Parents whose children have undergone an autism assessment often describe the process as extremely stressful. This affects how parents engage with services post-diagnosis, meaning…
Abstract
Purpose
Parents whose children have undergone an autism assessment often describe the process as extremely stressful. This affects how parents engage with services post-diagnosis, meaning less likelihood of using subsequent service support despite struggling to cope. Since parents already report many barriers to accessing services, e.g. long waiting lists, lack of co-ordination and limited resources (Sapiets et al. 2023), negative experiences during assessment should not pose another potential barrier to engagement. This study aimed to address how families’ needs can be better met during the assessment process.
Design/methodology/approach
In this qualitative study, the author conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 parents whose child had undergone an autism assessment in the last five years. Thematic analysis determined key themes.
Findings
The six themes were: clarity and communication, access to support and resources, aftercare, recognition of parent concerns, personalisation of the assessment process and concerns around the use of personal protective equipment/online assessments. These themes led to criteria to assess the quality of autism assessment services in line with parent perspectives.
Practical implications
These parent-informed criteria could facilitate the consideration of parents’ views into service evaluations of autism assessment services across the UK.
Originality/value
Previous research indicates that the autism assessment experience is often extremely stressful and overwhelming for families (Crane et al., 2016). Despite this, guidance to improve autism services rarely prioritises the opinions and experiences of service-users and their families. The criteria presented here were derived from themes identified by interviewing parents on their experiences of the autism assessment process, thus shifting the focus onto service-users.
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Ana Campos-Holland, Grace Hall and Gina Pol
The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result…
Abstract
Purpose
The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result, the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) aims to reevaluate standardized-state testing. Previous research has assessed its impact on schools, educators, and students; yet, youth’s voices are almost absent. Therefore, this qualitative analysis examines how youth of color perceive and experience standardized-state testing.
Design/methodology/approach
Seventy-three youth participated in a semistructured interview during the summer of 2015. The sample consists of 34 girls and 39 boys, 13–18 years of age, of African American, Latino/a, Jamaican American, multiracial/ethnic, and other descent. It includes 6–12th graders who attended 61 inter-district and intra-district schools during the 2014–2015 academic year in a Northeastern metropolitan area in the United States that is undergoing a racial/ethnic integration reform.
Findings
Youth experienced testing overload under conflicting adult authorities and within an academically stratified peer culture on an ever-shifting policy terrain. While the parent-adult authority remained in the periphery, the state-adult authority intrusively interrupted the teacher-student power dynamics and the disempowered teacher-adult authority held youth accountable through the “attentiveness” rhetoric. However, youth’s perspectives and lived experiences varied across grade levels, school modalities, and school-geographical locations.
Originality/value
In this adult-dominated society, the market approach to education reform ultimately placed the burden of teacher and school evaluation on youth. Most importantly, youth received variegated messages from their conflicting adult authorities that threatened their academic journeys.
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Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way…
Abstract
Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way of using the law in specific circumstances, and shows the variations therein. Sums up that arbitration is much the better way to gok as it avoids delays and expenses, plus the vexation/frustration of normal litigation. Concludes that the US and Greek constitutions and common law tradition in England appear to allow involved parties to choose their own judge, who can thus be an arbitrator. Discusses e‐commerce and speculates on this for the future.
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Robert James Thomas, Gareth Reginald Terence White and Anthony Samuel
The purpose of this research is to understand what motivates 7–11-year-old children to participate in online brand communities (OBCs). Prior research has concentrated on…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to understand what motivates 7–11-year-old children to participate in online brand communities (OBCs). Prior research has concentrated on prescriptive product categories (games and gaming), predominantly adolescent groups and the social aspects of community engagement and actual behaviour within communities, rather than the motivations to participate with the OBC. This has ultimately limited what has been gleaned, both theoretically and managerially, from this important segment.
Design/methodology/approach
An interpretive, longitudinal position is adopted, using a sample of 261 children (113 male and 148 female) from across the UK, using event-based diaries over a 12-month period, generating 2,224 entries.
Findings
Data indicate that children are motivated to participate in a brand community for four reasons: to support and ameliorate pre-purchase anxieties, resolve interpersonal conflicts, exact social dominance in terms of product ownership and perceptions of product knowledge and to actively engage in digitalised pester power. The study also reveals that certain motivational aspects such as conflict resolution and exacting dominance, are gender-specific.
Research limitations/implications
Knowledge of children’s motivation to engage with OBCs is important for marketers and brand managers alike as the data reveal markedly different stimuli when compared to known adult behaviours in the field. Given the nature of the study, scope exists for significant future research.
Practical implications
The study reveals behaviours that will assist brand managers in further understanding the complex and untraditional relationships that children have with brands and OBCs.
Originality/value
This study makes a novel examination of a hitherto little-explored segment of consumers. In doing so, it uncovers the theoretical and practical characteristics of child consumers that contemporary, adult-focussed literature does not recognise. The paper makes an additional contribution to theory by positing four new behavioural categories relating to community engagement – dependers, defusers, demanders and dominators – and four new motivational factors which are fundamentally different from adult taxonomies – social hegemony, parental persuasion, dilemma solving and conflict resolution.
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OUR readers will, we trust, appreciate our double souvenir number issued in connection with the Library Association Conference at Glasgow. Special features are the articles on the…
Abstract
OUR readers will, we trust, appreciate our double souvenir number issued in connection with the Library Association Conference at Glasgow. Special features are the articles on the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, 1874–1924, by a member of the staff, Mr. J. Dunlop, and one on the Burns Country, by Mr. J. M. Leighton, of Greenock Public Library. We printed the provisional programme in our July issue and as we go to press have little to add to the particulars there given, except to compliment the Library Association and the Local Reception Committee on the excellent programme arranged for the occasion, from both the professional and social point of view.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Michelle Robinson Obama are two First Ladies of the United States whose racial-ethnic, personal, and family characteristics made them the objects of…
Abstract
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Michelle Robinson Obama are two First Ladies of the United States whose racial-ethnic, personal, and family characteristics made them the objects of inordinate public fascination. Using Patricia Hill Collins's concept, the “outsider within,” this chapter explores Kennedy and Obama's emergence as cultural icons and their marginal relationship with the white Protestant American governing class. As wives of presidents and specific to her generation, each woman brought superior professional credentials to their public roles. As cultural icons who differ from the white racial frame, they are subjected to excessive media scrutiny, evaluation, and supervision. Both women exercise cultural agency from their positions as cultural icons, particularly utilizing ceremonial activities and the power of the White House to oppose cultural erasure and exclusion of minority groups and to provide models of social inclusion. Analysis of their roles highlights the continuing importance of wives to the acquisition and maintenance of power and to the role of elites in offering models of social justice.
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Plato and Aristotle would have found the modern effort to fuse ethics and ecology to be incomprehensible. Despite the fact that oikos—meaning house or household—is a Greek word…
Abstract
Plato and Aristotle would have found the modern effort to fuse ethics and ecology to be incomprehensible. Despite the fact that oikos—meaning house or household—is a Greek word, Greek science did not entertain a concept of ecology. Nor did Greek philosophy regard nature as morally considerable. Etymology aside, the word ecology in anything like its modern sense of “biospheric house” did not appear in European thought until 1873 when Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a German biologist and philosopher, used it, with the spelling “Oekologie,” in his The History of Creation. Furthermore, the words “ecology” and “ecological” always had exclusive reference, until quite recently, to a scientific discipline and not to a branch of philosophy. As with the Classical Greek philosophers, so it was also with modern thinkers. Ethics, they held, were concerned solely with interpersonal relations. They could not, therefore, recognize a duty to nature. That we do owe a duty to nature, however, is the carefully considered conclusion of most of the environmental ethicists.
Grace Bamber, Lisa Caygill and Sarah Craven-Staines
Lived mental health experience (LMHE) is a term describing the direct impact of a mental health problem or being a mental health carer. This study aims to qualitatively explore…
Abstract
Purpose
Lived mental health experience (LMHE) is a term describing the direct impact of a mental health problem or being a mental health carer. This study aims to qualitatively explore how UK-based trainee clinical psychologists with LMHE navigate doctoral training.
Design/methodology/approach
Trainee clinical psychologists (TCPs; N = 12) who self-reported LMHE completed a semi-structured interview which was analysed using constructivist grounded theory (CGT).
Findings
The end model had six main categories: the pressured system; narratives about LMHE within the profession; developing trainee identity and sense of self; disclosing LMHE within the professional context; building safe, balanced and reciprocal relationships with other professionals; drawing upon LMHE within clinical practice. The end model is visually depicted as an hourglass to represent receiving and internalising external information which influences identity development and bidirectionally filters outwards to shape interactions and relationships.
Social implications
Findings have implications for TCPs, course centres and using trusts.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first CGT study to qualitatively explore how TCPs with LMHE navigate the holistic trajectory of doctoral clinical psychology training.
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IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the…
Abstract
IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.
MANY and various are the problems both of finance and administration, but usually the more pressing of finance, connected with the establishment and maintenance of Branch…
Abstract
MANY and various are the problems both of finance and administration, but usually the more pressing of finance, connected with the establishment and maintenance of Branch libraries. It is the more surprising that the subject has been very little discussed or written about. If not looking too far ahead, I would suggest to the Council of the Library Association, and more especially the Publications Committee, that the topic be taken up at the next but one Annual Meeting, and that two whole days might very well be devoted to its consideration.