Trajectories of Anxiety During Elementary-school Years and the Prediction of High School Noncompletion

Previous research has provided mixed results regarding the effect of anxiety on academic achievement. Building on this body of research, the present longitudinal study pursued two goals. The first goal was to describe trajectories of anxiety during elementary-school years. The second goal was to determine the predictive value of these trajectories on high school noncompletion after controlling for personal (i.e., gender, classroom behaviors, and academic achievement) and familial (i.e., sociofamilial adversity) characteristics. A community sample of 1,817 children (887 boys, 930 girls) participated in this study. Results showed that anxiety tended to fluctuate from kindergarten to Grade 6 for different groups of children. Furthermore, the result of a logistic regression analysis indicated that group membership for anxiety predicted high school noncompletion by age 20. As a whole, these findings suggest that considering heterogeneous developmental patterns of anxiety during elementary-school years appears quite useful for predicting an important outcome such as high school noncompletion.

Making Change Happen: Black and White Activists talk to Kevin Cook about Aboriginal,Union and Liberation Politics

Making Change Happen: Black and White Activists talk to Kevin Cook about Aboriginal, Union and Liberation Politics . By Kevin Cook and Heather Goodall (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2013), pp.viii + 437, AU$40.00 (pb).     

Official Discourse

This paper analyses two Official Reports on law and order. They confront legitimation deficits, seeking discursively to redeem them by denial of their material geneses. This denial establishes an absence in the discourse. This absence, the Other, is the silence of a world constituted by material relations whose reality cannot be appropriated by a mode of normative argument which speaks to and from its own self-image via an idealised conception of justice. The paper discusses first the Reports' discursive problems, secondly, the disparate jurisprudential knowledges realised by the texts, and lastly the discursive presentation of these knowledges.     

‘Off with their heads’: public executions with Klossowski,Caillois and Foucault

In this article there is both theoretical argument and historical analysis. The main substantive focus is the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Foucault’s work has contributed greatly to the understanding of the nature of these, but the concepts, categories and historical accounts of Caillois and Klossowski are here deployed to enrich, and to some significant extent, displace his analyses. A primary concern is with contributing a further sociological dimension to the debates concerning the execution of Louis XVI/Louis Capet.     

Performance Appraisal and Its Use for Individual and Organisational Improvement in the Civil Service of Ghana: The Case of Much Ado about Nothing?

Recent efforts to modernise public sector institutions have led to the adoption of performance management systems worldwide. The belief in performance management is that information generated can be used to help individuals improve themselves in terms of what they do in their organisations, which will subsequently impact positively on the organisation. An instrument for collecting performance information (PI) is performance appraisal (PA). Since the early 1990s, the Ghanaian government has attempted to develop a systematic appraisal system as a strategy to obtain PI in the civil service (CS). In spite of this, the CS continues to perform below expectations despite individuals getting promoted every year. What has been the effect of PA in the CS? How has the collected information been utilised to improve performance? What are the main barriers to the use of PI, and what practices can be put in place that might encourage the effective collection of PI and its use in the CS? We argue that the PA system is much ado about nothing. In analysing why this is so, we will look at the impediments that continue to affect the collection and usage of PI and to suggest ways that will help improve the system. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adolescent Marital Expectations and Romantic Experiences: Associations With Perceptions About Parental Conflict and Adolescent Attachment Security

This study tested associations between adolescent perceptions of interparental conflict, adolescent attachment security with parents, and adolescent marital expectations and romantic experiences. Participants were 96 early adolescent females from 2 parent families. Insecurity was examined as a mediator of the association between negative perceptions of parental conflict and romantic outcomes. Results supported the mediation model in which adolescents' negative perceptions of parental conflict was associated with insecure attachment with parents, which was in turn associated with negative marital expectations and romantic experiences. Implications for understanding how parent-adolescent and interparental variables influence adolescent marital expectations and romantic experiences are discussed.