Developing responsive preventative practices: key messages from children's and families' experiences of the Children's Fund

As part of the prevention and social inclusion agenda, the Children's Fund, set up in 2000, has developed preventative services for children at risk of social exclusion. Drawing on a large qualitative dataset of interviews conducted in 2004/05 with children, young people and their parents/carers who accessed Children Fund services, this article analyses key practices and approaches valued by children and parents. These included: specialist support tailored to individual support needs, family-oriented approaches, trusting relationships with service providers, multi-agency approaches and sustainability of services. Finally, the article draws out key lessons for the future development of preventative services.

Messages about antibiotic resistance in different newspaper genres

Poorer people are more likely to use antibiotics; inappropriate antibiotic use causes resistance, and health campaigns attempt to change behaviour through education. However, fuelled by the media, the public think antibiotic resistance is outside their control. Differences in the attribution of blame for antibiotic resistance in two genres of UK newspapers, targeting distinct socioeconomic groups, were examined using a mixed methods approach. Firstly, depiction of blame was categorised as either external to the lay public (outside their control) or internal (lay person accountable) and subjected to a chi-square test. Secondly, using critical discourse analysis, we examined the portrayal of the main agents through newspaper language. Data from 597 articles (307 broadsheets) analysed revealed a significant association between newspaper genre and attribution of blame for antibiotic resistance. While both newspaper types blamed antibiotic resistance predominantly on factors external to the lay public, broadsheets were more likely to acknowledge internal factors than tabloids. Tabloids provided a more skewed representation, exposing readers to inaccurate explanations about antibiotic resistance. They highlighted ineptitude in health professionals, victimising patients and blaming others, while broadsheets used less emotive language. Pharmacists should take special care to communicate the importance of appropriate antibiotic use against this backdrop of distortion.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” : The Hidden Messages and the Debate on the Target Audience

Oscar Wilde’s fairytales have been read to children for more than a century. Nevertheless, since the time of their publication in 1888 and 1891, the target audience of The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates have been the concern of critics. Delving into the context behind the rich and colourful imagery, one can find implications of homosexuality, the Paterian aesthetic and religious connotations. According to Carol Tattersall, The Happy Prince and Other Tales successfully mislead the public that it is innocent of any intention to undermine established standards of living or writing. Tattersall’s argument is based on comparing the first collection to Wilde’s second, A House of Pomegranates, which was perceived as “offensive and immoral” (136). On the other hand, William Butler Yeats states in his introduction to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde that overall the reviewers of The Happy Prince and Other Tales were hostile because of Wilde’s aesthetic views (ixxvi). But Yeats overlooks the fact that Wilde was very pleased and proud, dashing notes to friends and reviewers and signing copies to many people (Tattersall 129). In general, the reception of Wilde’s first collection was more positive than that of the second because it was milder and more subtle in its controversial themes.

A comparison of the sources and nature of body image messages perceived by indigenous Fijian and European Australian adolescent girls

Australian and Fijian adolescent girls reported on the influence that sociocultural factors, including parents, peers, and the media, had on their body image attitudes. It was expected that messages that promote a thin body would be less prevalent among Fijians, as their cultural traditions place more importance on robust body sizes. An inductive thematic analysis of the girls’ semi-structured interviews indicated that both Fijian (n = 16) and Australian (n = 16) girls (aged 13–17) reported messages from similar sources, which included parents, siblings, and friends/peers. Australian girls consistently reported messages that reinforced thinness. On the other hand, Fijian girls reported messages that emphasized both thinness and robustness. The discussion focuses on the conflict between Western ideals and cultural Fijian traditions and the implications for culturally sensitive interventions.

Where is all the pressure coming from? Messages from mothers and teachers about preschool children's appearance, diet and exercise

This study used interviews and qualitative analyses to investigate the nature of the messages that preschool children receive from mothers and teachers about their bodies, general appearance, exercise and eating practices. Participants were 10 female teachers and 53 mothers. The behaviours of the 53 children (24 boys, 29 girls) were also observed to determine the nature of their eating and exercise behaviours. The results demonstrated that both mothers and teachers expressed concerns about their own bodies. Mothers also communicated messages to their daughters about losing weight and messages to their sons about increasing their muscles. Both girls and boys were concerned about their appearance, particularly their clothes and hair. Girls also demonstrated some concerns about losing weight, and boys with increasing muscles. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of designing education programs for mothers, teachers and children to prevent the development of body image concerns and disordered eating among children. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

Identifying dependency between secure messages for protocol analysis

Collusion attack has been recognized as a key issue in e-commerce systems and increasingly attracted people’s attention for quite some time in the literatures of information security. Regardless of the wide application of security protocol, this attack has been largely ignored in the protocol analysis. There is a lack of efficient and intuitive approaches to identify this attack since it is usually hidden and uneasy to find. Thus, this article addresses this critical issue using a compact and intuitive Bayesian network (BN)-based scheme. It assists in not only discovering the secure messages that may lead to the attack but also providing the degree of dependency to measure the occurrence of collusion attack. The experimental results demonstrate that our approaches are useful to detect the collusion attack in secure messages and enhance the protocol analysis.

Who is responsible for the protection of children? Implicit and explicit interpretations of marketing messages

In this paper, we examine ethical issues related to advertising to children in light of evidence that people can hold ‘implicit’ as well as ‘explicit’ consumer attitudes. From a review of the important features of implicit versus explicit attitudes, we hypothesise three important features of implicit consumer attitudes in children. First, we suggest they are likely to be acquired automatically from, in part, exposure to marketing messages. Second, we predict that these attitudes will be resistant to change through reflection or reason by the child or other person. Third, we hypothesise that children’s implicit consumer attitudes will be powerful predictors of their consumer choices in many situations. We discuss the implications for the ethics of marketing to children, and propose a research framework to begin investigating this important issue.

Mining inconsistent secure messages toward analyzing security protocols

Traditional approaches such as theorem proving and model checking have been successfully used to analyze security protocols. Ideally, they assume the data communication is reliable and require the user to predetermine authentication goals. However, missing and inconsistent data have been greatly ignored, and the increasingly complicated security protocol makes it difficult to predefine such goals. This paper presents a novel approach to analyze security protocols using association rule mining. It is able to not only validate the reliability of transactions but also discover potential correlations between secure messages. The algorithm and experiment demonstrate that our approaches are useful and promising.

Prominent messages in education and applied linguistic abstracts : how do authors appeal to their prospective readers?

This study investigates the rhetorical structure of abstracts of papers published in Applied Linguistics and Education. It examines how abstract authors in these two fields emphasise the significance of their research, and how they appeal to their prospective readership. Although abstracts in both disciplinary groups are found to display a coordinate textual development they exhibit a utilization of different relational schemata to indicate the functional prominence of textual propositions. In particular, different relational patterns are seen to be employed to fulfil the two primary objectives of an abstract: to provide a synopsis of the accompanying article, and to promote it to relevant research and professional communities. The way authors demonstrate the value of their research and their professional credibility appears to be conditioned by disciplinary writing conventions. It is proposed that relational choices, which result in differences in the accentuation of communicative messages in Applied Linguistics and Education abstracts, depend on the perceived relationship between the author and the discourse community in terms of expectations of prior knowledge.