated no apparent relationship between social class and each of the relevant objectification measures. As the first paper on the topic of class and objectification, it appears that there is no relationship observed between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge and motivation of a teacher are two unchallenged, essential characteristics for successful education. Whilst the relevance of teachers’ professional knowledge for successful students’ learning has been studied in a sophisticated manner for years, the meaning of teachers’ motivational orientations for students’ performance still lacks a differentiated consideration. This construct is conceptualized by three domains: (1) self-efficacy, (2) subject-specific enthusiasm, and (3) enthusiasm for teaching the subject. Motivational orientations overall have shown to be relevant predictors of students’ learning. However, there are several dimensions of motivation and their relative importance remains unclear. Our study goes beyond the available findings by considering in detail each of the three domains’ relations to students’ performance. Thus, we aim to further contribute to the clarification of the predictors of students’ performance in school teaching. For this purpose, we conducted a study with 48 biology teachers and their 1036 students. To assess the three domains of teachers’ motivational orientations, we applied paper and pencil tests. Concept maps and paper and pencil tests were used to measure students’ performance. By specifying multilevel structural equation models, we examined the relationship between the domains of teachers’ motivational orientations and the performance of the students. Our results reveal no relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and students’ performance, but a significant positive relationship between the latter and teachers’ subject-specific enthusiasm. Moreover, our results show a positive trend in the relationship between enthusiasm for teaching the subject and students’ performance. The results provide a differentiated picture about the importance of motivational orientations for the characterisation of an effective teacher. We discuss our findings in terms of possible effect mechanisms and their relevance for further research on teacher motivation and the improvement of teacher education programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ratings are present in many areas of assessment including peer review of research proposals and journal articles, teacher observations, university admissions and selection of new hires. One feature present in any rating process with multiple raters is that different raters often assign different scores to the same assessee, with the potential for bias and inconsistencies related to rater or assessee covariates. This paper analyzes disparities in ratings of internal and external applicants to teaching positions using applicant data from Spokane Public Schools. We first test for biases in rating while accounting for measures of teacher applicant qualifications and quality. Then, we develop model-based inter-rater reliability (IRR) estimates that allow us to account for various sources of measurement error, the hierarchical structure of the data, and to test whether covariates, such as applicant status, moderate IRR. We find that applicants external to the district receive lower ratings for job applications compared to internal applicants. This gap in ratings remains significant even after including measures of qualifications and quality such as experience, state licensure scores, or estimated teacher value added. With model-based IRR, we further show that consistency between raters is significantly lower when rating external applicants. We conclude the paper by discussing policy implications and possible applications of our model-based IRR estimate for hiring and selection practices in and out of the teacher labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Partnerships in global health and development governance have been firmly established as a tool to achieve effective outcomes. Botswana implements Safe Male Circumcision (SMC) for HIV prevention through a North-South partnership comprising the local Ministry of Health, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (funded by PEPFAR) and Africa Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). The SMC partnership experienced significant antagony and the aim of this paper is to illuminate the actions and processes in the SMC program that contributed to that antagony. Methods: Methods used to gather data include observation of the partners’ planning and strategic meeting in 2012, in-depth interviews with lead officers at national level, focus group discussions with district officers and implementers, younger male officers and old community members as recipients of the service. Results: The findings reveal that the partnership experienced antagony during operational processes and as the ultimate outcome. Target setting, financial power of the North, superficial ownership given to the South, ignoring local traditional realities results in antagony. Three roots of antagony have been identified: 1. therapeutic domination–medical expertise given with arrogance; 2.iatrogenic violence–good intentions that cause unintended harm; 3. the Trojan horse–Reckless acceptance of the gift as well as deceptive power positioned under the pretext of benevolence. Conclusion: The three roots of antagony; therapeutic domination, iatrogenic violence and the Trojan horse, constitute attitudes, hidden intentions and unintended consequences that influence program implementation and cause harm at different levels. Examples of therapeutic domination and the Trojan horse have highlighted the need for vigilance at the stage of establishing a partnership, to prevent more powerful partners from developing and applying hidden agendas and to strengthen accountability from the local partner. Iatrogenic violence has highlighted the need for partnership interventions to prevent good partner intentions accidentally producing bad outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research about unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has developed rapidly in recent years, especially the UAV swarm with sensors which is becoming common means of achieving situational awareness. Due to inadequate researches of the UAV swarm with complex control structure currently, we propose a patrolling task planning algorithm for the UAV swarm with double-layer centralized control structure under the uncertain and dynamic environment. The main objective of the UAV swarm is to collect environment information as much as possible. To summarized, the primary contributions of this paper are as follows. We first define the patrolling problem. After that, the patrolling problem is modeled as the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) problem. Building upon this, we put forward a myopic and scalable online task planning algorithm. The algorithm contains online heuristic function, sequential allocation method, and the mechanism of bottom-up information flow and top-down command flow, reducing the computation complexity effectively. Moreover, as the number of control layers increases, this algorithm guarantees the performance without increasing the computation complexity for the swarm leader. Finally, we empirically evaluate our algorithm in the specific scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Wealthy schools appoint better qualified teachers, less wealthy schools under qualified teachers. Added to this mix is a powerful teacher’s union whose policies attempt to entrench the job security of teachers in the less wealthy schools irrespective of whether they can teach their subjects or not. Can one isolate these effects from that of other socio-demographic factors that may also be affecting the performance of students when they enrol for a degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN)? An outcome variable that subtracts the number of courses that have been failed from the number of courses that have been passed, dividing this by the total number of years that they have spent studying for a particular degree will be used as a response variable for this paper. Objectives: The system of secondary education in South Africa is highly polarized. On the one hand, we have a group of mainly Black African students, forming about 80% of the total student population, that come from a vastly under-resourced rural or township based community. On the other hand, we have a group of predominantly White and Indian students who are able to attend a far better resourced set of private schools. Added to this mix, we have 240,000 of South Africa’s total number of 390,000 primary and secondary school teachers who belong to a powerful teacher’s union which enjoys a strong political alliance with the ruling party in South Africa. With most of their union members teaching in the less wealthy schools in South Africa, `school background’ now includes a politically motivated component that focuses on teacher self–interest rather than the education of the child. What sort of effect does school background have on the performance of students when they enter an institution of higher learning? More importantly, can one isolate the effect of school background from that of other possibly confounding factors such as gender, financial aid and the receipt of some form of residence based accommodation that will also impact on their performance while at university? Method: A total of 6,183 students enrolling for a degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) over the period 2008 to 2012 were used a dataset for this study. Permission to use this dataset was given by the Teaching and Learning Office at UKZN. The database that was used for this study was obtained from the Division of Management Information (DMI) office at UKZN. The percentage based marks that students have managed to record for Mathematics, English, Biology and Accounting in their school leaving exams together with some other important but observable socio-economic factors were included in a regression model to determine how students will perform at UKZN. Socio-economic variables relating to gender, race and whether they have receivd some form of financial aid or residence based accommodation while studying at university were also included as predictor variables in our regression based model structure. Results and Conclusions: An interaction effect associated with being a Black African student who has been privileged enough to attend a quintile five school was found to be significant. A main effect associated with being able to attend a more privileged quintile 5 school however was found to be nonsignificant even after an adjustment has been made for gender, race, the receipt of some form of financial aid and residence based accommodation. Given that UKZN already has a number of bridging programs in place that target students who have come from a less privileged background, for university based policymakers, this result may help to justify the targeted selection of Black African students from the less privileged schools that is taking place. Because some of the disparity in matric performance that we are observing may also be associated with teacher competency and the protective influence of a powerful teacher’s union, this paper may also help to highlight some of the economic costs related with having under-prepared students. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”–United Negro College Fund. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School-based comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) can help adolescents achieve their full potential and realize their sexual and reproductive health and rights. This is particularly pressing in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where high rates of unintended pregnancy and STIs among adolescents can limit countries’ ability to capitalize on the demographic dividend. While many LMICs have developed CSE curricula, their full implementation is often hindered by challenges around program planning and roll-out at the national and local level. A better understanding of these barriers, and similarities and differences across countries, can help devise strategies to improve implementation; yet few studies have examined these barriers. This paper analyzes the challenges to the implementation of national CSE curricula in four LMICs: Ghana, Kenya, Peru and Guatemala. It presents qualitative findings from in-depth interviews with central and local government officials, civil society representatives, and community level stakeholders ranging from religious leaders to youth representatives. Qualitative findings are complemented by quantitative results from surveys of principals, teachers who teach CSE topics, and students aged 15–17 in a representative sample of 60–80 secondary schools distributed across three regions in each country, for a total of around 3000 students per country. Challenges encountered were strikingly similar across countries. Program planning-related challenges included insufficient and piecemeal funding for CSE; lack of coordination of the various efforts by central and local government, NGOs and development partners; and inadequate systems for monitoring and evaluating teachers and students on CSE. Curriculum implementation-related challenges included inadequate weight given to CSE when integrated into other subjects, insufficient adaptation of the curriculum to local contexts, and limited stakeholder participation in curriculum development. While challenges were similar across countries, the strategies used to overcome them were different, and offer useful lessons to improve implementation for these and other low- and middle-income countries facing similar challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Gestural interfaces allow accessing and manipulating Electronic Medical Records (EMR) in hospitals while keeping a complete sterile environment. Particularly, in the Operating Room (OR), these interfaces enable surgeons to browse Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) without the need of delegating functions to the surgical staff. Existing gesture based medical interfaces rely on a suboptimal and an arbitrary small set of gestures that are mapped to a few commands available in PACS software. The objective of this work is to discuss a method to determine the most suitable set of gestures based on surgeon’s acceptability. To achieve this goal, the paper introduces two key innovations: (a) a novel methodology to incorporate gestures’ semantic properties into the agreement analysis, and (b) a new agreement metric to determine the most suitable gesture set for a PACS. Materials and methods: Three neurosurgical diagnostic tasks were conducted by nine neurosurgeons. The set of commands and gesture lexicons were determined using a Wizard of Oz paradigm. The gestures were decomposed into a set of 55 semantic properties based on the motion trajectory, orientation and pose of the surgeons’ hands and their ground truth values were manually annotated. Finally, a new agreement metric was developed, using the known Jaccard similarity to measure consensus between users over a gesture set. Results: A set of 34 PACS commands were found to be a sufficient number of actions for PACS manipulation. In addition, it was found that there is a level of agreement of 0.29 among the surgeons over the gestures found. Two statistical tests including paired t-test and Mann Whitney Wilcoxon test were conducted between the proposed metric and the traditional agreement metric. It was found that the agreement values computed using the former metric are significantly higher (p < 0.001) for both tests. Conclusions: This study reveals that the level of agreement among surgeons over the best gestures for PACS operation is higher than the previously reported metric (0.29 vs 0.13). This observation is based on the fact that the agreement focuses on main features of the gestures rather than the gestures themselves. The level of agreement is not very high, yet indicates a majority preference, and is better than using gestures based on authoritarian or arbitrary approaches. The methods described in this paper provide a guiding framework for the design of future gesture based PACS systems for the OR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social skills training, performed by human trainers, is a well-established method for obtaining appropriate skills in social interaction. Previous work automated the process of social skills training by developing a dialogue system that teaches social communication skills through interaction with a computer avatar. Even though previous work that simulated social skills training only considered acoustic and linguistic information, human social skills trainers take into account visual and other non-verbal features. In this paper, we create and evaluate a social skills training system that closes this gap by considering the audiovisual features of the smiling ratio and the head pose (yaw and pitch). In addition, the previous system was only tested with graduate students; in this paper, we applied our system to children or young adults with autism spectrum disorders. For our experimental evaluation, we recruited 18 members from the general population and 10 people with autism spectrum disorders and gave them our proposed multimodal system to use. An experienced human social skills trainer rated the social skills of the users. We evaluated the system’s effectiveness by comparing pre- and post-training scores and identified significant improvement in their social skills using our proposed multimodal system. Computer-based social skills training is useful for people who experience social difficulties. Such a system can be used by teachers, therapists, and social skills trainers for rehabilitation and the supplemental use of human-based training anywhere and anytime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labeling theory suggests that criminal justice interventions amplify offending behavior. Theories of intergenerational transmission suggest why children of convicted parents have a higher risk of offending. This paper combines these two perspectives and investigates whether labeling effects might be stronger for children of convicted parents. We first investigated labeling effects within the individual: we examined the impact of a conviction between ages 19–26 on self-reported offending behavior between 27–32 while controlling for self-reported behavior between 15–18. Our results show that a conviction predicted someone’s later self-reported offending behavior, even when previous offending behavior was taken into account. Second, we investigated whether having a convicted parent influenced this association. When we added this interaction to the analysis, a labeling effect was only visible among people with convicted parents. This supports the idea of cumulative disadvantage: Labeling seems stronger for people who are already in a disadvantaged situation having a convicted parent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indicators of compliance and efficiency in combatting money laundering, collected by EUROSTAT, are plagued with shortcomings. In this paper, I have carried out a forensic analysis on a 2003–2010 dataset of indicators of compliance and efficiency in combatting money laundering, that European Union member states self-reported to EUROSTAT, and on the basis of which, their efforts were evaluated. I used Benford’s law to detect any anomalous statistical patterns and found that statistical anomalies were also consistent with strategic manipulation. According to Benford’s law, if we pick a random sample of numbers representing natural processes, and look at the distribution of the first digits of these numbers, we see that, contrary to popular belief, digit 1 occurs most often, then digit 2, and so on, with digit 9 occurring in less than 5% of the sample. Without prior knowledge of Benford’s law, since people are not intuitively good at creating truly random numbers, deviations thereof can capture strategic alterations. In order to eliminate other sources of deviation, I have compared deviations in situations where incentives and opportunities for manipulation existed and in situations where they did not. While my results are not a conclusive proof of strategic manipulation, they signal that countries that faced incentives and opportunities to misinform the international community about their efforts to combat money laundering may have manipulated these indicators. Finally, my analysis points to the high potential for disruption that the manipulation of national statistics has, and calls for the acknowledgment that strategic manipulation can be an unintended consequence of the international community’s pressure on countries to put combatting money laundering on the top of their national agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant responsibility that physicians have in healthcare delivery, we know surprisingly little about why physician practice styles vary within or across institutions. Estimating variation in physician practice styles is complicated by the fact that patients are rarely randomly assigned to physicians. This paper uses the quasi-random assignment of patients to physicians in emergency departments (EDs) to show how physicians vary in their treatment of patients with minor injuries. The results reveal a considerable degree of variation in practice styles within EDs; physicians at the 75th percentile of the spending distribution spend 20% more than physicians at the 25th percentile. Observable physician characteristics do not explain much of the variation across physicians, but there is a significant degree of sorting between physicians and EDs over time, with high-cost physicians sorting into high-cost EDs as they gain experience. The results may shed light on why some EDs remain persistently higher-cost than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the trends in today’s tourism sector is the development of environmentally-friendly tourism activities which rely on natural resources of cultural heritage and on biodiversity. This is definitely the case for agritourism, a form of rural tourism. The purpose of this paper is to identify the development aspects of Polish agritourism with particular emphasis on natural and cultural attractiveness. To demonstrate the relationship between agritourism activities of Polish farms and the cultural and natural attractiveness, the Hellwig’s synthetic development indicator was used. As shown by research, the cultural and natural attractiveness of a destination is an important exogenous development factor. Another finding was that the intensified efforts undertaken by the farmers to access EU funds were not focused on areas with valuable natural or cultural resources and an untapped agritourism potential; instead, they were oriented at regions dominated by semi-subsistence or family farms. For a large part of farmers, the new form of support is about to become a source of additional incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Against a backdrop of more than four decades of war, conflict and insecurity, Afghanistan is recognised as suffering from endemic violence and children are exposed to multiple forms of violence, including at the family and school levels. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of school-based peace education and a community-based intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence in conflict resolution, implemented in Afghanistan with the aim of reducing violence against and between children. Methods: The evaluation consisted of a cross-sectional, interrupted time series design with three data collection points over 12 months. Data was collected from students in 11 secondary schools (seven girls’ and four boys’ schools) in Jawzjan province of Afghanistan, with a total of 361 boys and 373 girls sampled at endline. All children were interviewed with a questionnaire developed for the study. Key outcomes included children’s experience of peer violence (both perpetration and victimization) at school, corporal punishment both at home and at school, and observation of family violence. Other outcomes included children’s gender equitable attitudes, attitudes towards child punishment, depression and school performance. Results: Between baseline and endline evaluation points, there were significant reductions in various forms of violence at the school level, including both boys’ and girls’ past month experience of peer violence victimization, peer violence perpetration, and corporal punishment by teachers. There were also significant reductions in boys’ and girls’ experience of corporal punishment at home and observation of family violence, with a particularly strong effect observed among girls. Both boys and girls had significantly more equitable gender attitudes and significantly less violence-supportive attitudes in relation to children’s punishment, and significantly fewer symptoms of depression. Girls’ school attendance was also significantly higher at endline. Discussion: To our knowledge this is the first time that a peace education program has been evaluated in Afghanistan, with or without a community intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence for conflict resolution. The evaluation suggests that the intervention may have led to a reduction in various forms of violence, including children’s peer violence, corporal punishment of children both at school and at home, and in children’s reports of domestic violence against women at the household level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scientific researchers aspire to engage policy in their writing, but translating scientific research and findings into policy discussion often requires an understanding of the institutional complexities of legal and policy processes and actors. To examine how researchers have undertaken that challenge, we developed a set of metrics and applied them to articles published in one of the principal academic publication venues for science and policy—Science magazine’s Policy Forum. We reviewed each Policy Forum article published over a five-year period (2011–15), 220 in all. For each article, we assessed the level of policy content based on presence of a stated policy proposal or position and identification of the relevant policy actors and actions, and recorded attributes such as field of science, field of policy, number of references to legal and policy sources, number of authors from law and policy institutions, and number of citations. We find that a handful of science fields dominate publication frequency, but that all fields have produced publications with high policy engagement. Of the attributes, number of references to law and policy sources is correlated positively with level of engagement, whereas number of law and policy authors was fairly constant across all depths of engagement. Surprisingly, level of policy engagement was negatively correlated with the number of citations an article subsequently received. We offer possible explanations for these results and thoughts for authors, editors, and research institutions interested in facilitating robust engagement of policy in scientific writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community structures in collaboration networks reflect the natural tendency of individuals to organize their work in groups in order to better achieve common goals. In most of the cases, individuals exploit their connections to introduce themselves to new areas of interests, giving rise to multifaceted collaborations which span different fields. In this paper, we analyse collaborations in science and among movie actors as multiplex networks, where the layers represent respectively research topics and movie genres, and we show that communities indeed coexist and overlap at the different layers of such systems. We then propose a model to grow multiplex networks based on two mechanisms of intra and inter-layer triadic closure which mimic the real processes by which collaborations evolve. We show that our model is able to explain the multiplex community structure observed empirically, and we infer the strength of the two underlying social mechanisms from real-world systems. Being also able to correctly reproduce the values of intra-layer and inter-layer assortativity correlations, the model contributes to a better understanding of the principles driving the evolution of social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence-based practice and capacity-building approaches are essential for large-scale health promotion interventions. However, there are few models in the literature to guide and evaluate training of social service workers in community settings. This paper presents the development and evaluation of the “train-the-trainer” workshop (TTT) for the first large scale, community-based, family intervention projects, entitled “Happy Family Kitchen Project” (HFK) under the FAMILY project, a Hong Kong Jockey Club Initiative for a Harmonious Society. The workshop aimed to enhance social workers’ competence and performance in applying positive psychology constructs in their family interventions under HFK to improve family well-being of the community they served. The two-day TTT was developed and implemented by a multidisciplinary team in partnership with community agencies to 50 social workers (64% women). It focused on the enhancement of knowledge, attitude, and practice of five specific positive psychology themes, which were the basis for the subsequent development of the 23 family interventions for 1419 participants. Acceptability and applicability were enhanced by completing a needs assessment prior to the training. The TTT was evaluated by trainees’ reactions to the training content and design, changes in learners (trainees) and benefits to the service organizations. Focus group interviews to evaluate the workshop at three months after the training, and questionnaire survey at pre-training, immediately after, six months, one year and two years after training were conducted. There were statistically significant increases with large to moderate effect size in perceived knowledge, self-efficacy and practice after training, which sustained to 2-year follow-up. Furthermore, there were statistically significant improvements in family communication and well-being of the participants in the HFK interventions they implemented after training. This paper offers a practical example of development, implementation and model-based evaluation of training programs, which may be helpful to others seeking to develop such programs in diverse communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Childhood obesity is a serious public health challenge and schools have been identified as an ideal place to implement prevention interventions. The aim of this study was to measure the cost-effectiveness of a multi-faceted school-based obesity prevention intervention targeting children aged 6–7 years when compared to ‘usual activities’. Methods: A cluster randomised controlled trial in 54 schools across the West Midlands (UK) was conducted. The 12-month intervention aimed to increase physical activity by 30 minutes per day and encourage healthy eating. Costs were captured from a public sector perspective and utility-based health related outcomes measured using the CHU-9D. Multiple imputation using chained equations was used to address missing data. The cost effectiveness was measured at 30 months from baseline using a hierarchical net-benefit regression framework, that controlled for clustering and prespecified covariates. Any uncertainty in the results was characterised using cost-effectiveness acceptability curves. Results: At 30 months, the total adjusted incremental mean cost of the intervention was £155 (95% confidence interval [CI]: £139, £171), and the incremental mean QALYs gained was 0.006 (95% CI: -0.024, 0.036), per child. The incremental cost-effectiveness at 30 months was £26,815 per QALY and using a standard willingness to pay threshold of £30,000 per QALY, there was a 52% chance that the intervention was cost-effective. Conclusions: The cost-effectiveness of the school-based WAVES intervention was subject to substantial uncertainty. We therefore recommend more research to explore obesity prevention within schools as part of a wider systems approach to obesity prevention. Trial registration: This paper uses data collected by the WAVES trial: Controlled trials (registered May 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in modeling contemporary crime trends, a task that has historically been considered valuable to the public, researchers, and policymakers, is resurging. Advancements in criminology have made it clear that understanding crime trends necessarily involves understanding trends in how likely individuals are to report crimes to the police, as well as how likely the police are to accurately record those crimes. In this paper, we use dynamic linear models to simultaneously model the time series for several crime types in order to gain insight into trends in crime and crime reporting. We analyze crime data from Chicago spanning 2007 through 2016 and show how correlations in the way crime trends evolve may contain information about drivers of crime and crime reporting. We provide evidence of substantial differences in the relationships between the trends of crimes of different types depending on whether crimes are violent or nonviolent and whether or not crimes are tracked in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous school-based interventions have produced positive effects upon measures of children’s health and wellbeing but such interventions are often delivered by external experts which result in short-term effects. Thus, upskilling and expanding the resources available to classroom teachers could provide longer-term solutions. This paper presents a feasibility study of an online health resource (Healthy Schools Resource: HSR) developed to assist primary school teachers in the delivery of health-related education. Four schools (n = 2 intervention) participated in this study. Study feasibility was assessed by recruitment, retention and completion rates of several outcomes including height, weight, waist circumference, blood pressure and several metabolic markers including HDL-cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose and dietary knowledge following a 10-12-week intervention period. The process evaluation involved fidelity checks of teachers’ use of the HSR and post-intervention teacher interviews. A total of 614 consent forms were issued and 267 were returned (43%), of which, 201 confirmed consent for blood sampling (75%). Retention of children participating in the study was also high (96%). Of the 13 teachers who delivered the intervention to the children, four teachers were excluded from further analyses as they did not participate in the fidelity checks. Overall, teachers found the online resource facilitative of teaching health and wellbeing and several recommendations regarding the resource were provided to inform further evaluations. Recruitment and retention rates suggest that the teacher led intervention is feasible and acceptable to both teachers, parents and children. Initial findings provide promising evidence that given a greater sample size, a longer intervention exposure period and changes made to the resource, teachers’ use of HSR could enhance measures of health and wellbeing in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the representations and discourse of 41 trainee teachers on the inclusion of gaming elements in education and their potential contribution to covering social problems in the curriculum, and to education on and for gender equality between men and women. The study follows the principles of mixed methods research, based on the transcription, coding, categorisation, and analysis of data obtained from 34 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups, in addition to their descriptive quantitative analysis. The results showed optimum reception of gamification as a useful formative strategy in the various stages of education and that it can be validly used to include gender as a category of analysis in the teaching of social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent study shows that 617 million children and adolescents–or six out of 10 globally- are not acquiring minimum levels in literacy and mathematics, indicating the magnitude of the learning acquisition problem. For children with disabilities in context of conflict, the situation is arguably even worse: the literature shows that they face difficulties to access the education system due to multiple barriers, and when they do access, they are not learning. Our paper examines if an active education policy promoting inclusion since 2005 in Afghanistan, a protracted crisis context, has been effective. Using two cross sectional household surveys carried out eight years apart (2005–2013), our study shows that access to school and literacy did not improve between 2005 and 2013 for children and youth with disabilities. Both access and literacy outcomes were worse for girls with disabilities, those with a mental, learning or associated disability and those living in household where the head was uneducated. Finally, odds of being mentally distressed significantly declined between 2005 and 2013 indicating that schools might play a protective role for children with disabilities in Afghanistan. Our findings suggest that a multilevel multi-pronged adaptation of the existing system to improve the learning experience and promote children’s resilience, particularly for children with disabilities, in conflict context such as Afghanistan, is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about the use of child labor in West African cocoa production became widespread in the early 2000s in many high-income countries. In 2015 in Ghana, 91.8% (or a total of 878,595) of the children working in the cocoa sector were involved in a form of hazardous work. Child labor in cocoa production is not just a symptom of poverty but also a contributing factor, as children often forgo a formal education to work in cocoa orchards. Current Ghanaian law prohibits child labor, but, with many cocoa households living in poverty, child labor becomes a necessity for survival, and as such, current child labor laws are rarely enforced. Therefore, an effective policy that eliminates child labor could compensate farmers by providing an economic incentive. In this paper, we develop and calibrate a farm household model to estimate the cocoa price premium necessary to eliminate child labor from cocoa production while leaving the farm household welfare unchanged. This welfare-neutral price premium removes the negative effects of eliminating child labor for the farm household. Varying degrees of child labor exists, with certain forms posing a greater risk to children’s wellbeing. The results show that eliminating the worst forms of child labor would require a cocoa price premium of 2.81% and eliminating regular work (non-hazardous work but over the maximum hours allowed for a child) and the worst forms would require an 11.81% premium, which could be paid for by the well-established Ghanaian Cocoa Marketing Board. An incentive for the Cocoa Marketing Board to pay the price premium and monitor and enforce this policy would be the ability to differentiate their cocoa as child-labor free and not lose market share to countries who cannot currently certify this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This paper focuses on the issue of intimate partner violence and, specifically, on the distribution of femicides over time and the existence of copycat effects. This is the subject of an ongoing debate often triggered by the social alarm following multiple intimate partner homicides (IPHs) occurring in a short span of time. The aim of this research is to study the evolution of IPHs and provide a far-reaching answer by rigorously analyzing and searching for patterns in data on femicides. Methods: The study analyzes an official dataset, provided by the system VioGén of the Secretaría de Estado de Seguridad (Spanish State Secretariat for Security), including all the femicides occurred in Spain in 2007-2017. A statistical methodology to identify temporal interdependencies in count time series is proposed and applied to the dataset. The same methodology can be applied to other contexts. Results: There has been a decreasing trend in the number of femicides per year. No interdependencies among the temporal distribution of femicides are observed. Therefore, according to data, the existence of copycat effect in femicides cannot be claimed. Conclusions: Around 2011 there was a clear change in the average number of femicides which has not picked up. Results allow for an informed answer to the debate on copycat effect in Spanish femicides. The planning of femicides prevention activities should not be a reaction to a perceived increase in their occurrence. As a copycat effect is not detected in the studied time period, there is no evidence supporting the need to censor media reports on femicides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: For countries to contribute to Sustainable Development Goal 3.1 of reducing the global maternal mortality ratio (MMR) to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030, identifying the drivers of maternal mortality is critically important. The ability of countries to identify the key drivers is however hampered by the lack of data sources with sufficient observations of maternal death to allow a rigorous analysis of its determinants. This paper overcomes this problem by utilising census data. In the context of Indonesia, we merge individual-level data on pregnancy-related deaths and households’ socio-economic status from the 2010 Indonesian population census with detailed data on the availability and quality of local health services from the Village Census. We use these data to test the hypothesis that health service access and quality are important determinants of maternal death and explain the differences between high maternal mortality and low maternal mortality provinces. Methods: The 2010 Indonesian Population Census identifies 8075 pregnancy-related deaths and 5,866,791 live births. Multilevel logistic regression is used to analyse the impacts of demographic characteristics and the existence of, distance to and quality of health services on the likelihood of maternal death. Decomposition analysis quantifies the extent to which the difference in maternal mortality ratios between high and low performing provinces can be explained by demographic and health service characteristics. Findings: Health service access and characteristics account for 23% (CI: 17.2% to 28.5%) of the difference in maternal mortality ratios between high and low-performing provinces. The most important contributors are the number of doctors working at the community health centre (8.6%), the number of doctors in the village (6.9%) and distance to the nearest hospital (5.9%). Distance to health clinics and the number of midwives at community health centres and village health posts are not significant contributors, nor is socio-economic status. If the same level of access to doctors and hospitals in lower maternal mortality Java-Bali was provided to the higher maternal mortality Outer Islands of Indonesia, our model predicts 44 deaths would be averted per 100,000 pregnancies. Conclusion: Indonesia has employed a strategy over the past several decades of increasing the supply of midwives as a way of decreasing maternal mortality. While there is evidence of reductions in maternal mortality continuing to accrue from the provision of midwife services at village health posts, our findings suggest that further reductions in maternal mortality in Indonesia may require a change of focus to increasing the supply of doctors and access to hospitals. If data on maternal death is collected in a subsequent census, future research using two waves of census data would prove a useful validation of the results found here. Similar research using census data from other countries is also likely to be fruitful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, the Olympic shooting regulations were modified to increase the number of women’s shots from 40 to 60, equaling the number given to men. This research presented in this paper addresses two research issues: (1) has the performance of women’s shooting changed as a result of this increase in the number of shots? and (2) with the equalized number of shots in place, do women and men perform differently? This study included 292 shooters who competed in the 2016 and/or 2018 European Championships who all obtained top-50 results. Our sample included balanced quotas for sports (50% pistol and 50% rifle) and by category (50% women and 50% men). Both championships were held in the same facilities and in the same month of the season, but with the difference that in 2016, women had 40 shots and in 2018 they had 60 shots. We observed that women’s performances did not diminish for the pistol or the rifle category when their number of shots were increased. Men and women shot equally well with rifles, although the men’s performance with pistols was higher than that of women. We concluded that sports in which physical strength is a minor factor, as in the case of shooting, should revise their regulations in the interest of greater gender equality in sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Home visiting programs are implemented in high income countries to improve outcomes for families with young children. Significant resources are invested in such programs and high quality evaluations are important. In the context of research trials, implementation quality is often poorly reported and, when reported, is variable. This paper presents the quality of implementation of the right@home program, a sustained nurse home visiting intervention trialled in Australia, and delivered in a ‘real world’ context through usual child and family health services. right@home is structured around the core Maternal Early Childhood Sustained Home-visiting (MECSH) program, which is a salutogenic, child focused prevention model. Method: At each visit right@home practitioners completed a checklist detailing the client unique identifier, date of contact and activities undertaken. These checklists were collated to provide data on intervention dose, retention to program completion at child age 2 years, and visit content, which were compared with the program schedule. Quality of family-provider relationship was measured using the Session Rating Scale. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to identify clusters of activities and allow qualitative assessment of concordance between program aims and program delivery. Results: Of 363 intervention families offered the program, 352 (97·0%) commenced the program and 304 (87·3%) completed the program to child age 2 years. 253 of 352 (71·9%) families who commenced the program received more than 75 percent of scheduled visits including at least one antenatal visit. Families rated the participant-practitioner relationship highly (mean 39.4/40). The factor analysis identified six antenatal and six postnatal components which were concordant with the program aims. Conclusions: The right@home program was delivered with higher adherence to program dose, schedule and content, and retention than usually reported in other home visiting research. Program compliance may have resulted from program design (visit schedule, dose, content and delivery flexibility) that was consistent with family aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: NEETs (young people not in employment, education or training) are at higher risk for poorer mental and physical health. In France, the Missions locales (MLs) are the only social structures dedicated to this population. We sought to determine whether the systematic offer of a social and preventive medicine consultation at a ML might increase NEET participants’ access to training in the 12 months following the intervention. Methods: This intervention research was a parallel randomised controlled interventional study conducted at five MLs in mainland France in 2011–2012. It included 976 NEETs aged 18 to 25 years who attended one of the five MLs. At inclusion, participants were randomly assigned (1:1:1) to three groups: those in the first group were invited to see a social worker (not studied in this paper), those in the second group were invited to see a doctor and a social worker (intervention group), and the third was a control group. The primary outcome was participation in at least one training session during the year following study inclusion. Results: Among the 976 participants, 504 were randomly assigned to the intervention group and 472 to the control group; 704 (72.1%) were included in the analyses. A significantly higher proportion of the participants in the intervention group participated in a training session in the 12 months following the intervention than of those in the control group (63.3% vs 55.6%; p = 0.04). This difference was significantly greater for women, those less than 21 years of age, those unstably housed and those with a lower level of education. Conclusions: Social and preventive medicine consultations that are fully integrated into the social services for NEETs have an impact on their access to training and contribute to changing some of their health-related behaviours. This may improve their access to the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of virtual laboratories is growing as companies and educational institutions try to expand their reach, cut costs, increase student understanding, and provide more accessible hands on training for future scientists. Many new higher education initiatives outsource lab activities so students now perform them online in a virtual environment rather than in a classroom setting, thereby saving time and money while increasing accessibility. In this paper we explored whether the learning and motivational outcomes of interacting with a desktop virtual reality (VR) science lab simulation on the internet at home are equivalent to interacting with the same simulation in class with teacher supervision. A sample of 112 (76 female) university biology students participated in a between-subjects experimental design, in which participants learned at home or in class from the same virtual laboratory simulation on the topic of microbiology. The home and classroom groups did not differ significantly on post-test learning outcome scores, or on self-report measures of intrinsic motivation or self-efficacy. Furthermore, these conclusions remained after accounting for prior knowledge or goal orientation. In conclusion, the results indicate that virtual simulations are learning activities that students can engage in just as effectively outside of the classroom environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women remain highly vulnerable to HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, with female sex workers (FSWs) facing some of the highest rates of HIV. Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has the potential to reduce new infections among populations at highest risk and end-user perspectives of actual use in ‘real-world’ settings are critical to informing PrEP implementation. This paper presents findings from serial in-depth interviews (IDIs) conducted with FSW participants during the course of the Treatment And Prevention for Sex workers (TAPS) Demonstration Project in South Africa, exploring the lived experiences and perceptions of taking up and using PrEP. This research provides insight into risks and responsibilities facing FSWs perceived as prominent drivers in taking up and using PrEP, how PrEP was adopted to mitigate risk or ameliorate realities, and the characteristics of PrEP most valued, all of which are critical to consider in scale-up. Overall, distrust in the existence and/or efficacy of PrEP affected the motivation of women to come to the clinic and to maintain use. As one of the first reports of PrEP use among FSWs outside of a clinical trial setting, this research shows that it will be important to ensure accurate, relevant, and widespread messaging in communities to generate demand and support for PrEP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are public officials more responsive to requests from affluent or poor constituents? A growing body of evidence suggests that lawmakers are more responsive to the rich when they craft policy. However, some scholars theorize that officials also exhibit a corresponding bias in favor of the poor when they handle casework, essentially giving policy to the rich and services to the poor. In this paper, we test this casework prediction using four experiments in which confederates sent simple requests to state or local officials. In each, our confederates’ reported social classes were randomly assigned and signaled with a brief introductory statement mentioning the sender’s occupation or economic situation. Across our samples, we find precisely-estimated null effects of social class biases: the officials we studied were equally likely to respond regardless of the constituent’s class. These findings raise doubts about whether casework is really a class-biased process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a scalable machine learning approach accompanied by open-source software for identifying violent and peaceful forms of political protest participation using social media data. While violent political protests are statistically rare events, they often shape public perceptions of political and social movements. This is, in part, due to the extensive and disproportionate media coverage which violent protest participation receives relative to peaceful protest participation. In the past, when a small number of media conglomerates served as the primary information source for learning about political and social movements, viewership and advertiser demands encouraged news organizations to focus on violent forms of political protest participation. Consequently, much of our knowledge about political protest participation is derived from data collected about violent protests, while less is known about peaceful forms of protest. Since the early 2000s, the digital revolution shifted attention away from traditional news sources toward social media as a primary source of information about current events. This, along with developments in machine learning which allow us to collect and analyze data relevant to political participation, present us with unique opportunities to expand our knowledge of peaceful and violent forms of political protest participation through social media data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studio is critically important for design education, but few attempts have been made to demonstrate the parallels between studio factors and design performance. This paper adopts a coherent set of analyses to investigate the major studio factors and attempts to quantify the networking interactions among them. First, it describes how architectural studio is usually organised based on some major factors. Next, a theoretical model is established according to the described hypotheses and their mutual interactions. Third, the research method and statistical analysis with structural equation modelling (SEM) are presented. Finally, the results of this empirical examination are presented for discussion and suggestions. Our findings reveal that studio tutorials have no significant effect on undergraduate's design performance. In contrast, students’ subjective intention plays a more important role in shaping their behaviour, indicating the importance of transferring those exterior forces into internal benefits when the studio instructor attempts to optimise the pedagogy. These findings are also inspiring for all creative disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]