Motivations to Attend Graduate School for Former Foster Youth and Juvenile Offenders in Placement Facilities and Group Homes

This study aimed to identify the motivating factors for higher education, foster youth and probation youth experienced while in care. The interviews were designed to pinpoint who and what resources, if any, were attributed by the participant as having a positive influence on their attending college. Moreso, the study was purposely directed at individuals who graduated or were working towards a graduate degree or higher. A qualitative data approach was used to interview six participants in order to analyze any themes or similarities amongst the participants. The participants in this study were able to share their personal experiences while in care that inspired them to successfully begin a graduate degree. This study contains information about former foster youths caregivers, placements, social workers, educational journey and life after care. This study also highlights participants\u27 personal experiences including their financial, physical and emotional barriers that they faced aging out of the system and attending college and grad school. The studies limitations were highlighted as low number of participants, lack of diversity amongst degrees, no probation youth participants and diverse experiences while in care. This study introduces the urgency of magnifying the importance of education for these populations and the need for support by social workers, youth caregivers and other faculty that are relied upon to teach them about the benefits of education after care. These participants\u27 personal experiences do not represent all former foster youth and probation youth or future youth in care

“It’s not always poor decisions”: Shifts in business student’s attitudes toward poverty after completing Spent

Access the online Pressbooks version of this article here. This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) study examined whether undergraduate business students reported having different attitudes towards poverty after completing SPENT. SPENT is an open-access, digital poverty simulation offered through Urban Ministries of Durham. The author used the Reflexive Thematic Analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze 17 student reflection papers. The students were enrolled in an introductory finance course at a small teaching institution in the Southwest. The student reflection paper prompts were based on the four-phase Experiential Learning Model (Kolb, 1984). The author constructed four themes about the students’ attitudes toward poverty: (1) laziness and poor decisions, (2) multiple causes, (3) low wages, and (4) importance of education. This research offers implications for college instructors who use simulations and those who teach about poverty

Energy Policy in the Baltics: A Study of Regional Cooperation

Regionalism, especially in the form of macro-regions, has emerged as a force of cooperation and integration within the European Union. The Baltic states, who have cooperated more closely since acceding to the EU, provide an effective case study for testing the unifying power of regionalism. As small states that have shared a damaging dependence on Russian energy imports, the three Baltic states share the incentive to cooperate as a region and develop their internal gas, oil, and electricity capacities. The Baltic states have displayed uneven tendencies of cooperation when it comes to energy, however. After presenting an overview of regionalism in the EU, this paper examines EU policy regarding energy in the Baltics, energy ties between the Baltics and other countries, and specific energy projects in the Baltics to show that while the Baltics do not yet have a strong tradition of cooperation in the energy sector, they have laid the groundwork to strengthen future ties.Master of Art

Complaints about technology as a resource for identity-work

This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how interactants use narratives of complaint-like activities about hypothetical categories of people and confessions of their own complainable participation to accomplish a ‘bemoaning’ speech act that manages competing affiliations, demands, and disagreements to construct reasonable moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies ‘mean’ to them and for contemporary society. This shows how important it is to examine opinions as situated actions rather than as simple facts about what people believe

Can Persuasion Research Increase Commitment to Breastfeeding? A Test of Women\u27s Resistance to Pro Infant-Formula Messages

William McGuire’s Attitude Inoculation Theory (AIT) predicts that the act of warning women that they may be exposed to attempts to change their attitudes can “inoculate” them against persuasion. The warning can be compared to a weakened virus when it enters the body. In response to the threat or “virus” people will strengthen their attitudes. After a short delay the participant is introduced to the message and their resistance to this message is evaluated. The purpose of this study was to analyze women’s attitudes towards infant feeding by utilizing the inoculation theory. Overall, we found that the inoculation had no effect for participants who had pre-existing, positive breastfeeding attitudes. However, participants who had pre-existing, negative breastfeeding attitudes and received the inoculation strengthened their negative attitudes toward breastfeeding

The Effects of Aging on Associative Learning and Memory Retrieval in Causal Judgment

Research has shown that detecting and judging causal relationships requires associative learning and memory. Retrospective revaluation of causal cues requires associative memory (Aitken, Larkin, & Dickinson, 2001) to bind multiple cues together and use these associations to retrieve unseen cues for revaluation of their associative value. The difficulty that older adults experience with respect to retrospective revaluation could occur because of their deficit in associative binding and retrieval (Mutter, Atchley, & Plumlee, 2012). Like retrospective revaluation, blocking requires cue – outcome associative learning, but unlike retrospective revaluation, blocking does not require binding two cues together nor does it require using the resulting association between these cues for retrieval. Older adults display no deficit in blocking (Hannah, Allan, & Young, 2012; Holder & Mutter, in submission). To assess the effects of aging on associative learning and memory in causal judgment, this study examined age effects in retrospective revaluation and blocking using an allergy scenario in a streamed-trial task (Hannah, Crump, Allan, & Siegel, 2009; Hannah et al., 2012). This study found that older and younger adults both displayed blocking effects, which supports past research. Additionally, it was found that older and younger adults displayed retrospective revaluation in working memory. The ability for older adults to display retrospective revaluation in working memory is a new finding. It suggests that there may be a decrement in associative long-term memory, but associative processes in working memory may be intact

Examining College Students’ Attitudes Toward Poverty During the Adult Role of the Community Action Poverty Simulation

Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) and Extension professionals need to understand the lived experience of poverty because it affects every aspect of an individual’s life. Poverty is related to inadequate nutrition and food insecurity, lack of access to health care, insufficient child care, unsafe neighborhoods, lack of affordable housing, under-resourced schools, and a lower quality of life. Attitudes toward poverty vary widely among Americans and can be categorized as either internal/individual attributions (e.g., laziness, welfare dependency, etc.) or systemic/structural attributions (e.g., unemployment, inflation, etc.). Individuals holding internal attributions toward poverty are more likely to have negative feelings toward impoverished individuals. As such, efforts to educate FCS college students, Extension agents, and all Americans on the day-to-day reality of those in poverty are important. Extension-sponsored Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS) programs are effective in changing participants’ attitudes toward poverty. This research used Reflexive Thematic Analysis to analyze 56 reflection papers written by college students enrolled in a family resource management course. Three themes emerged from the research: (a) empathy, (b) a turn from internal attributions, and (c) systematic attributions. This research has implications for Extension and FCS professionals offering CAPS programming in higher education settings

Alliances, assemblages, and affects : three moments of building collective working-class literacies

This article explores how assemblage and affect theories can enable research into the formation of a collective working-class identity, inclusive of written, print, publication, and organizational literacies through the origins of the Federation of Worker Writer and Community Publishers, an organization that expanded its collectivity as new heritages, ethnicities, and immigrant identities altered the organization’s membership and "class" identity

The Powerful Potential of Relationships and Community Writing

The following essay is a collective reflection in which the authors revisit the themes they raise in the edited volume Unsustainable, ask new questions, and suggest, again, that long-term sustainability might not be the most appropriate goal for every university-community partnership. Still, relationships, with all their variability, remain the lifeblood of community writing work. Just as the Conference on Community Writing (CCW) was a welcome opportunity to reconnect with old friends and learn new names, our programs are built on the strength of the relationships we build in the community and on our campuses

Examining College Students’ Attitudes Toward Poverty During the Adult Role of the Community Action Poverty Simulation

Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) and Extension professionals need to understand the lived experience of poverty because it affects every aspect of an individual’s life. Poverty is related to inadequate nutrition and food insecurity, lack of access to health care, insufficient child care, unsafe neighborhoods, lack of affordable housing, under-resourced schools, and a lower quality of life. Attitudes toward poverty vary widely among Americans and can be categorized as either internal/individual attributions (e.g., laziness, welfare dependency, etc.) or systemic/structural attributions (e.g., unemployment, inflation, etc.). Individuals holding internal attributions toward poverty are more likely to have negative feelings toward impoverished individuals. As such, efforts to educate FCS college students, Extension agents, and all Americans on the day-to-day reality of those in poverty are important. Extension-sponsored Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS) programs are effective in changing participants’ attitudes toward poverty. This research used Reflexive Thematic Analysis to analyze 56 reflection papers written by college students enrolled in a family resource management course. Three themes emerged from the research: (a) empathy, (b) a turn from internal attributions, and (c) systematic attributions. This research has implications for Extension and FCS professionals offering CAPS programming in higher education settings