Teachers’ Understanding of Bullying

Using semi‐structured interviews, we examined teachers’ understanding of bullying of children in their classes. Although teachers’ definitions of bullying included both direct and indirect behaviours, several factors influenced how they characterized and responded to incidents. These factors included whether the teachers viewed an incident as serious or considered a victimized child responsible, whether a child matched their assumptions about victim characteristics and behaviours, and whether they described feeling empathy for a child. The nature of the school environment and organization such as availability of systemic support in addressing bullying incidents were further factors that influenced teachers’ awareness and responses. Key words: peer victimization, qualitative study on bullying, understanding bullying, response to bullying À l’aide d’entrevues semi‐structurées, les auteures ont étudié comment les enseignants perçoivent l’intimidation dans leurs classes. Bien que leurs définitions de l’intimidation comprennent à la fois les comportements directs et indirects, plusieurs facteurs influencent leur façon de caractériser les incidents et d’y réagir, notamment s’ils considèrent que l’incident est sérieux ou que la victime est responsable, si la victime correspond à leurs théories implicites sur les caractéristiques et les comportements d’une victime et s’ils ressentent de l’empathie pour la victime. Le climat de l’école et les structures offertes tel un soutien systémique pour faire face aux incidents d’intimidation faisaient également partie des facteurs ayant une incidence sur la sensibilisation et les réactions des enseignants. Mots clés: victimisation par des pairs, étude qualitative sur l’intimidation, comprendre l’intimidation, réagir à l’intimidation.

Lexical retrieval in discourse: An early indicator of Alzheimer’s dementia

We examined the progression of lexical-retrieval deficits in individuals with neuropathologically determined Alzheimer’s disease (AD; n=23) and a comparison group without criteria for AD (n=24) to determine whether linguistic changes were a significant marker of the disease. Our participants underwent multiple administrations of a neuropsychological battery, with initial administration occurring on average 16 years prior to death. The battery included the Boston Naming Test (BNT), a letter fluency task (FAS) and written description of the Cookie Theft Picture (CTP). Repeated measures analysis revealed that the AD-group showed progressively greater decline in FAS and CTP lexical performance than the comparison group. Crosssectional time-specific group comparisons indicated that the CTP differentiated performance between the two groups at 7–9 years prior to death and FAS and BNT only at 2–4 years. These results suggest that lexical retrieval deficits in written discourse serve as an early indicator of AD

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

An Assessment of Bridging Program Participants’ Sources of Academic Self-Efficacy at a Regional Australian University

Academic bridging and other remedial programs are designed to maximize outcomes for all students and are designed around an inclusive framework which targets the most disadvantaged or at need students. This study questions the validity of this practice through an evaluation of Bandura’s sources of academic self-efficacy for bridging program participants within two distinct cohorts, first-in-family and non-first-in-family students. The study comprised students at a regional Australian university (N=1806) which prides itself on high rates of first generation student enrolment. Data was analyzed using SPSS® software to construct regression analyses for each cohort and determine for each which of Bandura’s sources of academic self-efficacy predicted current academic self-efficacy. For both first-in-family and non-first-in-family students who did not participate in bridging programs, all four of Bandura’s sources of academic self-efficacy were significant predictors of current academic self-efficacy. For first-in-family students who participated in bridging programs, vicarious learning did not significantly predict academic self-efficacy. For non-first-in-family students who participated in bridging programs, mastery experience and social persuasion did not predict academic self-efficacy. Some suggestions for the disparity between the results for bridging program participants and the bulk of accepted literature are offered as are some implications for bridging program pedagogy

How People Evaluate Others with Social Anxiety Disorder: A Comparison to Depression and General Mental Illness Stigma

Despite the availability of effective interventions, most individuals with social anxiety disorder do not seek treatment. Given their fear of negative evaluation, socially anxious individuals might be especially susceptible to stigma concerns, a recognized barrier for mental health treatment. However, very little is known about the stigma specific to social anxiety disorder. In a design similar to Feldman and Crandall (2007), university undergraduate students read vignettes about target individuals with a generic mental illness label, major depressive disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Subjects rated each of 3 people in the vignettes on social distance and 17 dimensions including dangerousness, heritability and prevalence of the disorder, and gender ratio. Results indicated that being male and not having experience with mental health treatment was associated with somewhat greater preferred social distance. Multiple regression analyses revealed that being embarrassed by the disorder and dangerousness predicted social distance across all 3 vignettes. The vignette for social anxiety disorder had the most complex model and included work impairment, more common among women, and more avoidable. These results have implications for understanding the specific aspects of the stigma associated with social anxiety disorder. Public service messages to reduce stigma should focus on more accurate information about dangerousness and mental illness, given this is an established aspect of mental illness stigma. More nuanced messages about social anxiety might be best incorporated into the treatment referral process and as part of treatment

Teachers' understanding of bullying

Using semi‐structured interviews, we examined teachers’ understanding of bullying of children in their classes. Although teachers’ definitions of bullying included both direct and indirect behaviours, several factors influenced how they characterized and responded to incidents. These factors included whether the teachers viewed an incident as serious or considered a victimized child responsible, whether a child matched their assumptions about victim characteristics and behaviours, and whether they described feeling empathy for a child. The nature of the school environment and organization such as availability of systemic support in addressing bullying incidents were further factors that influenced teachers’ awareness and responses.This study was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

The Ongoing Problem of Bullying in Canada: A Ten-Year Perspective

This is the published version of an article published in the Canadian Social Work Journal.Bullying is a common experience for many children and youth (Craig and Harel, 2004; Craig and Pepler, 1996, 1997; O’Connell, Pepler and Craig, 1999; Nansel, et al., 2001; Olweus, 1994; Rigby, 2002). Bullying can significantly affect the academic, social, emotional and psychological functioning, as well as the physical health, of both children who are victimized and those who bully (Crick and Bigbee, 1998; Olweus, 1984; Rigby, 2002). In this paper, we report prevalence data for bullying and victimization collected in 1993 and again in 2003. In so doing, we seek to examine whether the prevalence of bullying has significantly changed over this ten-year period and to discuss the possible causes and implications of the patterns in the prevalence of bullying problems

Prevalence, Motivations, and Social, Mental Health and Health Consequences of Cyberbullying Among School-Aged Children and Youth: Protocol of a Longitudinal and Multi-Perspective Mixed Method Study

This paper describes the protocols applied in a longitudinal and multi-perspective mixed-methods study with five objectives: (1) to explore children/youth’s experiences, and children/youth’s, parents’, and teachers’ conceptions, definitions, and understanding of cyberbullying; (2) to explore how children/youth view the underlying motivations for cyberbullying; (3) to document the shifting prevalence rates of cyberbullying victimization, witnessing, and perpetration; (4) to identify risk and protective factors for cyberbullying involvement; and (5) to explore social, mental health, and health consequences of cyberbullying