Factors Shaping Expenditure on Food-Away-from-Home in Irish and UK Households

End of project reportFactors influencing consumer spending in two sectors of the food-away-from-home (FAFH) market (quick-service e.g. takeaways, and full-service e.g. restaurants) were analysed using national household expenditure survey data. Different variables affect expenditure in the two sectors in different ways. Income has a greater effect on expenditure in the full-service sector than in the quick-service sector. Similarly households that are health-conscious indicate a greater preference for full-service meals while households which place more value on time (and therefore are more convenience-oriented) indicate a greater preference for quick-service. Households of a higher social class and those with higher education levels also appear to favour full-service expenditure. In addition, younger, urbanised households favour quickservice meal options. The results emphasise the merits of analysing different sectors within the FAFH market separately.Teagasc Walsh Fellowship Programm

Urban Adolescents\u27 Experiences of Parental Unemployment

A substantial number of children in the United States are being raised in households with an unemployed parent. These individuals may have unknown and unmet needs, as they are the first generation since the Great Depression to be raised during a time characterized by economic hardship and high unemployment. The purpose of this study was to explore how urban adolescents of unemployed parents experience parental unemployment. This qualitative study was informed by phenomenology for data collection and consensual qualitative research (CQR) for data analysis. Participants included 13 urban adolescents from low socio-economic status areas, who have been raised by unemployed parent(s) or caregiver(s). Data were organized into eight domains that describe how parental unemployment has influenced the personal and social identity and career development of urban adolescents. Results suggested that participants perceive parental unemployment increased awareness, positively and negatively influenced social activities, and positively motivated participants for future success at school and/or work. Implications for clinicians working with this population are discussed

A shift of allegiance: The case of Erie and the North / Midland boundary

The city of Erie, Pennsylvania represents an anomalous case in the dialect geography of North America. According to all available historical records, it was linguistically aligned with the North in the early part of the 20 th century: the lexical data presented in Kurath (1949) and Carver (1987) locate Erie within most of the Northern isoglosses, and the phonological data presented in Kurath and McDavid (1961) show that Erie shared nearly all of its phonological features with the North and only a few with the Midland. However, recent research for the Atlas of North American English (Labov et al. 2006) shows that Erie is now a Midland city, and the two ANAE speakers from Erie show no traces of the Northern Cities Shift. Crucially, the two pivot points in the vowel system, as defined by Labov (1991), show clear Midland characteristics: short-a exhibits raising before all nasals, but not the general raising of the NCS, and both speakers have a complete merger of the vowels in cot and caught. Erie’s shift from being a Northern city to a Midland city is surprising given that the North/Midland boundary is the most clearly defined dialect boundary in North America today (Labov et al. 2006). Furthermore, it would not be predicted by dialect diffusion models that only take population and distance into account, such as Trudgill’s (1974) Gravity Model: Buffalo and Cleveland, the large Northern Cities along Lake Erie on either side of Erie are more populous and closer to Erie than Pittsburgh, the nearest large Midland city. The current study provides a more detailed characterization of Erie, and presents vowel measurements from seven Erieites, ranging in age from 25 to 60. I n general, the results confirm ANAE’s finding that Erie is aligned with the Midland. H owever, the vowels systems of the Erie speakers are different from the neighboring Midland speakers in two respects. First of all, /ow/ does not participate in the strong fronting that is characteristic of Pittsburgh/Western PA: only the youngest speaker (a 25-year-old female) shows an F2 value for /ow/ that is higher than would be expected for a Northern speaker. Furthermore, while all speakers clearly have the low-back merger, the phonetic realization of the resulting phoneme is unrounded and lower than the distinctly rounded and raised open-o of the Pittsburgh area. Thus, while Erie is clearly phonologically aligned with Pittsburgh, the two regions are not phonetically identical. This realignment with the Midland suggests that Pittsburgh has had a stronger influence on Erie since the middle of the 20 th century than either of the two large nearby Northern cities. Qualitative evidence from sociolinguistic interviews will be presented to confirm this and to show that Erieites have more contact with speakers from Pittsburgh than either Buffalo or Cleveland. Much of this contact stems from the popularity of Erie as a summer vacation destination for residents of Pittsburgh, evidenced by the fact that some Erieites refer to these summer vacationers from Pittsburgh as mups (from come up ). It will be argued that this higher density of communication caused Erie to shift its phonological allegiance from the North to the Midland, and, consequently, that any model of dialect diffusion must take communication patterns into account in order to be fully explanatory

The permeability of dialect boundaries: a case study of the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania

This dissertation presents a dialectological study of the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, and the neighboring towns in the boundary area between the North and Midland dialect regions. The field work conducted for this dissertation consists of interviews, word lists, minimal pair tests, and grammatical acceptability judgments. In total, data from 106 speakers was analyzed to determine the course of linguistic change in the city of Erie and the current location of the dialect boundaries in the neighboring regions. In order to process the acoustic data from this large corpus, the methodology of transcription and subsequent forced alignment was applied. In order to reduce error in the formant measurements, automatic techniques for measurement point selection and formant prediction were developed. The acoustic analysis focuses on aspects of the vowel system that differentiate the North and the Midland. The results show that the merger of /o/ and /oh/ began in the city of Erie before 1900, and that it subsequently spread to Ripley, NY. On the other hand, Erie is still located on the Northern side of the boundary with respect to the fronting of the back upgliding vowels /uw/, /ow/, and /aw/. Finally, an analysis of the lexical and morphosyntactic variables shows a widespread acceptability of the Midland features in Erie. In the final section of the dissertation, the early settlement history of the region is examined, and Erie\u27s acceptance of several Midland features is explained by the early presence of a large contingent of non-Northern, especially Scots-Irish, settlers

Emotion Perception Correlates In Moderate And Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Introduction: Studies have demonstrated that individuals with TBI experience impairments in emotion perception accuracy in facial and auditory modalities but does not yet understand patterns of emotion perception and their relation to neurocognitive performance. The current study assessed why emotion perception deficits occur via psychological and cognitive relationships as well as patterns of emotion misattributions. Methods: 50 adults with a bona-fide moderate or severe traumatic brain injury and 39 healthy comparison adults were included in the study. Eligible participants completed a battery of paper-and-pencil and computerized neuropsychological measures, including three tasks of emotion perception, and psychological questionnaires. Results: The TBI group underperformed on auditory and facial emotion perception tasks compared to healthy adults. Patterns of neuropsychological correlates of emotion perception were generally global, but nuanced depending on group membership and modality of emotion perception task. Findings about experienced affect suggest a moderating effect of experienced emotion depending on the intensity and content on facial emotion perception accuracy. Misattribution patterns revealed that individuals in the TBI group demonstrated the highest degree of omission errors compared to healthy adults. Additionally, they tended to observe emotion where there was none (i.e., when presented with neutral stimuli) and see it as negative more often than their healthy counterparts. Conclusions: The presence of low and high levels of experienced affect, specific neuropsychological relationships, and the pattern of misattribution errors were distinct for persons following TBI compared to their healthy counterparts in auditory and facial modalities of emotion perception. Findings from this current study enable education of providers and loved owes as well as additional research to improve social/interpersonal functioning and quality of life for persons with TBI

The Forgotten Few: French Canadians and the Great War

Geoff Keelan is a PhD Candidate at the University of Waterloo under Dr. Whitney Lackenbauer. He studies Quebec and the First World War, specifically the role of Henri Bourassa during the war, French Canadian veterans and other themes that challenge the traditionally understood narrative of Quebec during the Great War

Urban Adolescents\u27 Experiences of Parental Unemployment

A substantial number of children in the United States are being raised in households with an unemployed parent. These individuals may have unknown and unmet needs, as they are the first generation since the Great Depression to be raised during a time characterized by economic hardship and high unemployment. The purpose of this study was to explore how urban adolescents of unemployed parents experience parental unemployment. This qualitative study was informed by phenomenology for data collection and consensual qualitative research (CQR) for data analysis. Participants included 13 urban adolescents from low socio-economic status areas, who have been raised by unemployed parent(s) or caregiver(s). Data were organized into eight domains that describe how parental unemployment has influenced the personal and social identity and career development of urban adolescents. Results suggested that participants perceive parental unemployment increased awareness, positively and negatively influenced social activities, and positively motivated participants for future success at school and/or work. Implications for clinicians working with this population are discussed