A Process Model for Evaluating Athletic Coaches in the Mabton School District

The purpose of this project was to design and develop a process model for evaluating athletic coaches in the Mabton School District, Mabton, Washington. To accomplish this purpose, research and information on developing an evaluation form for athletic coaches was reviewed. Additionally, a hand search of various other sources was also conducted

BARRIERS TO AND FACILITATORS OF CARE: EXPLORING HOW LOW-INCOME WOMEN ACCESS REPRODUCTIVE HEALTHCARE IN A RURAL COMMUNITY

The purpose of this research study was to gain a comprehensive understanding of the experiences of low-income women living in a rural community when accessing reproductive care and bring awareness to the barriers and facilitating factors they encounter. The present study adopted a post positivism paradigm and was conducted in a rural county in Northern California. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data was gathered through demographic surveys and individual interviews with twenty-two participants. A bottom-up approach was utilized for the phases of qualitative data analysis, which included open coding, axial coding and selective coding. Data analysis revealed thirteen open codes and various connections between those codes. These codes were broken down into three broader categories: the power of personal experiences at the micro level, the community environment in which services are provided and received, and the broader systemic issues at a macro level. The researcher identified the deeply interpersonal nature of reproductive healthcare, which is often directly related to a cultural or societal stigma, as a core issue among low-income women living in rural areas. This core issue is further explored along with actions that can be taken to help mitigate this issue including but not limited to helping clients process core beliefs and emotions around care, teaching clients how to advocate for themselves in a medical setting and collaborating with healthcare agencies to provide relevant training for medical professionals. This research addresses a gap in the existing literature and contributes to both micro and macro social work by offering insight to the barriers that low-income women face, which can guide both clinical practice and policy development. Understanding the experiences of low-income women can be especially helpful to social workers in healthcare settings and better equip them to work with clients

Relational intersection of youth sport participation and identity development

Youth sport has continued to grow in attraction, particularly in the United States. Many youth, at younger and younger ages, are entering the confines of sport yet expansive research is still lacking in fully exploring the many facets that are a part of youth sport participation. It is of the upmost importance that research in this area is conducted, as youth are participating in sport at a significant time in their growth and development. Youth development is not only impacted by internal processes but also through experiences, such as sport. This analysis explores the positive, neutral, or negative relationship of identity development with sport participation in the hopes of bringing awareness and understanding to the relationship of youth sport participation on the development of youth

15-07 App-based Crowd Sourcing of Bicycle and Pedestrian Conflict Data

Most agencies and decision-makers rely on crash and crash severity (property damage only, injury or fatality) data to assess transportation safety; however, in the context of public health where perceptions of safety may influence the willingness to adopt active transportation modes (e.g. bicycling and walking), pedestrian-vehicle and other similar conflicts may represent a better performance measure for safety assessment. For transportation safety, a clear conflict occurs when two parties’ paths cross and one of the parties must undertake an evasive maneuver (e.g. change direction or stop) to avoid a crash. Other less severe conflicts where paths cross but no evasive maneuver occurs may also impact public perceptions of safety. Most existing literature on conflicts focuses on vehicle conflicts and intersections. While some research has investigated bicycle and pedestrian conflicts, most of this has focused on the intersection environment. In this project, we propose field testing a crowd-sourced data app to better understand the continuum of conflicts (bicycle/pedestrian, bicycle/vehicle, and pedestrian/vehicle) experienced by pedestrians and cyclists; the study also tests the effectiveness of the app and its associated crowd-sourced data collection. This study assesses the data quality of the crowd sourced data and compares it to more traditional data sources while performing hot spot analysis. If widely adopted, the app will enable communities to create their own data collection efforts to identify dangerous sites within their neighborhoods. Agencies will have a valuable data source at low-cost to help inform their decision making related to bicycle and pedestrian education, enforcement, infrastructure, programs and policies

Academic performance & student engagement in level 1 physics undergraduates

At the beginning of academic year 2007-08, staff in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Glasgow started to implement a number of substantial changes to the administration of the level 1 physics undergraduate class. The main aims were to improve the academic performance and progression statistics. With this in mind, a comprehensive system of learning support was introduced, the main remit being the provision of an improved personal contact and academic monitoring and support strategy for all students at level 1. The effects of low engagement with compulsory continuous assessment components had already been observed to have a significant effect for students sitting in the middle of the grade curve. Analysis of data from the 2007-08 class showed that even some nominally high-achieving students achieved lowered grades due to the effects of low engagement. Nonetheless, academic and other support measures put in place during 2007-08 played a part in raising the passrate for the level 1 physics class by approximately 8% as well as raising the progression rate by approximately 10%.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Skidmore Clips of Neutral and Expressive Scenarios (SCENES): Novel Dynamic Stimuli for Social Cognition Research

Social cognition research has relied primarily on photographic emotional stimuli. Such stimuli likely have limited ecological validity in terms of representing real world social interactions. The current study presents evidence for the validity of a new stimuli set of dynamic social SCENES (Skidmore Clips of Emotional and Neutral Expressive Scenarios). To develop these stimuli, ten undergraduate theater students were recruited to portray members of an audience. This audience was configured to display (seven) varying configurations of social feedback, ranging from unequivocally approving to unequivocally disapproving (including three different versions of balanced/neutral scenes). Validity data were obtained from 383 adult participants recruited from Amazon\u27s Mechanical Turk. Each participant viewed three randomly assigned scenes and provided a rating of the perceived criticalness of each scene. Results indicate that the SCENES reflect the intended range of emotionality, and pairwise comparisons suggest that the SCENES capture distinct levels of critical feedback. Overall, the SCENES stimuli set represents a publicly available (www.scenesstimuli.com) resource for researchers interested in measuring social cognition in the presence of dynamic and naturalistic social stimuli

Influence of Quiet Eye Self-Training on Internal Processes and Performance Outcomes

Use and effectiveness of the quiet eye (QE) technique has been a topic of interest in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of QE self-training on college students' internal processes associated with performing a novel task. Specifically, college students' internal processes were examined to understand how QE self-training influenced performance on a novel aiming task. College students (N = 106; M = 21.84 ± 1.79) voluntarily participated in QE self-training intervention. Participants' self-efficacy, self-regulation, and mindfulness was examined before and after QE self-training intervention over a 7-week period, with performance being measured weekly. Following intervention, interviews and follow-up survey were used to gather information about perceptions of using QE self-training instruction. Results indicated outcome performance improved from pre- to post-intervention. Additionally, participants mindfulness acting with awareness and non-judging of inner experiences was influenced by QET self-training. Findings from this study may help sport coaches and performance psychology professionals provide attentional focus training instruction to individuals with diverse levels of skills while also providing future directions for applied practice and research

Tracing an ethic of care in the policy and practice of the Troubled Families Programme

Drawing upon the Trace method developed by Selma Sevenhuijsen (2004), this paper has traced the discourse constructed in two key Troubled Families Programme (TFP) policy documents through the lens of care ethics, highlighting tensions between ‘care’ and ‘justice’ orientations in the neoliberal family intervention model. It is argued that whilst the family intervention model advocated has the potential to provide families with support underpinned by an ethic of care, the TFP's managerialist tendencies also create challenges to the integration of care ethics within such services. Given that the programme's financial framework generates considerable opportunity for local variation in policy implementation, the ethics of care offer a valuable moral framework by which to evaluate local practice. Moreover, engaging with a distinctly feminist ethic of care renders visible to family support services the inequalities produced through the gendered distribution of ‘caring’ responsibilities, and highlights the need for interventions to address rather than reinforce these inequalities