Managing Stress and Pain to Prevent Patient Discomfort, Distress and Delayed Wound Healing.

Evidence suggests stress slows the healing of wounds but pain may also play a part. Regular assessment could improve patients' quality of life and recovery time.

Rhetoric and Realities of London 2012 Olympic Education and Participation ‘Legacies’: Voices from the Core and Periphery

A legacy emphasis was one of the fundamental pillars of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The notion of an Olympic legacy was predicated on assumptions that the event’s value would not purely derive from the sporting spectacle, but rather, from the ‘success’ of enduring effects met out in London and across the country. For physical education students and practitioners, Olympic legacy agendas translated into persistent pressure to increase inspiration, engagement, participation and performance in the subject, sport and physical activity. Responding to this context, and cogniscent of significant disciplinary scholarship, this paper reports initial data from the first phase of a longitudinal study involving Key Stage Three (students aged 11-13) cohorts in two comparable United Kingdom schools: the first an inner-city (core) London school adjacent to the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London (n=150); the second, a (peripheral) school in the Midlands (n=198). The research involved the use of themed questionnaires focusing on self-reported attitudes toward the Olympic Games, and, experiences of physical education, sport and physical activity. Students from both schools demonstrated a wide variety of attitudes toward physical education and sport; yet, minor variances emerged regarding extreme enthusiasm levels. Both cohorts also expressed considerably mixed feelings toward the impending Olympic Games. Strong and variable responses were also reported regarding inspiration levels, ticketing acquisition and engagement levels. Consequently, this investigation can be read within the broader context of legacy debates, and, aligns well with physical educationalists’ on-going discomfort regarding legacy imperatives being enforced upon the discipline and its practitioners. Our work reiterates a shared disciplinary scepticism that while an Olympic Games may temporarily affect young peoples’ affectations for sport (and maybe physical education and physical activity), it may not provide the best, or most appropriate, mechanism for sustained attitudinal and/or social changes en masse.

Exploring Intrinsic Gender Identity Using Second Life

Virtual Worlds (VWs) provide an environment to understand and explore notions of gender and identity, particularly given the ability for users to experiment with gender in online worlds. Our study analyses gender identity using the virtual space of Second Life (SL) to explore experiences and responses to gender in an avatar. We introduced 46 novice users to the VW of SL in order to see if real life gender influenced their choices of avatar. Participants selected the gender of their original avatar and once they were used to SL, they were then asked to change the gender of that avatar. We used mixed methods research consisting of paper based questionnaires (n=34) and focus groups (n=46) conducted in SL. Nearly all participants chose an initial avatar that reflected their real-life gender with females (n=22) reporting higher levels of identification with this initial avatar. Females were significantly more concerned with the gender-specific appearance of their initial avatar. On swapping gender, females reported higher levels of discomfort and many changed back before 7 minutes. Males (n=24) did not report significant discomfort with their changed-gender avatar and did not revert back to their original avatar as quickly. Our findings suggest that female participants in this study tended to reinforce gender binaries through such things as clothing, hairstyles and behaviors of their avatars. Male participants were less likely to experience discomfort through changing the gender of their avatar (with the males noting they still perceived an avatar with a female appearance as male).