The Child-Parent Reading Experience in Pediatric Medical Office Waiting Areas

The practice of shared reading between parent(s) and children (especially those ages 0-5 years old) contributes significantly to children’s literacy development and readiness for school learning. Parents and caregivers often report that finding the time for daily shared reading is a challenge. Thus, the waiting times prior to pediatric medical visits offer a unique opportunity for them to engage in shared reading with their children. READ ENC, a local community literacy coalition in Pitt County, NC, partnered with several pediatric offices in the surrounding community to place READ ENC Book Nooks filled with children’s picture books in their waiting spaces. This research study focused on whether the presence of these Book Nooks engaged parent(s) and children in shared reading while waiting. Interviews comprised of a pre-determined set of eleven open-ended questions were conducted with five pediatric practice managers. Additionally, seven two-hour long observations were conducted in three separate pediatric office waiting rooms to document the interactions of parent(s) and children while waiting and whether the presence of the Book Nooks resulted in any shared reading. The qualitative data collected from these interviews and observations were analyzed through qualitative data analysis. This process highlighted a common finding that children typically initiated the reading that occurred while waiting, sometimes resulting in attempts to engage their parents in shared reading. Moreover, the data identified engaging with technology (cellphones, television, and arcade games) and well-child forms as significant distractions for both parties, which often took place rather than shared reading. While the presence of books available in waiting areas has the potential to provide families with additional reading time, simply supplying books in waiting areas does not guarantee shared reading as an outcome. Study findings point to the potential of increasing office and pediatric promotion of shared reading while waiting and limiting technology and well-child in office form completion in order to prioritize increased reading engagement in the waiting space

Framing Effects in Riskless Decisions: Discounting of Temporally Delayed Outcomes

Studies of riskless choice in both cognitive (Stevenson, 1986) and behavioral paradigms (Chung & Herrnstein, 1967) have found that subjects prefer temporally delayed losses and temporally advanced gains. Analogously, studies of risky choice have found that subjects prefer risky losses and certain gains (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Because probability is conceptually identical to the inverse of delay, it was recently suggested that these findings were descriptions of the same choice process (Rachlin, Logue, Gibbon, & Frankel, 1986). There were two goals of the present investigation. The first was to replicate and extend, through the use of a withinsubjects design, the finding that subjects prefer delayed gains and immediate losses. The second was to test the applicability of the prospect theory value function in a choice context involving temporally delayed financial options. Subjects showed strong preferences for immediate gains and delayed losses, but there was not support for the prospect theory value function in a riskless context involving temporal delays

Gender and Perceptions of Leadership Tasks

Women are underrepresented in leadership roles in organizations. This study examined student perceptions of autocratic and participative leadership tasks. There were no differences between men and women in the perceived desirability of these tasks or in their perceived ability to perform them. The results suggest that women aren’t self-selecting out of leadership due to tasks associated with the role

Incorporating the value proposition for society with business models of health tourism enterprises

This article discusses the need to expand the concept of the value proposition, in order that this business model component includes the value for a customer, the value captured by the enterprise, and the value for the community, as well as benefits for the natural environment. The objective of the article is to identify sustainable development components that have been proposed for tourist enterprises in the research literature. The article proposes actions to complement existing tourist enterprises business models in order to give them the characteristics of a sustainable business model and to implement practices of value creation for the community. The research notes that the value captured by an enterprise determines the level of implementation of its economic objectives resulting from the value creation for the customer and implementation of social objectives (including pro-ecologic ones). The revenues of an enterprise depend, first of all, on meeting the expectations of the customer, meaning that they depend on the value proposition for the customer, and their volume will allow researchers to determine the possibility of creating value for the community. The expected tendency to create value for the community is argued to be proportional to the effectiveness of customer value influence, less the value captured by the enterprise. After an initial review of relevant literature, attention is focused on health tourism enterprises and how these principals can be applied in that context

Space and Time: Wind in an Investment Planning Model

Investment planning models inform investment decisions and government policies. Current models do not capture the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, restricting the applicability of the models for high penetrations of renewables. We provide a methodology to capture spatial variation in wind output in combination with transmission constraints. The representation of wind distributions with stochastic approaches or an extensive historic data set would exceed computational constraints for real world application. Hence we restrict the amount of input data, and use boot-strapping to illustrate the robustness of the results. For the UK power system we model wind deployment and the value of transmission capacity

Homophobia and heterosexism

“Homophobia” is a widely understood term referring to antihomosexual attitudes and practices, but terms such as “homophobia,” “heterosexism,” and “heteronormativity” point to different ideas of what “homosexual” means, and where opposition to same-sex relations originates. Gayle Rubin, relying on structural anthropology, proposes that it arises as a disciplinary mechanism used by men to exercise control over women’s reproductive power in families. Gender panic theory focuses particularly on how defensiveness against losing male status and privilege generates homophobia. Sociohistorical theories examine how homophobia increases or decreases according to the symbolic placement of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the social status system. In the early twenty-first century, contradictory trends have led to improved citizenship rights for LGBT people in some countries, while others have reinforced or increased state and social violence against their LGBT populations

Effects of Solution Elicitation Aids and Need for Cognition on the Generation of Solutions to Ill-Structured Problems

Numerous techniques have been proposed to assist problem solvers in the solution generation process. We empirically examined the effectiveness of a solution elicitation technique based on the presentation of problem objectives and also examined whether the technique was effective across individual differences in need for cognition (NC). We found that when two conflicting objectives were presented successively, more solutions, more categories of solutions, and more effective solutions were generated than when the same two objectives were presented simultaneously or not at all. However, the results indicated that effective solutions may be more efficiently generated by considering objectives simultaneously. Need for cognition was positively related to measures of divergent thinking, and the presentation of objectives was particularly effective as a solution elicitation aid for individuals with low NC. Implications for creative problem-solving research and practice are discussed