Reducing The School-to-Prison pipeline through Restorative Practices and Culturally Responsive Teaching

Research has shown there is a growing trend that students of color end up becoming incarcerated due to the school-to-prison pipeline. Students of color are being targeted by exclusionary policies at a higher rate than their white counterparts. School districts must reevaluate their discipline measures and adopt new policies that work to build positive relationships and communities within them. This project provides the groundwork for implementing restorative practices and culturally responsive teaching in schools, with the hope of building stronger community ties and reducing exclusionary discipline policies. The project provides research that supports the implementation of restorative practices and culturally responsive teaching as well as surveys to help track the effectiveness of these programs within the school

Decolonizing Psychology as a Scientific and Ethical Necessity

The starting point of this paper is the colonial heritage of mainstream psychology, and particularly of developmental psychology. The dominant paradigm is still the assumption of universality of theories and findings that originate in research from and with a tiny part of the world’s population. Associated is the neglect, even ignorance, concerning existing anthropological, cultural, and psychological ethnographic research from different communities across the globe, which demonstrate that the so-called WEIRD science (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) is different in many respects from the multitude of existing cultural patterns, representing an outlier in a statistical sense. The paper presents a reflection of what inclusivity means and how it can be realized. It is obvious that a good intention is not necessary a good deed. Inclusivity necessitates a complete change of perspective. The second part of the paper deals with the necessary decolonization of early childhood development interventions. It is demonstrated how WEIRD assumptions are exported in large parts of LMIC without proving their validity and applicability. These practices not only ignore scientific evidence but are also unethical because of epistemic violence. It is concluded that basic science and applications are highly interconnected. Decolonization should start with including majority world research in the general database. It is important to realize that extending the spectrum of samples is not helpful as long as methods are applied that are developed in the WEIRD world

Comparison of Human Versus GenAI Generated Measurements of Personal Beauty Values

It is a challenging task to develop a scale to measure psychological constructs in a non-native language. In this study, we compared reliability and validity of a scale to measure five dimensions of Personal Beauty Values (PBV) generated by ChatGPT4 with a human-generated PBV scale. The original human-generated PBV scale in English consists of 14 items divided into five dimensions. The limitation of this scale developed by non-native English speakers is a restricted number of items, which will potentially limit the applicability of the scale to other cultural contexts. To complement this weakness, we generated additional items of the five PBV dimensions using ChatGPT4. Specifically, we asked ChatGPT4 to generate 5 additional English items for each dimension based on the existing human-generated items. Using the US sample (N = 340), we pruned the items into four items per dimension. Subsequently, we translated them into French and Japanese, collected data in France and Japan (N = 346 and N = 300, respectively) and compared reliability and validity of the ChatGPT4-generated scale with the human-generated scale in each country. The results of our study demonstrated the replicability of the five-dimensional PBV structure by using the ChatGPT4-generated scale in the US context. However, when these ChatGPT4-generated items were translated into French and Japanese, it was not possible to extract the same dimensional structure due to the lack of discriminant validity

Home Based Elder Care (HBEC) in India: Exploring Culturally Competent Models

The chapter deliberates on elder care models within the sociocultural context of India, aligning with traditional values and family structure. The chapter is based on mini-case studies of 47 healthcare organizations that offer various types of care services to the aging population and extends to discuss a few of the upcoming models. Key informant interviews were conducted across different types of organisations studied involving the CEO/manager / proprietors, paramedical staff, and the seniors availing the services of the organisation. Apart from this focused group discussions of seniors in rural communities were also conducted. Structures of the organizations, along with the policies and practices for care delivery were studied and assessed through primary and secondary sources (like websites). These organizations are located in Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Delhi, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, and Pune. The elder care models and their services are described in terms of their socio-cultural context, the system of their care delivery. The models are then classified into various categories based on the composition of their stakeholders and the services they deliver. The broad categories reported here are organized corporate care, emergency care, assisted living, activity and day-care models, sustainable and gender-equitable models, and various government-led initiatives. The unique characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of all these models are critically examined to inform the development of future models of value-integrated and sustainable aging care services