A unified approach to demographic data collection for research with young children across diverse cultures.

Culture is a key determinant of children's development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants' demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no standardized tool currently exists to collect these data. Variation in cultural expectations, family structures, and life circumstances across communities make the creation of a unifying instrument challenging. Here, we present a framework to standardize demographic reporting for early child development (birth to 3 years of age), focusing on six core sociodemographic construct categories: biological information, gestational status, health status, community of descent, caregiving environment, and socioeconomic status. For each category, we discuss potential constructs and measurement items and provide guidance for their use and adaptation to diverse contexts. These items are stored in an open repository of context-adapted questionnaires that provide a consistent approach to obtaining and reporting demographic information so that these data can be archived and shared in a more standardized format. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Validation of an open source, remote web-based eye-tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood.

Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in-person eye-tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web-based eye-tracking with in-lab eye-tracking in young children. We report a multi-lab study that compared these two measures in an anticipatory looking task with toddlers using WebGazer.js and jsPsych. Results of our remotely tested sample of 18-27-month-old toddlers (N = 125) revealed that web-based eye-tracking successfully captured goal-based action predictions, although the proportion of the goal-directed anticipatory looking was lower compared to the in-lab sample (N = 70). As expected, attrition rate was substantially higher in the web-based (42%) than the in-lab sample (10%). Excluding trials based on visual inspection of the match of time-locked gaze coordinates and the participant's webcam video overlayed on the stimuli was an important preprocessing step to reduce noise in the data. We discuss the use of this remote web-based method in comparison with other current methodological innovations. Our study demonstrates that remote web-based eye-tracking can be a useful tool for testing toddlers, facilitating recruitment of larger and more diverse samples; a caveat to consider is the larger drop-out rate.

How to build up big team science: a practical guide for large-scale collaborations.

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of big team science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage and participate in these collaborations. In this paper, we integrate insights from a multi-disciplinary set of BTS initiatives to provide a how-to guide for BTS. We first discuss initial considerations for launching a BTS project, such as building the team, identifying leadership, governance, tools and open science approaches. We then turn to issues related to running and completing a BTS project, such as study design, ethical approvals and issues related to data collection, management and analysis. Finally, we address topics that present special challenges for BTS, including authorship decisions, collaborative writing and team decision-making.

We aren't especially fearful apes, and fearful apes aren't especially prosocial.

Grossmann posits that heightened fearfulness in humans evolved to facilitate cooperative caregiving. We argue that three of his claims - that children express more fear than other apes, that they are uniquely responsive to fearful expressions, and that expression and perception of fear are linked with prosocial behaviors - are inconsistent with existing literature or require additional supporting evidence.

Socially evaluative contexts facilitate mentalizing.

Our ability to understand others' minds stands at the foundation of human learning, communication, cooperation, and social life more broadly. Although humans' ability to mentalize has been well-studied throughout the cognitive sciences, little attention has been paid to whether and how mentalizing differs across contexts. Classic developmental studies have examined mentalizing within minimally social contexts, in which a single agent seeks a neutral inanimate object. Such object-directed acts may be common, but they are typically consequential only to the object-seeking agent themselves. Here, we review a host of indirect evidence suggesting that contexts providing the opportunity to evaluate prospective social partners may facilitate mentalizing across development. Our article calls on cognitive scientists to study mentalizing in contexts where it counts.

Interprofessional conflict and conflict management in an educational setting.

Background: Whenever health professionals work together as a team, conflict is inevitable - some would argue even necessary. However, conflict can have negative effects on patient care, job satisfaction, personal wellness, and professional productivity. Purpose: This study aims to describe interprofessional conflicts in a hospital setting from the perspective of three groups of health science students. Methods: An online questionnaire survey collected data from 225 health science students (medicine, nursing, and social work) in Northern California (USA). Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted resulting in seven central themes of conflict. Results: There are differences among health professional students in terms of how conflict is experienced and managed. Nursing students and medical students were more likely to take on the "victim" role when explaining their conflict, and their conflicts were more likely to be intra-professional. The most common cause of conflicts was related to hierarchy and power issues. The majority were dissatisfied with the way the conflict was resolved. Conclusions: Findings from this study can be used to design interprofessional curriculum to improve outcomes from conflicts and improve wellbeing, job satisfaction, and reduce patient turnover.

The Impact of Hospice Patient Disease Type and Length of Stay on Caregiver Utilization of Grief Counseling: A 10-Year Retrospective Study.

This investigation explored the relationship between hospice patient disease type, length of stay (LOS) in hospice, and caregiver utilization of grief counseling in bereavement. A 10-year retrospective study was conducted utilizing data from caregivers associated with hospice patients who died between 2004 and 2014. A threshold of inclusion for disease type (≥1.00% of hospice admissions) resulted in a sample size of 3704 patients, comprising 19 different disease types and 348 associated caregivers who received counseling. Replicating a previous study, brain cancer, lung cancer, and renal failure were among the top 4 disease types associated with higher-than-average utilization of bereavement services among caregivers, regardless of the patient's LOS. This finding may be related to factors such as the duration of the disease, the deterioration of the patient, the absence of symptom control, and secondary losses. LOS as a predictor of whether counseling will be utilized by hospice caregivers was unsupported by this study, as the percentage of caregivers receiving counseling closely paralleled the patient's LOS across 4 cohorts (1-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days, and 91+ days). However, among the caregivers who utilized counseling, the LOS was a statistically significant predictor of the number of counseling sessions utilized. For caregivers who utilized only 1 counseling session, the associated patient median LOS was 21.5 days. For caregivers who utilized 5 or more counseling sessions, the associated patient median LOS dropped to 12 days, suggesting an inverted relationship between hospice patient LOS and the duration of counseling in bereavement.

Contemporary Perspectives on Social Work in Acquired Brain Injury: An Introduction.

This special issue of the Journal of Social Work in Disability and Rehabilitation, "Contemporary Perspectives on Social Work in Acquired Brain Injury," has been initiated and coordinated by the International Network of Social Workers in Acquired Brain Injury (INSWABI). In introducing the issue, some space is allocated for providing definitions of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and acquired brain injury (ABI), outlining the epidemiology and global costs, and detailing the impairments and psychosocial impacts for both the person sustaining the injury and his or her family. Finally, an outline of the articles contributing to this special issue are detailed, followed by a brief discussion about the role of the INSWABI network in promoting best practice in social work within this specialty area.

Intimate partner violence and women with disabilities: toward bringing visibility to an unrecognized population.

Although women with disabilities experience abuse at alarming rates, research exploring the unique experiences and the dimensions of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the lives of women with disabilities is in its infancy. This article attempts to highlight multidimensional factors for consideration in addressing the needs of women with disabilities who are victims of abuse and violence. Risk factors related to the vulnerability that disabilities pose for IPV victimization are explored in relation to consequent limitations of the traditional models of domestic violence. Feminist disability theory as a viable theory for framing meaningful research and informing effective and accessible prevention and intervention for women with disabilities who are victims of IPV is introduced.