Founts of knowledge or delusions of grandeur? Limits and illusions of tourism research impact: A reply to Wood

The starting point of our paper (Thomas & Ormerod, 2017) was to assess the extent to which academic research influenced policy and practice. Others have undertaken this task and come to a broadly similar conclusion; collectively, tourism researchers appear to have little impact on anyone other than fellow academics (and perhaps their students). Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, important or unimportant, depends on your perspective. In addition to illustrating the novel use of digital methods, the main contribution of our research lay in its attempt to explain why some academic researchers appear to have more non-academic impact than others. Our theorising of impact was, therefore, designed to identify variables that influenced impact and to show their inter-relationships. Readers will reach their own conclusions about the extent to which we were successful in our ambition, but few will deny that we had a very comprehensive data set to work with, albeit limited to the UK

The complementary roles of knowledge and strategy in insight problem-solving

Two main classes of theory have been proposed to account forinsight problem-solving performance; those that invoke theovercoming of constraints arising from prior knowledge as thesource of insight, and those that propose strategic search formoves that make progress towards a hypothesized goal state.An experiment using matchstick algebra problems assessed thecontributions of each source. Results indicate that, while priorknowledge creates the conditions under which matchstickalgebra problems are more or less difficult to solve, search formoves that make the most apparent progress towards ahypothesized goal provides the key to eventual solution

Uncertainty in child custody cases after parental separation: context and decision-making process

Context factors (e.g. a family’s developmental crisis) can affect the child custody decision-making process and the child’s best interests after parental separation. But what are these context factors, and how can they vary across different cultures and legal systems? This paper reports a cross-cultural qualitative study funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and was carried out under a Naturalistic Decision-making approach. This study addresses context factors that impact the decision-making of experienced legal actors working in child custody cases. Interviews were conducted with 73 legal actors (judges, prosecutors, lawyers, psychologists, and social workers) in Brazil and England. The data gathered were analysed employing a reflexive thematic analysis that generated seven themes addressing how uncertainty is structured by context factors in child custody cases after parental separation. The themes generated encompassed three domains (‘family’, ‘family court’, and ‘legal-psychosocial’) that draw attention to the sources of uncertainty in child custody cases, especially to the role of contextual players (family and children) in the child custody decision-making process

Squeezed out: the consequences of riparian zone modification for specialist invertebrates

While anthropogenic biodiversity loss in fresh waters is among the most rapid of all ecosystems, impacts on the conservation of associated riparian zones are less well documented. Riverine ecotones are particularly vulnerable to the combined ‘squeeze’ between land-use encroachment, discharge regulation and climate change. Over a 3-year period of persistent low discharge in a regulated, temperate river system (River Usk, Wales, UK; 2009–2011), specialist carabid beetles on exposed riverine sediments (ERS) were used as model organisms to test the hypotheses that catchment-scale flow modification affects riparian zone invertebrates more than local habitat character, and that this modification is accompanied by associated succession among the Carabidae. Annual summer discharge during the study period was among the lowest of the preceding 12 years, affecting carabid assemblages. The richness of specialist ERS carabids declined, while generalist carabid species’ populations either increased in abundance or remained stable. Community composition also changed, as three (Bembidion prasinum, B. decorum and B. punctulatum) of the four dominant carabids typical of ERS increased in abundance while B. atrocaeruleum decreased. Despite significant inter-annual variation in habitat quality and the encroachment of ground vegetation, beetle assemblages more closely tracked reach-scale variations between sites or catchment-scale variations through time. These data from multiple sites and years illustrate how ERS Carabidae respond to broad-scale discharge variations more than local habitat character. This implies that the maintenance of naturally variable flow regimes is at least as important to the conservation of ERS and their dependent assemblages as are site-scale measures

Drawing the answers: sketching to support free and probed recall by child witnesses and victims with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The success of witness interviews in the criminal justice system depends on the accuracy of information obtained, which is a function of both amount and quality of information. Attempts to enhance witness retrieval such as mental reinstatement of context have been designed with typically developed adults in mind. In this paper, the relative benefits of mental and sketch reinstatement mnemonics are explored with both typically developing children and children with autism. Children watched a crime event video, and their retrieval of event information was examined in free and probed recall phases of a cognitive interview. As expected, typically developing children recalled more correct information of all types than children with autism during free and probed recall phases. Sketching during free recall was more beneficial for both groups in both phases in reducing the amount of incorrect items, but the relative effect of sketching on enhancing retrieval accuracy was greater for children with autism. The results indicate the benefits of choosing retrieval mnemonics that are sensitive to the specific impairments of autistic individuals, and suggest that retrieval accuracy during interviews can be enhanced, in some cases to the same level as that of typically developing individuals