Addressing avoidable vision impairment in Mozambique and the Africa region

The Mozambique Eyecare Project was an international partnership to implement and research eye health education in Mozambique and the Africa region. An optometry degree was developed at Universidade Lúrio, Mozambique. In addition, existing eye health workers were upskilled with training. Researchers from various disciplines evaluated the project and its potential for impact on eye health in the region. The body of evidence generated from the research provides useful lessons for development programmes in general, as well as specific lessons for delivering eye health education and service delivery models for low-income settings.     

The Forgotten Educator: Experiential Learning’s Internship Supervisor

Past studies have addressed the role of the university, student interns and, the faculty advisor; here, we attempt to fill in a missing piece of the experiential-learning process by examining the role and importance of the often overlooked internship supervisor. A survey was developed and distributed to 343 recent internship supervisors. Their responses show that many of these supervisors view internships as an important professional and educational experience. We argue here that the internship supervisor can maximize one’s effectiveness when operating within a strong college or university educational infrastructure facilitated by an engaged and competent faculty advisor. Our recommendations were discussed and confirmed by a focus group of experienced faculty advisors.     

Trajectories of Discrimination across the College Years: Associations with Academic,Psychological, and Physical Adjustment Outcomes

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Despite growing evidence that racial-ethnic discrimination has a critical impact on college students of color, there is a shortage of longitudinal studies...     

COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives

Policy Sciences - The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D....     

Women on the Edge of Modernity

Feminism has long been committed to a critique of stereotypic examples of women in patriarchal discourse and has been keen to see what it could offer by way of alternatives. Yet to suggest that alternatives are possible raises the question of whether feminism itself can altogether avoid the trap of turning women into stereotypes, turning the specific example of woman into a universal model, in its own efforts to represent women. Communication demands the particular; it is not possible to refer to everything at once. At the same time, judgements that arise from the use of those particulars are always to some extent faulty - inaccurate or incomplete, too particular or too general. This applies as much to aesthetics (models of beauty) as it does to politics (another matter of representation). What is at issue here is the entire problematic of inclusion and exclusion, whether in politics or aesthetics. Focusing on the significance of Kant's reliance on woman as an example in the Critique of Judgement , Elam argues that it would be a mistake to dismiss all aesthetic discourses of beauty as ploys on the part of patriarchy to keep women for men's eyes only. The Critique of Judgement stands to be useful to feminism because it demonstrates that the problem of the example cannot be solved by striving for the perfect representation of woman - either an inclusive aesthetics or a fully representational politics - or even by overcoming the use of examples altogether. Rather, taking 'woman' as an example stages both aesthetic and political questions about representation that call attention to the challenges feminism faces in its attempt to form political communities.     

The separative self in Sylvia Plath's the bell jar

Plath's novel The Bell Jar dramatizes the collusion between the notion of a separate and separative self (or bounded, autonomous subject) and the cultural forces that have oppressed women. The pervasive imagery of dismemberment conveys the alienation and self‐alienation leading to Esther Greenwood's breakdown and suicide attempt; the recovery which Plath constructs for her heroine merely reenacts the dismemberments obsessively imaged in the first half of the novel. This “recovery” denies the relationality of the self and leaves Esther to define herself unwittingly and unwillingly in relation to culturally‐ingrained stereotypes of women. Contemporary feminist theory has questioned the validity of the separative model of selfhood, but literary critics have brought to the novel the same assumptions about the self which inform Plath's book. Thus they have failed to recognize what the novel has to teach about the destructive effects — at least for women — of our cultural commitment to that model.     

The Relative Influence of Different Domains of Social Connectedness on Self-Directed Violence in Adolescence

Previous research has linked greater social connectedness with a lowered risk of self-directed violence among adolescents. However, few studies have analyzed the comparative strength of different domains of connectedness (e.g., family, peers and school) to determine where limited resources might best be focused. Data to address that gap were taken from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Student Health and Safety Survey, administered to 4,131 7th–12th graders (51.5% female; 43.8% Hispanic; 22.6% African American or Black). Logistic regressions (controlling for age, gender, race/ethnicity, family structure, academic performance, and depressive symptoms) suggest that family connectedness was a stronger predictor than connectedness to peers, school, or adults at school for non-suicidal self-harm, suicidal ideation, suicide plans, and non-fatal suicidal behavior. In some analyses, peer connectedness was unexpectedly a risk factor. Results have implications for prevention of suicide in adolescence, especially in the context of the current trend towards school-based prevention programs.     

The Consequences of Social Inequality for the Health and Development of India’s Children: The Case of Caste,Sanitation, and Child Height

Social Justice Research - The links among social inequality, economic inequality, and health have long been of interest to social scientists, but causal links are difficult to investigate...     

Longer Term Impact of Bystander Training to Reduce Violence Acceptance and Sexism

ABSTRACT

Many bystander programs to prevent violence have been developed and evaluated in college populations. An exception is the randomized controlled trial of Green Dot, found effective in reducing violence rates and violence acceptance in 26 high-schools (2010–2014). In ‘Life’s Snapshot’, 10,727 seniors were recruited from these same schools with the goal of determining the longer-term efficacy of bystander training. Students in intervention schools could have up to three years of Green Dot exposure. Seniors from intervention versus control schools had significantly lower scores (p <.01) indicating less violence acceptance or sexism for two of five measures. Seniors’ self-reports of bystander training received confirmed these findings. These cross-sectional analyses suggest that some reductions in violence acceptance associated with bystander programming may be maintained into early adulthood.     

Parental involvement and the effectiveness of an adolescent day treatment program

Results on an outcome study with adolescents in a partial hospitalization program reflect parental involvement during the treatment process. The study compared behavioral outcomes of adolescent patients with high parental involvement with outcomes of adolescent patients with low parental involvement. The partial hospitalization program led to improvement for adolescents aged 13–17 years with significant differences for improvement by parental involvement. Improvements were in primary function areas, school and home as perceived by the adolescent, and in a reduction in severity level and total pathology as rated by the parent. Further, adolescents with high parental involvement were less likely to need rehospitalization.Received M.A. in psychology, from Governors State University. Research interests focus on adolescent treatment.Received Ph.D. in counselor education from Loyola University of Chicago. Research interests concern individual and career development, and service delivery issues.