Evaluation of performance at university with the Rasch Analysis

In 2007/2008 the University of Salento has started a degree course in Psychology. Right from the start, the people in charge of the course have been focusing on preventing early dropouts by stimulating a better professional awareness and by ensuring the best possible course experience. To do so, the students were asked increasing performance standards to prevent the choice of university studies as mere alternative to work. This study refers specifically of controlling the training process through the analysis of perfor- mance of students (monitoring career). Normally a review of developments in the curriculum in relation to explanatory variables is performed using sta- tistical inferential model where the dependent variable is the grade obtained in the different disciplines or even the credits acquired by the student. The particular structure of the activity since its inception allows to introduce the evaluation of the curriculum using effectively Rasch Analysis. The model involves the insertion of the exams outcomes analysed in terms of success / failure examination for each of the constituent disciplines of studies. This model establishes a more reliable criteria for the verification of differential variables useful for monitoring the training process (for example: final grade to high school diploma, sex, age, university registration renewal , etc.) and the subsequent management of the training process

The concept of context in the field of addiction research. A review

Objective: In the field of addiction research, the studies have typically focused on the identification of individual factors that affect the onset and maintenance of addictive behaviors. However, during the last 20 years, there has been a growing interest in the role of social and cultural factors and efforts have also been made to re-situate addicts in their social environment. The authors reviewed the literature on addictions with the purpose of investigating how scholars have conceptualized and incorporated contextual influences in their work. Method: Studies investigating different aspects of the “context”, published in the period 2012-2014 in one of the most representative journal in the field, were analyzed. Results: From a total of 126 studies examined, 14 macro-categories and 56 sub-categories were identified. Most of the articles identify the context with the socio-demographic variables, the exposition to addictive behaviors in the social environment and different social and familiar factors (like media influence, parental style, etc); Conclusions: Currently, there is a huge variability in the way of defining and analyzing the role of context. Only few studies addressed the role of culture. The view of culture as the context-container to which individuals belong emerges, with a little recognition of the role of individuals in negotiating their cultural world and the meaning of their experience

The concept of context in the field of addiction research. A review

In the field of addiction research, studies have typically focused on the identification of individual factors that affect the onset and maintenance of addictive behaviors. However, there has been growing interest in the role of social and cultural factors. The authors reviewed the literature on addictions with the purpose of investigating how scholars have conceptualized and incorporated contextual influences in their work. An analysis was made of studies investigating “context”, in the period 2012-2014, in one of the most representative journals in the field. From a total of 142 studies examined, 14 macro-categories and 48 sub-categories were identified. Most of the articles identify context with socio-demographic variables, exposition to addictive behaviors in the social environment and different social and family factors. The review reveals that many studies lack an explicit theoretical model; furthermore, there is a huge variability in the way of defining and analyzing the role of context; only a few studies addressed the role of culture and the meaning of the experience

Subjective culturer, smoking, alcohol and the Internet dependence

Cross cultural, ethnographic, anthropological studies, as well as research in the field of developmental and cultural psychopathology, give evidence in support of the idea that “context” (interpersonal environment, conventional social structures, social norms, socio-economic variables, cultural factors) plays a main role in defining which expression of distress is accepted or sanctioned (Draguns, 1995; Gone & Kirmayer, 2010). Different studies show how acculturation plays an important role in the initiation and maintenance of a number of mental illnesses (Oei & Raylu, 2009). According to the cultural standpoint, our work focuses on the role of the subjects’ cultures in many types of problematic repetitive behaviors, like smoking, alcohol and internet addictions. The term “subjective culture” can be originally found in Triandis (1972, 2002). According to the author, subjective culture includes ideas about how to live properly and how to behave in relation to objects and people. However, whereas for the author subjective culture is a “characteristic way of perceiving its social environment" by society (Triandis, 1972, p. viii, 3), we recognize that many subjective cultures may be expressed within the same society (Venuleo, Salvatore, & Mossi, 2014; Venuleo, Mossi, & Salvatore, 2014; Venuleo & Marinaci, forthcoming). Previous studies in the Italian context have already provided evidence that subjective cultures, through which people interpret their social environment, play a major role in differentiating heavy drinkers, as well as pathological gamblers, compared with a control group (Venuleo, Salvatore, & Mossi, 2014). The current study assessed whether smoking dependent subjects express different subjective cultures compared with alcohol dependent subjects and internet dependent subjects. Our hypothesis is that subjective cultures also play a role in differentiating various kinds of addiction, having different implications for individuals’ social adapting, Participants, recruited in three different contexts (public health services for the treatment of addiction, casino, undergraduate course) were subjected to the Cigarette Dependence Scale (CDS) (J-F. Etter, J. Le Houezec & T. V. Perneger 2003), the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) (World Health Organization 1993), the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) (K. Young 1998), and the Questionnaire on the Interpretation of the Social Environment (QUISE) (Mossi & Salvatore 2011), in order to investigate the subjective cultures. Two different logistic regressions were applied in order to esteem the capability of the QUISE scores to differentiate smoking dependent subjects from alcohol dependent subjects and internet dependent subjects. Consistent with the hypothesis, the results show that smoking dependent subjects express a different way of connoting the social environment, when compared with alcohol dependent and internet dependent subjects. The former depict the environment as positive and reliable, while the the latter depict it as negative and unreliable. Implications for prevention and intervention efforts are discussed

Unplanned reaction or something else? The role of subjective cultures in hazardous and harmful drinking

This study compares the impact of levels of impulsivity and subjective cultures through which subjects interpret their experience of the social environment on the probability of hazardous and harmful alcohol use. A sample of 501 participants from Southern Italy completed a series of questionnaires in order to detect their subjective cultures and levels of impulsiveness (attentional, motor and non-planning). Moreover, alcohol consumption, drinking behavior, alcohol-related problems and adverse reactions during the past year were assessed. A sub-group of hazardous and harmful drinkers (n = 106; 21%) was identified and a healthy control group (n = 127; 25%) was selected. Members of the hazardous and harmful group view the social environment as a significantly more unreliable place, and also scored higher on motor impulsiveness and lower on non-planning impulsiveness. Discussion considers theoretical and clinical implications of the results

Evaluation of performance at university with the Rasch Analysis

In 2007/2008 the University of Salento has started a degree course in Psychology. Right from the start, the people in charge of the course have been focusing on preventing early dropouts by stimulating a better professional awareness and by ensuring the best possible course experience. To do so, the students were asked increasing performance standards to prevent the choice of university studies as mere alternative to work. This study refers specifically of controlling the training process through the analysis of perfor- mance of students (monitoring career). Normally a review of developments in the curriculum in relation to explanatory variables is performed using sta- tistical inferential model where the dependent variable is the grade obtained in the different disciplines or even the credits acquired by the student. The particular structure of the activity since its inception allows to introduce the evaluation of the curriculum using effectively Rasch Analysis. The model involves the insertion of the exams outcomes analysed in terms of success / failure examination for each of the constituent disciplines of studies. This model establishes a more reliable criteria for the verification of differential variables useful for monitoring the training process (for example: final grade to high school diploma, sex, age, university registration renewal , etc.) and the subsequent management of the training process

Combining Cultural and Individual Dimensions in the Analysis of Hazardous Behaviours: An Explorative Study on the Interplay Between Cultural Models, Impulsivity, and Depression in Hazardous Drinking and Gambling

We aimed in this study to analyse how impulsivity and depression are related to hazardous gambling and drinking, while taking into account the moderating effects of the cultural models that people use to interpret their social environment. Cultural models, impulsivity, depression, hazardous gambling, and drinking were assessed in a convenience sample of 329 subjects recruited in three contexts (university, health services and support settings, venues for gambling and drinking) in South-eastern Italy. Mixed models were used to explore the influence of the different variables separately and the interaction between cultural models and the other predictive variables (impulsivity and depression). The findings show that different cultural models of the social environment are related to different probabilities of hazardous drinking and gambling. Heavy drinkers and gamblers tend to perceive their social world as an extremely anomic environment. In the case of hazardous drinking, this critical view of the social environment is associated with lack of premeditation, lack of perseverance, sensation seeking, and depression. In the case of gambling, this view is associated with sensation seeking and depression. Moreover, the way in which the participants evaluated the social environment was found to moderate the influence of depression in hazardous drinking and of sensation seeking in hazardous gambling. The findings of this exploratory study offer support to the idea that exploring cultural factors and how they combine with other psychological and psychosocial risk factors may promote a better understanding of people’s engagement in hazardous behaviours

Models of value construction: for a Semio-dialectical Approach to Organization and Social Action

Social subjects—for example, a compan a freelancer—have a project, namely, their activity aims to pursue a specific state of the world. The content of this state changes according to the nature of the organization and the field condition in which it operates, nonetheless, the intentional nature of the organization is invariant. And the organization’s project defines its identity. For instance, let us consider a broker company; its identity is defined by its mission; namely, the optimization of the supply versus demand relationship about financial products, aimed at maximizing clients and company’s utility

Models of value construction. For a semio-dialectical approach to organization and social action

Social subjects—for example, a compan a freelancer—have a project, namely, their activity aims to pursue a specific state of the world. The content of this state changes according to the nature of the organization and the field condition in which it operates, nonetheless, the intentional nature of the organization is invariant. And the organization’s project defines its identity. For instance, let us consider a broker company; its identity is defined by its mission; namely, the optimization of the supply versus demand relationship about financial products, aimed at maximizing clients and company’s utility

Subjective cultures of the social environment among problem gamblers, drinkers and internet users

The cultural context is widely cited as integral to understanding why people engage in behaviour that damages their health. Yet it is rarely the direct object of investigation in the field of addiction behaviour. The current study examines whether the subjective cultures through which subjects interpret the social environment play a role in increasing (or decreasing) the probability of problem gambling, drinking, and internet use. The questionnaire on the Interpretation of the Social Environment (ISE) (Mossi & Salvatore 2011) was used in order to detect the subject cultures in a whole sample of 771 participants, recruited in five different contexts (public Health service; Slot-machine room and Bingo center, Undergraduate courses; smoke shops and betting centers, Help Centre for immigrants and the disadvantaged). One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and logistic regressions were used to compare problem (both at risk and dependent) group and control for each of the three kinds of harmful behaviour under analysis on ISE scores of subjective culture. The problem group of gamblers, drinkers and internet users show they differ from control as concerns the evaluation of the social environment. Whereas control groups tend to express trust in social norms and institutions, problem groups tend to perceive their social environment as lacking in rules, and thus as untrustworthy. Within this interpretative frame, to be "reasonable", to act "responsibly" does not appear a key for a person's social adaptation nor a key to acquire power over events and one’s own future. The results suggest that the way people interpret their social environment might be a key area for a better understanding of harmful behaviour, with different critical effects on social adjustment; the knowledge of subjective cultures might provide valuable information in the development of healthcare strategies