Kids’ Life and Times: using an Internet survey to measure children’s health-related quality of life

Objective
To examine the psychometric properties of an internet version of a children and young person's quality of life measure originally designed as a paper questionnaire.

Methods
Participants were 3,440 10 and 11 year old children in Northern Ireland who completed the KIDSCREEN-27 online as part of a general attitudinal survey. The questionnaire was animated using cartoon characters that are familiar to most children and the questions appeared on screen and were read aloud by actors.

Results
Exploratory principal component analysis of the online version of the questionnaire supported the existence of five components in line with the paper version. The items loaded on the components that would be expected based on previous findings with five domains - physical well-being,psychological well-being, autonomy and parents, social support and peers and school environment.Internal consistency reliability of the five domains was measured using Cronbach's alpha and the results suggested that the scale scores were reliable. The domain scores were similar to those reported in the literature for the paper version.

Conclusions
These results suggest that the factor structure and internal consistency reliability scores of the KIDSCREEN-27 embedded within an online survey are comparable to those reported in the literature for the paper version.

Tolstoy, stories, and facilitating insight in end of life care: Exploring ethics through vicarious experience (with Glackin M and Henry R)

Facilitating moral insight in end of life care can be challenging, and the purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this can be nurtured by means of creative literature. Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych is presented as an example of such literature. Aristotle's Nichomean Ethics provides the philosophical underpinning for the method used. Sources also include the nursing literature, and students' evaluations of the impact of Tolstoy's novella on their ability to perceive the ethical issues arising in end of life care. Comments from evaluations were analysed and significant themes emerged. Students' comments clearly support the suggestion that use of this novella has facilitated insight into ethical issues at the end of life. Evaluations also indicate that vicarious experience gained through reading this novella has helped to nurture sensitivity and professional insight into the importance of compassion and offering ‘comfort’ to the dying person.

Men, Women and an Integrated History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement

Since its emergence as a discipline in the 1960s, women’s history has had a profound effect on the study of the past. Scholarship on women’s experiences of and contributions to the Russian revolutionary movement has increased exponentially since the publication of a number of biographies of Aleksandra Kollontai in the 1970s and 1980s and a comprehensive picture has emerged of women’s involvement in all the major revolutionary parties, as leading figures as well as rank and file activists. Despite this wealth of historical discovery, remarkably little has found its way into so-called ‘general’ histories of the revolution. An integrated history, which is the ultimate aim of women’s history, has yet to be produced for the Russian revolutionary movement, even though recent prosopographical studies of revolutionary women have made clear the numerous ways in which men and women cooperated and interacted on a daily basis in the underground. This article explores the nature of and reasons for this failure, makes a case for why incorporating women’s experiences into the grand narrative of the Russian revolution is important and discusses how this might be achieved.

Early modern Ireland and the history of the child

Analysis of public policy on the care of children and youth in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland has generated a substantial historiography in recent years. By contrast there has been far less exploration of the state's attitude to young people in early modern Irish society. The historical dimension to the current debate on state care of minors is usually identified as beginning in the nineteenth century but the institutional custody of children originated in the sixteenth century. A central aim of this essay is to document the early modern context of public concern with children and youth in order to provide a more precise historical dimension to the contemporary debate.

Data mining approach identifies research priorities and data requirements for resolving the red algal tree of life

Background. The assembly of the tree of life has seen significant progress in recent years but algae and protists have been largely overlooked in this effort. Many groups of algae and protists have ancient roots and it is unclear how much data will be required to resolve their phylogenetic relationships for incorporation in the tree of life. The red algae, a group of primary photosynthetic eukaryotes of more than a billion years old, provide the earliest fossil evidence for eukaryotic multicellularity and sexual reproduction. Despite this evolutionary significance, their phylogenetic relationships are understudied. This study aims to infer a comprehensive red algal tree of life at the family level from a supermatrix containing data mined from GenBank. We aim to locate remaining regions of low support in the topology, evaluate their causes and estimate the amount of data required to resolve them. Results. Phylogenetic analysis of a supermatrix of 14 loci and 98 red algal families yielded the most complete red algal tree of life to date. Visualization of statistical support showed the presence of five poorly supported regions. Causes for low support were identified with statistics about the age of the region, data availability and node density, showing that poor support has different origins in different parts of the tree. Parametric simulation experiments yielded optimistic estimates of how much data will be needed to resolve the poorly supported regions (ca. 103 to ca. 104 nucleotides for the different regions). Nonparametric simulations gave a markedly more pessimistic image, some regions requiring more than 2.8 105 nucleotides or not achieving the desired level of support at all. The discrepancies between parametric and nonparametric simulations are discussed in light of our dataset and known attributes of both approaches. Conclusions. Our study takes the red algae one step closer to meaningful inclusion in the tree of life. In addition to the recovery of stable relationships, the recognition of five regions in need of further study is a significant outcome of this work. Based on our analyses of current availability and future requirements of data, we make clear recommendations for forthcoming research.