College Students' Mindfulness, Resilience, Flourishing, and Academic Success: An Exploratory Study from Egypt

Limited research has been conducted on the influence of mindfulness, resilience, and well-being on academic achievement within the context of Arabic culture, particularly in higher education. The main objectives of this study are twofold. Firstly, to establish the validity of the Arabic version of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale and the Brief Resilience Scale and to assess their factor structure using a sample from Egypt. Secondly, to investigate the proposed model that explores the mediating role of resilience and well-being in the associations between mindfulness and academic outcomes Two separate studies were undertaken, involving a total of 883 college students from Egypt (n1 = 486; n2 = 397). The administration of mindfulness, resilience, and flourishing scales was conducted as a means of measuring well-being. The utilisation of the grade point average (GPA) served as a metric for measuring academic achievement. Grade point average (GPA) scores were calculated by taking the average of the scores achieved in the modules completed during the first semester. The findings of the study indicate that the scales measuring mindfulness and resilience in the Egyptian sample are unidimensional. Significant correlations were observed between mindfulness, resilience, flourishing, and GPA. Two CFA models were analysed, and it was found that the second model exhibited a complete alignment with the data, specifically in relation to the mediator variables of resilience and flourishing. Resilience and flourishing serve as mediators within the association linking mindfulness and grade point average (GPA). There exists a positive correlation between the practice of mindfulness and academic performance, as measured by the grade point average (GPA)

The Power Laws of Violence against Women: Rescaling Research and Policies

BACKGROUND: Violence against Women -despite its perpetuation over centuries and its omnipresence at all social levels- entered into social consciousness and the general agenda of Social Sciences only recently, mainly thanks to feminist research, campaigns, and general social awareness. The present article analyzes in a secondary analysis of German prevalence data on Violence against Women, whether the frequency and severity of Violence against Women can be described with power laws. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Although the investigated distributions all resemble power-law distributions, a rigorous statistical analysis accepts this hypothesis at a significance level of 0.1 only for 1 of 5 cases of the tested frequency distributions and with some restrictions for the severity of physical violence. Lowering the significance level to 0.01 leads to the acceptance of the power-law hypothesis in 2 of the 5 tested frequency distributions and as well for the severity of domestic violence. The rejections might be mainly due to the noise in the data, with biases caused by self-reporting, errors through rounding, desirability response bias, and selection bias. CONCLUSION: Future victimological surveys should be designed explicitly to avoid these deficiencies in the data to be able to clearly answer the question whether Violence against Women follows a power-law pattern. This finding would not only have statistical implications for the processing and presentation of the data, but also groundbreaking consequences on the general understanding of Violence against Women and policy modeling, as the skewed nature of the underlying distributions makes evident that Violence against Women is a highly disparate and unequal social problem. This opens new questions for interdisciplinary research, regarding the interplay between environmental, experimental, and social factors on victimization

Sewing Frankenstein!! Instrumental Theatre in Austria between 1960 and 1980

This text analyzes the development of the choreographed instrumental theater of the two Austrian composers Otto M. Zykan and HK Gruber, taking into account the predecessor works of Mauricio Kagel. Zykan’s Singers Nähmaschine ist die beste: Oper oder Ode oder Opernode (Singer’s sewing machine is the best: Opera or ode or opera-ode) of 1966, his Inscene 1 and Inscene 2 of 1967, and Gruber’s Frankenstein!!, composed and expanded from 1970 to 1978, serve as subjects for analyzing this Austrian development. The purpose of this article is to study literature and other material on early Austrian choreographed instrumental theater. The method employed to present the different stages of development and variants of choreographed instrumental theater is the study of literature and the comparative analysis of musical material, as well as interviews with Gruber, which are interpreted in terms of qualitative social research (oral history). The results show three different types: first, choreographed instrumental theater, whose development Zykan continued, second, choreographed vocal theater, and third, Gruber’s imaginary theater. The term choreographed instrumental theater describes a musical piece in which the instrumentalists not only make the music but also perform as “actors.” Gestures and other actions are composed too. This technique was later transferred to vocal music when the singers also had to perform specific movements, and in 1977 a final step in the development of imaginary theater was taken with Frankenstein!! Here, there are fewer movements and facial expressions that have to be performed. This work can be useful as a point of reference for academics, musicians, and students working on the issue of music theater from Austria after 1945, as well as for developing it further through familiarization with the first works of the most important representatives

Psychometric properties of the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale in Chinese earthquake victims

Aim