Understanding Desistance from Sexual Offending: A Thematic Review of Research Findings

Although there is a substantial body of work on desistance from crime in general, comparatively little is known about desistance from sexual crime. The broad aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the research methodology and preliminary findings from a recent empirical study on desistance from sexual offending conducted by the authors. Such findings have potentially important implications for policy and practice concerning sex offender risk assessment, treatment and management.

A review of research trends in mathematics teacher education. 'Una revisión de las tendencias de investigación en la formación de profesores de matemáticas'.

Resumen basado en el de la publicación

A review of research on working memory and its importance in education of the deaf

This independent study provides an overview of working memory as it pertains to deaf and hard of hearing students.

Competitiveness in construction: a critical review of research

Since its popularization in the 1980s, competitiveness has received close attention from practitioners and researchers across a wide range of industries. In the construction sector, many works on competitiveness have also been published. So far, however, there seems to be no comprehensive review to summarize and critique existing research on competitiveness in construction. This research, therefore, reviews the extant literature from four aspects: concept of competitiveness, competitiveness research at the construction industry level, competitiveness research at the firm level, and competitiveness research at the project level. The review presents the state-of-the-art development of competitiveness research in construction, identifies the research gaps, and proposes new directions for further studies. Further research is recommended to validate previous studies in construction practices, identify the mechanisms that encourage mutual enhancement of competitiveness at different levels, and how to achieve its sustainability by embracing new management and/or economics techniques.

Citation and peer review of data: moving towards formal data publication

This paper discusses many of the issues associated with formally publishing data in academia, focusing primarily on the structures that need to be put in place for peer review and formal citation of datasets. Data publication is becoming increasingly important to the scientific community, as it will provide a mechanism for those who create data to receive academic credit for their work and will allow the conclusions arising from an analysis to be more readily verifiable, thus promoting transparency in the scientific process. Peer review of data will also provide a mechanism for ensuring the quality of datasets, and we provide suggestions on the types of activities one expects to see in the peer review of data. A simple taxonomy of data publication methodologies is presented and evaluated, and the paper concludes with a discussion of dataset granularity, transience and semantics, along with a recommended human-readable citation syntax.

Describing individual incidents of sexual abuse: a review of research on the effects of multiple sources of information on children's reports

Objective: For successful prosecution of child sexual abuse, children are often required to provide reports about individual, alleged incidents. Although verbally or mentally rehearsing memory of an incident can strengthen memories, children’s report of individual incidents can also be contaminated when they experience other events related to the individual incidents (e.g., informal interviews, dreams of the incident) and/or when they have similar, repeated experiences of an incident, as in cases of multiple abuse.

Method: Research is reviewed on the positive and negative effects of these related experiences on the length, accuracy, and structure of children’s reports of a particular incident.

Results: Children’s memories of a particular incident can be strengthened when exposed to information that does not contradict what they have experienced, thus promoting accurate recall and resistance to false, suggestive influences. When the encountered information differs from children’s experiences of the target incident, however, children can become confused between their experiences—they may remember the content but not the source of their experiences.

Conclusions: We discuss the implications of this research for interviewing children in sexual abuse investigations and provide a set of research-based recommendations for investigative interviewers.

The UK perspective: a review of research on organisational stress management interventions

There are an increasing number of studies that have monitored the impact of Stress Management Interventions (SMls) and the results of these studies can play a vital role in informing the development of more effective, evidenced-based SMIs. In this paper, the authors have undertaken a review of United Kingdom (UK)-based research that has tested the impact of SMIs. Sixteen studies were examined and the results revealed that the vast majority of interventions were targeted at the individual employee, although there was a tendency for more recent research to focus on organisational level interventions. While all intervention levels were found to have some human and/or organisational benefits, strategies aimed at the individual level were less likely to result in longer-term benefits. An examination of the research methods used in the 16 studies indicated that UK-based researchers are beginning to adopt more rigorous research methods. However, there was a tendency for researchers to evaluate interventions over a relatively short time-frame. The implications of these findings for future research are discussed.

Domestic technology generation in LDCs: a review of research findings

Includes bibliography