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Behaviours that challenge in a school setting can lead to responses from teachers that are restrictive. It can impact learning and can limit opportunities for the future. These types of behaviours can also lead to exclusion from school. The purpose of this paper was to review the effectiveness of a non-restrictive strategy, behavioural contracting, in reducing behaviours that challenge.

Three case studies are included in this paper, showing how behavioural contracting can be used flexibly and individually to reduce behaviours that challenge. The specific behaviours focused on include pinching, hitting, grabbing, hair-pulling, disrobing, kicking, spitting and biting.

In all three case studies, the behaviours that challenge reduced significantly. This positively impacted the quality of life for these three individuals and has led to more opportunities for learning in the school setting.

Previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of behavioural contracting to reduce a number of different behaviours that challenge. This paper showed how behavioural contracting can be simplified to make it more applicable to individuals with complex needs. It is important that non-restrictive strategies are used to address behaviours that challenge, and behavioural contracting can be a simple strategy that can be used across many different settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development and use of social sustainability performance measurement practices at the city level. This purpose is achieved by addressing the following research question: How do city actors translate social sustainability strategies into performance measurement practices?

An extensive ethnographic study was conducted with a focus on how social sustainability – as defined in the vision and related strategies of the Swedish city of Gothenburg – was translated into performance measurement practices and how performance indicators and assessment tools were transformed over time in the pursuit of social sustainability goals. Findings were interpreted through the lens of Actor Network Theory concept of translation.

Findings reveal how, through a chain of translations, social sustainability and related performance indicators and other assessment tools evolve over time. Social sustainability deviated from the original politically decided definition, as stated in the strategy, because it was transformed by the human and nonhuman actors engaged with it. Social sustainability performance measurement practices lost relevance as internal steering tools and became a means for gaining external legitimacy.

Performance measurement and assessment tools initially intended to monitor the achievement of social sustainability goals lose their meaningfulness when their main use becomes a formal accomplishment rather than an opportunity for improvement.

This paper highlights how translations which destabilize social sustainability can affect the city management and influence the overarching social sustainability aims of the whole city. The presence of many actors gives room to “theoretical” and “practical” translations which deviate the course of actions.

This study explored the motivations of individuals who entered the firefighting profession in Trinidad and Tobago in an attempt to gauge their stimulus for entry into the profession. The research was conducted due to the unavailability of literature on the phenomenon under inquiry in the Caribbean, more specifically, Trinidad and Tobago.

This qualitative phenomenological study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with 24 male and female firefighters from the 4 divisions of the Trinidad and Tobago Fire Service (TTFS), namely north, south, central and Tobago divisions, and the personal motivations for entry into the TTFS were explored.

The findings indicate that motivations for males who entered the firefighting profession were job security, opportunity to assist people, benefits, salary and job stability, while the motivations for females were opportunity to assist people, family, benefits, job security and job stability. Several themes emerged, namely altruism, job security, benefits and job stability.

As with most studies, this research has limitations. The main limitations were the small sample size of the study’s population and the use of a lone jurisdiction (Trinidad and Tobago) to situate the study. Despite the aforementioned limitations, the study is useful as it appears to be the first of its kind in the Caribbean and thus provides useful insights as well as a starting point for future research. Looking forward, research on motivations to become a firefighter should examine the phenomenon via a more expansive Caribbean lens, as firefighting units are an undeniable feature of the national security landscape in the region.

The current study appears to be the first of its kind in the Caribbean, as voracious searches failed to unearth similar studies.