A qualitative exploration of practitioners' understanding of and response to child-to-parent aggression

There has been limited research and policy directed toward defining and understanding child-to-parent aggression (CPA), resulting in inconsistent definitions, understandings, and responses, which has a detrimental impact on families. In particular, there have been limited qualitative studies of those working on the frontline of CPA, hindering the development of effective policy. The present qualitative study therefore aimed to explore practitioner perspectives of CPA. Twenty-five practitioners from diverse fields (e.g. youth justice, police, charities) participated in four focus groups relating to their experiences of working with CPA in the UK. Thematic analysis of focus groups revealed three key themes: definitions of CPA, understanding of CPA risk factors, and responding to CPA. Practitioners understood CPA to be a broad use of aggression to intimidate and control parents and highlighted a range of individual (e.g. mental health, substance abuse) and social (e.g. parenting, gangs) risk factors for CPA. Further, practitioners felt that current methods of reporting CPA were ineffective and may have a detrimental impact on families. The findings of this study have implications for CPA policy and support the need for a multi-agency and coordinated strategy for responding to CPA

A comparison of sighted and visually impaired children’s text comprehension

Aim: Do children with visual impairments outperform their sighted cohorts in reading and auditory comprehension tasks? Methods: We address this question by applying panel regression techniques on a comprehensive sample of 16 children with visual impairments from a Greek special school for students with visual impairments. Results: By comparing the reader comprehender profile for both children types, we find that the children with visual impairments perform better than their sighted counterparts. The better performance is supported both unconditionally and conditionally on idiosyncratic characteristics, such as age, text complexity, modality, sex and reading ability. Conclusion: Decomposing the reader comprehender profile into a literal, global and local type of questions we find that the results are mainly driven by the superior performance of the children with VI in the literal questions

Automated individual decision-making and profiling in the light of the new Regulation (EU) 2016/679

The exponentially increasing use of algorithms and advanced artificial intelligence methods in the processes of individual decision-making, beyond the undeniable benefits it offers to modern society, poses serious challenges and significant concerns regarding the protection of personal data and the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons. Automated decision-making systems are often characterized by opaque procedures and unjustified discrimination, inaccuracies, and perpetuation of stereotypes. In order to address the increasingly growing risks, the General Data Protection Regulation EU 2016/679 introduced coherent and direct regulatory provisions that govern automated decision-making, aiming to ensure a higher level of protection of natural persons. This dissertation records and analyzes the legal protection of natural persons against automated individual decision-making, including profiling, mainly in the context of the General Data Protection Regulation. Specifically, it examines the whole regulatory framework for the protection of individuals governing automated decision-making, focusing both on the special provisions regarding the specific form of solely automated decision-making under Article 22 of the GDPR, as well as the general provisions of the Regulation that apply to all types of automated decision-making. The dissertation aims to explore the effectiveness and sufficiency of the provided protection and to highlight any vulnerabilities, deficiencies, and shortcomings in the relevant provisions of the Regulation that may limit the protection of individuals. Finally, this study concludes with closing thoughts on strengthening the protection of individuals against this particular processing and aims to trigger further discussions on the effective mitigation of the risks it poses.Η εκθετικά αυξανόμενη χρήση των αλγορίθμων και των προηγμένων μεθόδων τεχνητής νοημοσύνης στις διαδικασίες λήψης ατομικών αποφάσεων, πέραν των αναμφίβολων ωφελειών που προσφέρει στη σύγχρονη κοινωνία, δημιουργεί σοβαρές προκλήσεις και έντονες ανησυχίες για την προστασία των προσωπικών δεδομένων και των θεμελιωδών δικαιωμάτων και ελευθεριών των φυσικών προσώπων. Συχνά, τα αυτοματοποιημένα συστήματα λήψης αποφάσεων χαρακτηρίζονται από αδιαφανείς διαδικασίες και αδικαιολόγητες διακρίσεις, ανακρίβειες και διαιώνιση στερεοτύπων. Προκειμένου να αντιμετωπιστούν οι ολοένα αυξανόμενοι κίνδυνοι, ο Γενικός Κανονισμός Προστασίας Προσωπικών Δεδομένων ΕΕ 2016/679 εισήγαγε με συνεκτικό και άμεσο τρόπο κανονιστικές προβλέψεις που ρυθμίζουν την αυτοματοποιημένη λήψη ατομικών αποφάσεων, με στόχο τη διασφάλιση υψηλότερου επιπέδου προστασίας των φυσικών προσώπων. Η παρούσα διατριβή καταγράφει και αναλύει την έννομη προστασία των φυσικών προσώπων έναντι της αυτοματοποιημένης λήψης ατομικών αποφάσεων, συμπεριλαμβανομένης της κατάρτισης προφίλ, κυρίως υπό το πρίσμα του Γενικού Κανονισμού Προστασίας Δεδομένων. Συγκεκριμένα, εξετάζει το σύνολο του κανονιστικού πλέγματος προστασίας των ατόμων το οποίο διέπει την αυτοματοποιημένη λήψη αποφάσεων, εστιάζοντας τόσο στις ειδικές διατάξεις σχετικά με την ιδιαίτερη μορφή της αποκλειστικά αυτοματοποιημένης λήψης αποφάσεων κατ’ άρθρο 22 ΓΚΠΔ, όσο και στις γενικές προβλέψεις του Κανονισμού που τυγχάνουν εφαρμογής σε κάθε είδους αυτοματοποιημένη λήψη αποφάσεων. Στόχος της διατριβής είναι η διερεύνηση της αποτελεσματικότητας και επάρκειας της παρεχόμενης προστασίας και η ανάδειξη τυχόν ευπαθειών, ελλείψεων και αστοχιών των επίμαχων προβλέψεων του Κανονισμού που δύνανται να περιορίσουν την προστασία του ατόμου. Τέλος, η παρούσα καταλήγει σε συμπερασματικές σκέψεις αναφορικά με την ενίσχυση της προστασίας των ατόμων έναντι της ιδιάζουσας αυτής επεξεργασίας και φιλοδοξεί να αποτελέσει έναυσμα και απαρχή συζητήσεων για την αποτελεσματική αντιμετώπιση των κινδύνων που αυτή ελλοχεύει

The Executive Function of Bilingual and Monolingual Children: A Technical Efficiency Approach

The paper introduces a novel approach to evaluate performance in the executive functioning skills of bilingual and monolingual children. This approach targets method and analysis specific issues in the field, which has reached an impasse (Antoniou et al., 2021). This study moves beyond the traditional approach towards bilingualism, by using an array of executive functioning tasks and frontier methodologies which allow us to jointly consider multiple tasks and metrics in a new measure; technical efficiency (TE). We use a Data Envelopment Analysis technique to estimate TE for a sample of 32 Greek-English bilingual and 38 Greek monolingual children. In a second-stage we compare the TE of the groups using an ANCOVA, a bootstrap regression and a k-means nearest neighbour technique, while controlling for a range of background variables. Results show that bilinguals have superior TE compared to their monolingual counterparts, being around 6.5% more efficient. Robustness tests reveal that TE yields similar results to the more complex conventional MANCOVA analyses, while utilising information in a more efficient way. By using the TE approach on a relevant existing dataset, we further highlight TE’s advantages compared to conventional analyses; not only does TE use a single measure, instead of two principal components, but it also allows more group observations as it accounts for differences between the groups by construction