An Ethnographic Study of Ethical Practices in Relationships Between Young People and Youth Workers.

Through this research I aimed to understand more about the ethical issues youth workers face in practice, using a comparative mini-ethnographic methodology. Compared to relationships young people share with other professionals, this ‘youth work relationship’ often has greater flexibility, wider and more nebulous concepts of professional boundaries, and inhabits an inherently more informal space. I begin by highlighting the contested concepts of youth work, and how they relate to dominant discourses in professional ethics. I acknowledge the reality of youth workers who may be in a risk-averse organisational structure, which promotes particular ways of working predominantly for the protection of the organisation. The original contribution to knowledge within this thesis is in empirically recognising the ethical issues inherent in youth work relationships and beginning to develop a virtue ethics for youth work. In particular, it is through naming eight observed inter-related themes of the youth work relationship, and arguing that the appropriateness of behaviours and interactions should be understood holistically rather than through relatively simplistic codes and roles, that new understandings of ethical issues in youth work are created. I therefore conclude by arguing the complexity of the youth work relationship can be understood through a virtue ethics framework. Virtue ethics is helpful as the character of the worker is particularly important, and it is through both having a ‘major premise’ or telos of the youth work relationship, and through having a disposition to be professionally wise, act with integrity, and be trustworthy, that workers can navigate these complex relationships

Household food security status in South Africa

The Human Sciences Research Council has established a policy research initiative to monitor household food security and to identify and evaluate policy options. In this special edition, a selection of articles from this project is assembled. While deep chronic hunger has fallen with the expansion of the social grants, under-nutrition is a very serious and widespread challenge. This special edition draws together the best available evidence on household food security with the aim of stimulating wider debate.food security, social grants, smallholder and subsistence production, poverty, Consumer/Household Economics,

A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources

Scientific data of importance to biologists in the Human Genome Project resides not only in conventional databases, but in structured files maintained in a number of different formats (e.g. ASN.1 and ACE) as well a.s sequence analysis packages (e.g. BLAST and FASTA). These formats and packages contain a number of data types not found in conventional databases, such as lists and variants, and may be deeply nested. We present in this paper techniques for querying and transforming such data, and illustrate their use in a prototype system developed in conjunction with the Human Genome Center for Chromosome 22. We also describe optimizations performed by the system, a crucial issue for bulk data

Psychometric evidence of body composition as a multidimensional trait in college students

Body composition (BC) assessment is often conducted using one of several different field techniques, which individually are considered valid tests. Anecdotal evidence has suggested, however, that some individuals may rank relatively high when assessed by one method and relatively low when assessed by another method. This inconsistency would indicate that BC assessments have poor convergent validity. The purpose of this study was to examine the convergent validity of common BC assessments using a norm-referenced approach. A total of 67 college students participated in this measurement study and had their BC assessed by each of three different tests: percent body fat (PBF) by skinfold technique (PBFSF), waist circumference (WC), and body mass index (BMI). Two different statistical procedures were used to evaluate convergent validity of the three BC assessments. First, Cohen’s weighted kappas were calculated using quartiles of each BC measure. This analysis utilized three different 4 x 4 tables from all BC measure pairs. Second, Bland and Altman limits of agreement (LOA) plots were constructed on all pairs after T-score transformation of each measure. Mean (SD) values of PBFSF (%), WC (cm), and BMI (kg/m2) were 12.3 (5.0), 87.0 (8.3), 26.8 (3.5) and 23.3 (7.0), 77.1 (8.8), 24.8 (3.2) for males and females, respectively. Simple kappas showed poor agreement across the three pairs of BC assessments and ranged from .14 to .17. The weighted kappas improved to fair agreement and ranged from .32 to .38. None of the three LOA plots showed systematic bias toward a method. However, 95% LOA were wide for PBFSF vs. WC (± 28.9), BMI vs. PBFSF (± 25.9), and BMI vs. WC (± 12.3). Results of this measurement study indicate that common BC assessments have poor convergent validity among college students. These results further indicate that BC may be a multidimensional trait, requiring a specific test depending on the specific trait of interest