Experiences of Children During the Pandemic: Scrutinizing Increased Vulnerabilities in Education in the Case of Turkey.

The lengthy time of school closure was one defining factor in understanding child well-being during the pandemic in a context where school as a relational space holds great importance for children, particularly those from a low socioeconomic background. Considering this significant aspect of lengthy school closure during the pandemic in Turkey, this article explores children's experiences concerning their day-to-day access to education, digital inequalities, housing conditions, and changing context of relations with peers and teachers. The article also explores the meaning that children attribute to school as a relational space where they shape their intergenerational and generational relations. The absence of the school in children's lives for almost 2 years has been a major source of longing for such significant childhood space. Following our earlier work on the children's negotiation of well-being within the boundaries of the relational spaces of home and school, this article looks into how children negotiate their well-being in a pandemic environment where school as a relational space has changed its meaning and where children's caretakers' (teachers, parents, and other) vulnerabilities have also increased. The analysis draws on the qualitative fieldwork carried out with 50 children during the summer of 2020 in Turkey. We aim to reflect on the experiences from children's perspectives within the boundaries of the constraints that the pandemic has generated. This article also discusses how COVID-19 has widened the gap and increased vulnerabilities among the already disadvantaged groups and gender in terms of available resources and their allocation as it is reflected in time use that portrays the meaning that children attribute to their own experience during the pandemic.

Detecting Suicidal Ideation on Forums: Proof-of-Concept Study.

BACKGROUND: In 2016, 44,965 people in the United States died by suicide. It is common to see people with suicidal ideation seek help or leave suicide notes on social media before attempting suicide. Many prefer to express their feelings with longer passages on forums such as Reddit and blogs. Because these expressive posts follow regular language patterns, potential suicide attempts can be prevented by detecting suicidal posts as they are written. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to build a classifier that differentiates suicidal and nonsuicidal forum posts via text mining methods applied on post titles and bodies. METHODS: A total of 508,398 Reddit posts longer than 100 characters and posted between 2008 and 2016 on SuicideWatch, Depression, Anxiety, and ShowerThoughts subreddits were downloaded from the publicly available Reddit dataset. Of these, 10,785 posts were randomly selected and 785 were manually annotated as suicidal or nonsuicidal. Features were extracted using term frequency-inverse document frequency, linguistic inquiry and word count, and sentiment analysis on post titles and bodies. Logistic regression, random forest, and support vector machine (SVM) classification algorithms were applied on resulting corpus and prediction performance is evaluated. RESULTS: The logistic regression and SVM classifiers correctly identified suicidality of posts with 80% to 92% accuracy and F1 score, respectively, depending on different data compositions closely followed by random forest, compared to baseline ZeroR algorithm achieving 50% accuracy and 66% F1 score. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrated that it is possible to detect people with suicidal ideation on online forums with high accuracy. The logistic regression classifier in this study can potentially be embedded on blogs and forums to make the decision to offer real-time online counseling in case a suicidal post is being written.

Clinical assessment of pathological personality traits.

OBJECTIVE: Research has raised questions about the ability of clinicians to make reliable diagnostic judgments about personality. The aim of this study was to assess the reliability and validity of the dimensional diagnosis of pathological personality traits with the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure-200 (SWAP-200) Q sort. METHOD: Two clinician/judges independently described 24 outpatients using the SWAP-200, based on a systematic clinical interview. Treating clinicians described the patients using the SWAP-200 based on their knowledge of the patients over the course of treatment while they were blind to interview data. RESULTS: Interrater reliability was high. Convergent and discriminant validity between interviewers and clinicians was also strong. A procedure recently developed for providing precise estimates of construct validity with contrast analysis applied to correlational data documented strong evidence of validity. CONCLUSIONS: Clinicians and independent interviewers can reliably assess complex personality traits associated with personality pathology using the SWAP-200.

Assessing personality disorders using a systematic clinical interview: evaluation of an alternative to structured interviews.

The aim of this study was to assess interrater reliability and provide initial data bearing on the validity of a method of assessing personality disorders (PDs) that does not presume that patients can accurately self-report personality pathology. In a sample of 24 outpatients, two clinician-judges independently applied the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure-200 (SWAP-200; Westen & Shedler, 1999a, 2000), a 200-item Q-sort procedure for assessing personality pathology, to data from the Clinical Diagnostic Interview (Westen, 2002), a systematic clinical interview that mirrors and standardizes methods used by experienced clinicians to diagnose personality. In 16 of the 24 cases, the treating clinician also independently described the patient using the SWAP-200 Q-sort, based on longitudinal knowledge of the patient over the course of treatment, blind to the interview data. Interrater reliability was uniformly high, with median correlations between interviewers at r > .80. Interviewer-treating clinician correlations were also high, with median convergent validity coefficients at r > .80. Diagnostic overlap (discriminant validity) was moderate for dimensional DSM-IV diagnoses, reflecting extensive comorbidity among disorders, but minimal for empirically derived diagnoses identified in prior research. Treating clinicians' dimensional PD diagnoses using this method also strongly predicted interviewer-rated measures of adaptive functioning. The findings provide preliminary support for the reliability and validity of an alternative to structured interviews for diagnosing personality pathology, and suggest that the way to improve validity of personality diagnosis may not be to minimize clinical inference but to quantify it using psychometric instruments.