The relationship of loneliness and social anxiety with children's and adolescents' online communication

Children and adolescents are now using online communication to form and/or maintain relationships with strangers and/or friends. Relationships in real life are important for children and adolescents in identity formation and general development. However, social relationships can be difficult for those who experience feelings of loneliness and social anxiety. The current study aimed to replicate and extend research conducted by Valkenburg and Peter (2007b), by investigating differences in online communication patterns between children and adolescents with and without selfreported loneliness and social anxiety. Six hundred and twenty-six students aged 10-16 years completed a questionnaire survey about the amount of time they engaged in online communication, the topics they discussed, who they communicated with, and their purposes of online communication. Following Valkenburg and Peter (2007b), loneliness was measured with a shortened version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3) developed by Russell (1996), whereas social anxiety was assessed with a sub-scale of the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (La Greca & Lopez, 1998). The sample was divided into four groups of children and adolescents: 220 were “non-socially anxious and non-lonely”, 139 were “socially anxious but not lonely”, 107 were “lonely but not socially anxious”, and 159 were “lonely and socially anxious”. A one-way ANOVA and chi-square tests were conducted to evaluate the aforementioned differences between these groups. The results indicated that children and adolescents who reported being lonely used online communication differently from those who did not report being lonely. Essentially, the former communicated online more frequently about personal things and intimate topics, but also to compensate for their weak social skills and to meet new people. Further analyses on gender differences within lonely children and adolescents revealed that boys and girls communicated online more frequently with different partners. It was concluded that for these vulnerable individuals online communication may fulfil needs of self-disclosure, identity exploration, and social interactions. However, future longitudinal studies combining a quantitative with a qualitative approach would better address the relationship between Internet use and psychosocial well-being. The findings also suggested the need for further exploration of how such troubled children and adolescents can use the Internet beneficially.

Use of Bayesian geostatistical prediction to estimate local variations in Schistosoma haematobium infection in western Africa

Objective We aimed to predict sub-national spatial variation in numbers of people infected with Schistosoma haematobium, and associated uncertainties, in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, prior to implementation of national control programmes. Methods We used national field survey datasets covering a contiguous area 2,750 × 850 km, from 26,790 school-aged children (5–14 years) in 418 schools. Bayesian geostatistical models were used to predict prevalence of high and low intensity infections and associated 95% credible intervals (CrI). Numbers infected were determined by multiplying predicted prevalence by numbers of school-aged children in 1 km2 pixels covering the study area. Findings Numbers of school-aged children with low-intensity infections were: 433,268 in Burkina Faso, 872,328 in Mali and 580,286 in Niger. Numbers with high-intensity infections were: 416,009 in Burkina Faso, 511,845 in Mali and 254,150 in Niger. 95% CrIs (indicative of uncertainty) were wide; e.g. the mean number of boys aged 10–14 years infected in Mali was 140,200 (95% CrI 6200, 512,100). Conclusion National aggregate estimates for numbers infected mask important local variation, e.g. most S. haematobium infections in Niger occur in the Niger River valley. Prevalence of high-intensity infections was strongly clustered in foci in western and central Mali, north-eastern and northwestern Burkina Faso and the Niger River valley in Niger. Populations in these foci are likely to carry the bulk of the urinary schistosomiasis burden and should receive priority for schistosomiasis control. Uncertainties in predicted prevalence and numbers infected should be acknowledged and taken into consideration by control programme planners.

Nature's experiment? Handedness and early childhood development

In recent years a large body of research has investigated the various factors affecting child development and the consequent impact of child development on future educational and labour market outcomes. In this article we contribute to this literature by investigating the effect of handedness on a child and given recent research demonstrating that child development strongly affects adult outcomes. Using a large nationally representative sample of young children we find that the probability of a child being left-handed is not significantly related to child health at birth, family composition, parental employment or household income. We also find robust evidence that left-handed (and mixed handed) children perform significantly worse in nearly all measures of development than right-handed children with the relative disadvantage being larger for boys than girls. Importantly these differentials cannot be explained by different socioeconomic characteristics of the household, parental attitudes or investments in learning resources.

A shameful spectacle

The linguistics of violence in film and on television is a hotly debated topic, especially whenever outrageously violent crimes are committed in the community. The debate tends to proceed thus: was the perpetrator addicted to watching violent films and videos, and if so, did the language of mediated violence translate into the language of everyday action, blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality? The cause—effect relationship between fantasies enacted on screen and horrific real-life crimes has never been proven scientifically, despite endless governmental inquiries and many attempts by academics to discover a causation formula. I will not be looking so much at the vexed question of the relationship between stylized violence on celluloid and real violence in a community. Rather, I wish to explore the nature of a particular form of mediated, gendered violence through an analysis of the language of several key films made in the past decade focusing on the violent crime of rape: Hollywood films The Accused (1988), Casualties of War (1989), Thelma and Louise (1991), Strange Days (1996), and the Australian films Shame (1988) and The Boys (1998). In this way, I wish to show how rape is depicted linguistically in film, and how such films may actually give solutions to this abhorrent kind of violence rather than thrill the viewer vicariously, or, in a worst case scenario, stimulate people to further violence.

Digital kids, analogue students : a mixed methods study of students' engagement with a school-based Web 2.0 learning innovation

The inquiry documented in this thesis is located at the nexus of technological innovation and traditional schooling. As we enter the second decade of a new century, few would argue against the increasingly urgent need to integrate digital literacies with traditional academic knowledge. Yet, despite substantial investments from governments and businesses, the adoption and diffusion of contemporary digital tools in formal schooling remain sluggish. To date, research on technology adoption in schools tends to take a deficit perspective of schools and teachers, with the lack of resources and teacher ‘technophobia’ most commonly cited as barriers to digital uptake. Corresponding interventions that focus on increasing funding and upskilling teachers, however, have made little difference to adoption trends in the last decade. Empirical evidence that explicates the cultural and pedagogical complexities of innovation diffusion within long-established conventions of mainstream schooling, particularly from the standpoint of students, is wanting. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis inquires into how students evaluate and account for the constraints and affordances of contemporary digital tools when they engage with them as part of their conventional schooling. It documents the attempted integration of a student-led Web 2.0 learning initiative, known as the Student Media Centre (SMC), into the schooling practices of a long-established, high-performing independent senior boys��� school in urban Australia. The study employed an ‘explanatory’ two-phase research design (Creswell, 2003) that combined complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to achieve both breadth of measurement and richness of characterisation. In the initial quantitative phase, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to the senior school student population to determine adoption trends and predictors of SMC usage (N=481). Measurement constructs included individual learning dispositions (learning and performance goals, cognitive playfulness and personal innovativeness), as well as social and technological variables (peer support, perceived usefulness and ease of use). Incremental predictive models of SMC usage were conducted using Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modelling: (i) individual-level predictors, (ii) individual and social predictors, and (iii) individual, social and technological predictors. Peer support emerged as the best predictor of SMC usage. Other salient predictors include perceived ease of use and usefulness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals. On the whole, an overwhelming proportion of students reported low usage levels, low perceived usefulness and a lack of peer support for engaging with the digital learning initiative. The small minority of frequent users reported having high levels of peer support and robust learning goal orientations, rather than being predominantly driven by performance goals. These findings indicate that tensions around social validation, digital learning and academic performance pressures influence students’ engagement with the Web 2.0 learning initiative. The qualitative phase that followed provided insights into these tensions by shifting the analytics from individual attitudes and behaviours to shared social and cultural reasoning practices that explain students’ engagement with the innovation. Six indepth focus groups, comprising 60 students with different levels of SMC usage, were conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed. Textual data were analysed using Membership Categorisation Analysis. Students’ accounts converged around a key proposition. The Web 2.0 learning initiative was useful-in-principle but useless-in-practice. While students endorsed the usefulness of the SMC for enhancing multimodal engagement, extending peer-topeer networks and acquiring real-world skills, they also called attention to a number of constraints that obfuscated the realisation of these design affordances in practice. These constraints were cast in terms of three binary formulations of social and cultural imperatives at play within the school: (i) ‘cool/uncool’, (ii) ‘dominant staff/compliant student’, and (iii) ‘digital learning/academic performance’. The first formulation foregrounds the social stigma of the SMC among peers and its resultant lack of positive network benefits. The second relates to students’ perception of the school culture as authoritarian and punitive with adverse effects on the very student agency required to drive the innovation. The third points to academic performance pressures in a crowded curriculum with tight timelines. Taken together, findings from both phases of the study provide the following key insights. First, students endorsed the learning affordances of contemporary digital tools such as the SMC for enhancing their current schooling practices. For the majority of students, however, these learning affordances were overshadowed by the performative demands of schooling, both social and academic. The student participants saw engagement with the SMC in-school as distinct from, even oppositional to, the conventional social and academic performance indicators of schooling, namely (i) being ‘cool’ (or at least ‘not uncool’), (ii) sufficiently ‘compliant’, and (iii) achieving good academic grades. Their reasoned response therefore, was simply to resist engagement with the digital learning innovation. Second, a small minority of students seemed dispositionally inclined to negotiate the learning affordances and performance constraints of digital learning and traditional schooling more effectively than others. These students were able to engage more frequently and meaningfully with the SMC in school. Their ability to adapt and traverse seemingly incommensurate social and institutional identities and norms is theorised as cultural agility – a dispositional construct that comprises personal innovativeness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals orientation. The logic then is ‘both and’ rather than ‘either or’ for these individuals with a capacity to accommodate both learning and performance in school, whether in terms of digital engagement and academic excellence, or successful brokerage across multiple social identities and institutional affiliations within the school. In sum, this study takes us beyond the familiar terrain of deficit discourses that tend to blame institutional conservatism, lack of resourcing and teacher resistance for low uptake of digital technologies in schools. It does so by providing an empirical base for the development of a ‘third way’ of theorising technological and pedagogical innovation in schools, one which is more informed by students as critical stakeholders and thus more relevant to the lived culture within the school, and its complex relationship to students’ lives outside of school. It is in this relationship that we find an explanation for how these individuals can, at the one time, be digital kids and analogue students.

Appreciating diversity: Confronting homophobia at school

The development of sexual identity is a complex, lifelong process involving the interplay of sex, gender and orientation, occurring within a social framework of heterosexual dominance (Murray 2001). Australia has a richly diverse culture and, at some point in our lives, we will all meet people, who look, think, live, or act differently to ourselves. Through understanding and celebrating the diversity of our culture, we enrich our lives and the lives of others. Schools influence how boys (and girls) see themselves and each other; those of us who work in schools cannot pretend to be outside the process of gender construction. In our daily business we send messages, set boundaries and respond with support, disinterest or censure to the acting out of various masculinities and femininities.

Does feminism spoil girls? Explanations for official rises in female delinquency

Official rates of female delinquency have been rising steadily in countries such as Australia, England, Canada and the United States since the 1960s. They have also generally been rising at a rate faster than that for boys. As yet there is little consensus about the reasons for these rises or even whether such rate rises reflect any real increase in female delinquency at all. Against this backdrop of rising official crimes rates for young women, this article revisits the various criminological explanations for these trends.

Gender

The OED informs us that “gender” has at its root the Latin genus, meaning “race, kind,” and emerges as early as the fifth century as a term for differentiating between types of (especially) people and words. In the following 1500 years, gender appears in linguistic and biological contexts to distinguish types of words and bodies from one another, as when words in Indo-European languages were identified as masculine, feminine, or neuter, and humans were identified as male or female. It is telling that gender has historically (whether overtly or covertly) been a tool of negotiation between our understandings of bodies, and meanings derived from and attributed to them. Within the field of children’s literature studies, as in other disciplines, gender in and of itself is rarely the object of critique. Rather, specific constructions of gender structure understandings of subjectivity; allow or disallow certain behaviors or experiences on the basis of biological sex; and dictate a specific vision of social relations and organization. Critical approaches to gender in children’s literature have included linguistic analysis (Turner-Bowker; Sunderland); analysis of visual representations (Bradford; Moebius); cultural images of females (Grauerholz and Pescosolido); consideration of gender and genre (Christian-Smith; Stephens); ideological (Nodelman and Reimer); psychoanalytic (Coats); discourse analysis (Stephens); and masculinity studies (Nodelman) among others. In the adjacent fields of education and literacy studies, gender has been a sustained point of investigation, often deriving from perceived gendering of pedagogical practices (Lehr) or of reading preferences and competencies, and in recent years, perceptions of boys as “reluctant readers” (Moss). The ideology of patriarchy has primarily come under critical scrutiny 2 because it has been used to locate characters and readers within the specific binary logic of gender relations that historically subordinated the feminine to the masculine. Just as feminism might be broadly defined as resistance to existing power structures, a gendered reading might be broadly defined as a “resistant reading” in that it most often reveals or contests that which a text assumes to be the norm.

Anxiety among high school students in India : comparisons across gender, school type, social strata, and perceptions of quality time with parents

The broad objective of the study was to better understand anxiety among adolescents in Kolkata city, India. Specifically, the study compared anxiety across gender, school type, socio-economic background and mothers’ employment status. The study also examined adolescents’ perceptions of quality time with their parents. A group of 460 adolescents (220 boys and 240 girls), aged 13-17 years were recruited to participate in the study via a multi-stage sampling technique. The data were collected using a self-report semi-structured questionnaire and a standardized psychological test, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Results show that anxiety was prevalent in the sample with 20.1% of boys and 17.9% of girls found to be suffering from high anxiety. More boys were anxious than girls (p<0.01). Adolescents from Bengali medium schools were more anxious than adolescents from English medium schools (p<0.01). Adolescents belonging to the middle class (middle socio-economic group) suffered more anxiety than those from both high and low socio-economic groups (p<0.01). Adolescents with working mothers were found to be more anxious (p<0.01). Results also show that a substantial proportion of the adolescents perceived they did not receive quality time from fathers (32.1%) and mothers (21.3%). A large number of them also did not feel comfortable to share their personal issues with their parents (60.0% for fathers and 40.0% for mothers).

Parental beliefs about supervising children when crossing roads and cycling

Pedestrian and cyclist injuries are significant public health issues together accounting for 11-30% of road deaths in highly motorised countries. Children are particularly at risk. In Australia in 2009 children 0-16 years comprised 11.4% of pedestrian deaths and 6.4% of cyclist deaths. Parental attitudes and level of supervision are important to children’s road safety. Results from a telephone survey with parents of children 5-9 years (N=147) are reported. Questions addressed beliefs about preventability of injury, appropriate ages for children to cross the road or cycle independently, and the frequency of holding 5-9 year old children’s hands while crossing the road. Results suggest that parents believe most injuries are preventable and that they personally can act to improve their own safety in the home, on the road, at work, as well as in or on the water. Most parents (68%) indicated children should be 10 years or older before crossing the road or cycling independently. Parents were more likely to report holding younger children’s hands (5-6 years) when crossing the road and less likely to do so for 7-9 year olds. There was a small effect of child gender, with parents more likely to hold boy’s hand than a girl’s.

How to be masculine in the block area

This article focuses on the social interactions of several boys aged 3-5 years in the block area of a preschool classroom in a childcare setting. Using transcripts of video segments showing these boys engaged in daily play and interactions, the article analyses two episodes that occurred in the first weeks of the school year. At first glance, both episodes appear chaotic, with little appearance of order among the players. A closer analysis reveals a finely organized play taking place, with older boys teaching important lessons to the newcomers about how to be masculine in the block area. These episodes illustrate that masculinity is not a fixed character trait, but is determined through practice and participation in the activities of masculinity. Play and conflict are the avenues through which this occurs.

Solving graphics tasks : gender differences in middle-school students

The capacity to solve tasks that contain high concentrations of visual-spatial information, including graphs, maps and diagrams, is becoming increasingly important in educational contexts as well as everyday life. This research examined gender differences in the performance of students solving graphics tasks from the Graphical Languages in Mathematics (GLIM) instrument that included number lines, graphs, maps and diagrams. The participants were 317 Australian students (169 males and 148 females) aged 9 to 12 years. Boys outperformed girls on graphical languages that required the interpretation of information represented on an axis and graphical languages that required movement between two- and three-dimensional representations (generally Map language).

Twelve-month effectiveness of a parent-led, family-focused weight-management program for prepubertal children : a randomized, controlled trial

BACKGROUND Parenting-skills training may be an effective age-appropriate child behavior-modification strategy to assist parents in addressing childhood overweight. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to evaluate the relative effectiveness of parenting-skills training as a key strategy for the treatment of overweight children. DESIGN The design consisted of an assessor-blinded, randomized, controlled trial involving 111 (64% female) overweight, prepubertal children 6 to 9 years of age randomly assigned to parenting-skills training plus intensive lifestyle education, parenting-skills training alone, or a 12-month wait-listed control. Height, BMI, and waist-circumference z score and metabolic profile were assessed at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months (intention to treat). RESULTS After 12 months, the BMI z score was reduced by ∼10% with parenting-skills training plus intensive lifestyle education versus ∼5% with parenting-skills training alone or wait-listing for intervention. Waist-circumference z score fell over 12 months in both intervention groups but not in the control group. There was a significant gender effect, with greater reduction in BMI and waist-circumference z scores in boys compared with girls. CONCLUSION Parenting-skills training combined with promoting a healthy family lifestyle may be an effective approach to weight management in prepubertal children, particularly boys. Future studies should be powered to allow gender subanalysis.

Randomized trial of effect of bifocal and prismatic bifocal spectacles on myopic progression

Objective: To determine whether bifocal and prismatic bifocal spectacles could control myopia in children with high rates of myopic progression. ---------- Methods: This was a randomized controlled clinical trial. One hundred thirty-five (73 girls and 62 boys) myopic Chinese Canadian children (myopia of 1.00 diopters [D]) with myopic progression of at least 0.50 D in the preceding year were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 treatments: (1) single-vision lenses (n = 41), (2) +1.50-D executive bifocals (n = 48), or (3) +1.50-D executive bifocals with a 3–prism diopters base-in prism in the near segment of each lens (n = 46). ---------- Main Outcome Measures: Myopic progression measured by an automated refractor under cycloplegia and increase in axial length (secondary) measured by ultrasonography at 6-month intervals for 24 months. Only the data of the right eye were used. ---------- Results: Of the 135 children (mean age, 10.29 years [SE, 0.15 years]; mean visual acuity, –3.08 D [SE, 0.10 D]), 131 (97%) completed the trial after 24 months. Myopic progression averaged –1.55 D (SE, 0.12 D) for those who wore single-vision lenses, –0.96 D (SE, 0.09 D) for those who wore bifocals, and –0.70 D (SE, 0.10 D) for those who wore prismatic bifocals. Axial length increased an average of 0.62 mm (SE, 0.04 mm), 0.41 mm (SE, 0.04 mm), and 0.41 mm (SE, 0.05 mm), respectively. The treatment effect of bifocals (0.59 D) and prismatic bifocals (0.85 D) was significant (P < .001) and both bifocal groups had less axial elongation (0.21 mm) than the single-vision lens group (P < .001). ---------- Conclusions: Bifocal lenses can moderately slow myopic progression in children with high rates of progression after 24 months.

The Space Day at QUT

The Space Day has been running at QUT for about a decade. The Space Day started out as a single lecture on the stars delivered to a group of high school students from Brisbane State High School (BSHS), just across the river from QUT and therefore convenient for the school to visit. I was contacted by Victor James of St. Laurence’s College (SLC), Brisbane asking if he could bring a group of boys to QUT for a lecture similar to that delivered to BSHS. However, for SLC a hands-on laboratory session was added to the lecture and thus the Space Day was born. For the Space Day we have concentrated on year 7 – 10 students. Subsequently, many other schools from Brisbane and further afield in Queensland have attended a Space Day.