Safer recruitment practice: audit of exisiting recruitment practices in residential child care

In the wake of a number of high profile cases of the abuse of children and young people in residential child care, there have been repeated calls for the improvement of recruitment and selection of residential child care staff. Following the Children’s Safeguards Review the Scottish Executive funded the Scottish Recruitment and Selection Consortium to contribute to the safefguards for children by developing a toolkit for safer selection of staff. The toolkit was published in 2001. In 2004 the Scottish executive commisioned research form Residential Child Care (SIRCC) to identify current recruitment practices in residentialchild care for staff who have unsupervised contact with children and young people and to gauge opinion on how safer recruitment should be taken forward . A postal survey of operational and human resource managers responsible for the recruitment of residential childcare staff in local authority and voluntary organisationswas undertaken between January and April 2005. A sample of those respondents was invited to participate in semi-structured exploratory interviews, focusing in more detail on current practice and participants’ views on the implementation of the recommendations of the Toolkit

Ablative resin Patent

Ablative resins used for retarding regression in ablative materia

Other-initiated repair in English

The practices of other-initiation of repair provide speakers with a set of solutions to one of the most basic problems in conversation: troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Based on a collection of 227 cases systematically identified in a corpus of English conversation, this article describes the formats and practices of other-initiations of repair attested in the corpus and reports their quantitative distribution. In addition to straight other-initiations of repair, the identification of all possible cases also yielded a substantial proportion in which speakers use other-initiations to perform other actions, including non-serious actions, such as jokes and teases, preliminaries to dispreferred responses, and displays of surprise and disbelief. A distinction is made between otherinitiations that perform additional actions concurrently and those that formally resemble straight other-initiations but analyzably do not initiate repair as an action

Young Graphs: 1089 et al

This paper deals with those positive integers N such that, for given integers g and k with 1< k<g, the base-g digits of N and kN appear in reverse order. Such N are called (g, k) reverse multiples. Anne Ludington Young, in 1992, developed a kind of tree reflecting properties of these numbers; N. J. A. Sloane, in 2013, modified these trees into directed graphs and introduced certain combinatoric methods to determine from these graphs the number of reverse multiples for given values of g and k with a given number of digits. We extend their work, proving Sloane's isomorphism conjectures for 1089 graphs and complete graphs, furthering his study of cyclic graphs, and proving a minor result on isomorphism.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures. New version accounts for expansions and revisions of Holt's work in its commentary. A conjecture has become a result, the examples section is revised, a few footnotes are modified, some equivalence class terminology is slightly changed, the acknowledgments section is expanded, and a number of stylistic and typographical errors and choices are repaire

Adjusting epistemic gradients: The final particle ba in Mandarin Chinese conversation

In Mandarin Chinese conversation, the final particle "ba" contributes to the formation of a variety of social actions. Using the methods of conversation analysis, this article examines the use of the "ba" particle in answers to questions, informings, and assessments. It is argued that the particle serves as a turn-constructional resource for the adjustment of the epistemic gradient invoked in the sequence, downgrading the speaker’s epistemic position. In assessment sequences, the epistemic adjustment made by the particle also serves to solicit a response from the recipient who invariably has knowledge of the matter in question. An analysis of the "ba" particle in terms of epistemic gradients and their adjustment unifies two accounts of the particle’s function put forward in the literature

Recruitment : Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction

In this article, we examine methods that participants use to resolve troubles in the realization of practical courses of action. The concept of recruitment is developed to encompass the linguistic and embodied ways in which assistance may be sought – requested or solicited – or in which we come to perceive another’s need and offer or volunteer assistance. We argue that these methods are organized as a continuum, from explicit requests, to practices that elicit offers, to anticipations of need. We further identify a class of subsidiary actions that can precede recruitment and that publicly expose troubles and thereby create opportunities for others to assist. Data in American and British English

Unaddressed participants’ gaze in multi-person interaction : Optimizing recipiency

One of the most intriguing aspects of human communication is its turn-taking system. It requires the ability to process on-going turns at talk while planning the next, and to launch this next turn without considerable overlap or delay. Recent research has investigated the eye movements of observers of dialogs to gain insight into how we process turns at talk. More specifically, this research has focused on the extent to which we are able to anticipate the end of current and the beginning of next turns. At the same time, there has been a call for shifting experimental paradigms exploring social-cognitive processes away from passive observation toward on-line processing. Here, we present research that responds to this call by situating state-of-the-art technology for tracking interlocutors’ eye movements within spontaneous, face-to-face conversation. Each conversation involved three native speakers of English. The analysis focused on question–response sequences involving just two of those participants, thus rendering the third momentarily unaddressed. Temporal analyses of the unaddressed participants’ gaze shifts from current to next speaker revealed that unaddressed participants are able to anticipate next turns, and moreover, that they often shift their gaze toward the next speaker before the current turn ends. However, an analysis of the complex structure of turns at talk revealed that the planning of these gaze shifts virtually coincides with the points at which the turns first become recognizable as possibly complete. We argue that the timing of these eye movements is governed by an organizational principle whereby unaddressed participants shift their gaze at a point that appears interactionally most optimal: It provides unaddressed participants with access to much of the visual, bodily behavior that accompanies both the current speaker’s and the next speaker’s turn, and it allows them to display recipiency with regard to both speakers’ turns

The Timing and Construction of Preference : A Quantitative Study

Conversation-analytic research has argued that the timing and construction of preferred responding actions (e.g., acceptances) differ from that of dispreferred responding actions (e.g., rejections), potentially enabling early response prediction by recipients. We examined 195 preferred and dispreferred responding actions in telephone corpora and found that the timing of the most frequent cases of each type did not differ systematically. Only for turn transitions of 700 ms or more was the proportion of dispreferred responding actions clearly greater than that of preferreds. In contrast, an analysis of the timing that included turn formats (i.e., those with or without qualification) revealed clearer differences. Small departures from a normal gap duration decrease the likelihood of a preferred action in a preferred turn format (e.g., a simple “yes”). We propose that the timing of a response is best understood as a turn-constructional feature, the first virtual component of a preferred or dispreferred turn format