The European Educational Research Association: people, practices and policy over the last 20 years

From a pragmatic point of view, it is the people who make an organisation, but organisations are both people and structures, and not least organisations develop culture. One of the significant features of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) as an organisation is that many of its activities are run by people on a voluntary basis. Apart from a small office, now in Berlin, which oversees and handles the everyday management, participation on Council, reviewing and programming for ECER (European Conference on Educational Research), managing networks, etc. are all undertaken as voluntary work by academics from across Europe (and beyond). From the large group of people who are currently sustaining these activities, many have participated from the beginning, but many others, after having been once at the conference, returned and got engaged in the work, for instance within one of the networks. Among the many who participate in EERA activities, there is a diversity of reasons for doing so, but there seems to be something which is recurring in what people say about why they do it. One of these recurring ideas is that the discursive norms of the organisation are enforced in the context of welcoming people and ideas, and second, there exists an intellectual generosity and egalitarianism which encourages newcomers to participate rather than protect themselves. We believe that this tells something about what EERA and ECER are about.

Knowledge and attitudes towards dietary fibers - romania vs other european countries

Aim: The aim of our study was to evaluate the Romanian’s knowledge and attitudes regarding dietary fibers compared with other European countries. Materials and methods: We made a cross-sectional survey (part of multinational project from CI&DETS Research Centre, Instituto Politecnico Viseu, Portugal, with reference PROJ/CI&DETS/2014/0001) based on a questionnaire applied in 2015, over 670 Romanian consumers, focused on the attitudes and knowledge towards ingestion of foods rich in fibers. We used the software SPSS for statistics. Results: Our results showed that the knowledge about dietary fibers and also the ingestion of food products rich in fibers were low. The female participants ate more whole grains and fruits than males and pay more attention to food labelling, the Romanian people prefer to stay and eat home than at restaurants especially in rural areas, and the knowledge about fiber’s benefits was significantly related to high education and urban location. Comparing to other European countries, Romania had the highest level of knowledge about dietary fibers definition followed by Portugal, Turkey and Hungary, but the lowest regarding the fibers importance for health after Macedonia, Turkey and Latvia. Conclusion: We sustain the needs for more efficient community interventions and proper information about the importance of dietary fibers for our health and also for the dissemination of the nutritional standards among Romanian population.