Using Experimental Research to Test Instructional Effectiveness: A Case Study

Cross-cultural competence is now regarded as a critical student learning outcome by many U.S. higher educational institutions. It requires in part that students be able to empathize with people whose ethno-cultural, economic, political, and/or geographic backgrounds are different from their own—a quality that we are labeling global empathy. Yet colleges and universities frequently find it difficult to develop global empathy among their students. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether different instructional techniques—traditional lecture, video news reports, and an online game—or undergraduate students’ academic majors are associated with variations in indicators of global empathy. Statistically significant variations in survey data were found only among students majoring in psychology and in responses to two survey questions. Two behavioral measures did not reveal any statistically significant variation. A larger sample, longer exposure to treatment condition, or other changes to the experimental design might elucidate stronger evidence that instructional method or undergraduate academic major affects the development of global empathy, but this type of research may not be feasible at colleges and universities where enrollments are small and faculty lack necessary resources.     

Community,identity, orientation: sexuality,gender and rights in ASEAN

The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) escalated its community building project significantly over the last decade, culminating in the launch of a reformed and substantially integrated ASEAN Community at the end of 2015. This article considers what might follow from this newly reformed and rhetorically people-focused version of ASEAN for matters of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE). In claiming to be people-oriented and people-centred, and by developing a regional rights regime, ASEAN opens itself to standards by which it can be measured and held to account. We critically review ASEAN 2025: Forging Ahead Together, and consider civil society's response, focusing on the critique offered by the ASEAN SOGIE Caucus, the peak civil society organisation for ASEAN SOGIE matters. We focus on three themes: identity, visibility politics, and rights. We argue that while ASEAN falls short of its own rhetorical standards, these same standards support a politics which keeps rights in contestation, enabling civil society to push for accountability to international standards, and a more democratic politics.     

Facilitating the Delivery of Justice Services to Rural and Remote Communities

There are many projects that facilitate the delivery of services to various cyber communities around the world (see S. Turkle , Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1996). The major projects concentrate on helping the building up of these cyber communities and facilitating the training and awareness raising of these communities. The communities are educated on the use of technology and the importance of using internet and multimedia based technology to enhance some or a few aspects of their lives. The delivery of health and justice related services require the development of overall technology infrastructure that incorporates the use of existing and planned telecommunications developments for remote and rural communities. The facilitation required for the delivery of these services to remote and rural areas requires that the government and private sector cooperate to provide the necessary environment (P. Uimonen Internet as a Tool for Social Development UNRISD, Geneva, 1997) . In the developed world this has been achieved by the governments providing generic funding for the advancement of the telecommunication carriers that in turn provide the infrastructure development to rural areas. In the developing world, the issues are very different and there is currently aid related funds being channelled to improve the telecommunication barriers faced by these countries (International Telecommunications Union Report, 1997) . This paper attempts to outline a model to deliver justice services to remote and rural communities. The infrastructure issues that help to deliver such services effectively and an evaluation format for such a project will be outlined. The training issues involved in such a project will also be discussed. The paper will identify factors that help to provide these services to a larger proportion of the rural population.     

Predictors of Level of Voice in Adolescent Girls: Ethnicity,Attachment, and Gender Role Socialization

The current study empirically examined predictors of level of voice (ethnicity, attachment, and gender role socialization) in a diverse sample of 108 14-year-old girls. Structural equation modeling results indicated that parental attachment predicted level of voice with authority figures, and gender role socialization predicted level of voice with authority figures and peers. Both masculinity and femininity were salient for higher levels of voice with authority figures whereas higher scores on masculinity contributed to higher levels of voice with peers. These findings suggest that, contrary to previous theoretical work, femininity itself is not a risk factor for low levels of voice. In addition, African-American girls had higher levels of voice with teachers and classmates than did Caucasian girls, and girls who were in a school with a greater concentration of ethnic minorities had higher levels of voice with peers than did girls at a school with fewer minority students.

Room of One's Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias

Virginia Woolf's aspiration in A Room of One's Own (1929) for a private space and independence for the 'uneducated' women who would write fiction was echoed in Jipping Street (1928), the fictional autobiography of the working-class Kathleen Woodward, as well as by numerous other women during the period. This article asks why this wish for a room emerged in the twenties, and what is shows about the political affect of feminism at that time. One of the effects of post-suffrage feminism was that working-class women's experience began to be not only observed but listened to, written down and published, but real changes in the legal and economic position of women only came slowly. Both Woolf's polemic and Woodward's fictional autobiography are diatribes against poverty and laments for women's wasted lives. Neither idealized suffering; poverty in their texts was an injustice that aroused anger, not a state of abjection or redemption which required an anguished identification. When these two books were published, just after women's suffrage was achieved, hopes were high. The thirties were a more brutal decade, with unemployment and the growth of fascism, and Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) is darker in tone. Neither Woolf nor Woodward had faith in conventional politics. Instead both writers chose silence, solitude and the aesthetic seduction of words and thoughts. Neither wanted to enter the world of men, but nor did they want to live lives like their mothers. Both these books require of women an inner change. The room represents a transitional space. There was no clear vision of the future yet. As so often with feminist thought, the wish is for a break with the past, a resistance to culture and a change in human nature.     

‘Couldn't You Have Got a Computer Program to Do That for You?’ Reflections on the Impact that Machines Have on the Ways We Think About and Undertake Qualitative Research in the Socio-Legal Community

This article addresses the role that computer software programs play in the sort of textual analysis that has typically been the preserve of the qualitative researcher. Drawing on two distinct research projects conducted separately by the authors, it considers the transformation of social science software from a competent assistant that can help to sort and retrieve data, to an intelligent assistant capable of independently finding trends and counter-arguments, to a co-investigator capable of doing things that human researchers cannot. In addition to challenging some of the claims of ‘siliconistas’, this article considers the impact of new technology on the aesthetics of research and the professional identity of qualitative researchers. In doing so, it raises some important questions about how well we are training early-career academics for the challenges that they are likely to face in the future world of socio-legal empirical research.     

Language,gender and ‘reality’: Violence against women

This paper examines the theory behind and some examples of the relationships between gender, language, cognition and perception in the context of the criminal justice system. In particular, we consider the language of domestic violence and sexual assault and how words and communication styles can affect and are affected by what we think and believe to be ‘reality’. The paper illustrates how the language used to describe violence against women may operate to minimise these acts, and the dominant conversational style and female violence victims' genderlect may collide to produce evidentiary issues and a credibility gap. We argue that there is an inherent dilemma in engaging with legal constructs which continue to negate women's understandings of reality, and that the voices of female rape and domestic violence victims remain muted by the baritone ‘voice’ of the legal system.     

‘Too Much,too Indigestible,too Fast’? The Decades of Struggle for Abortion Law Reform in Northern Ireland

In July 2019, the UK Parliament voted by an overwhelming majority for fundamental reform of Northern Ireland's archaic abortion laws. Regulations implementing the reform came into effect on 25 March 2020. Drawing on extensive archival resources and a small number of interviews, we locate this extraordinary political moment in a broader historical context. We explore the factors that blocked the possibility of reform in either Westminster or Stormont for over five decades and consider what it was that had changed in 2019 to render it possible. While the measure passed in Westminster represents a radical rupture with the past, we suggest that it was anything other than sudden, rather representing the culmination of decades of sustained campaigning. We conclude by briefly discussing what this change is likely to mean for the future.