Developed Urban Adolescent Life Experiences Scale to measure life events among urban adolescents based on data from focus-group interviews and examined impact of neighborhood on adolescents' perceptions of life stress. Found that life stress in the peer domain varied by adolescent's neighborhood of residence. Family/community stress was linearly…

Uses focus-group interviews of social work supervisors and caseworkers to explore impact of masters of social work degree obtained in a university/agency partnership on personal behavior, structure, and technological organization. Notes findings including increased worker confidence, changed communication patterns between workers and organization,…

Counselor educators need to be able to demonstrate their effectiveness in training new counselors; however, currently few valid or reliable measures exist for assessing educators' impact. The authors describe the development of such an instrument, the Counseling Skills Scale. They began by revising an existing scale and then they solicited…

The ability to work collaboratively with others is becoming an essential component of contemporary school reform. This article reviews current trends in school reform that embody collaborative principles and also draws on the literature to provide a theoretical overview of collaboration itself. The article then outlines the findings from a…

Purpose: Although driving by persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an important public health concern, we know little about the attitudes and perceptions of key stakeholders regarding driving safety in these individuals or the factors that precipitate and influence driving assessment and cessation decisions. Design and Methods: We convened 10…

In this article we describe research in which we used focus group data to study the implementation of preschool programs in elementary schools. 20 preschool teachers, 22 kindergarten teachers, and 53 parents from 10 schools in 5 states participated in the focus groups. These data, collected in the spring of 2001, were part of a 3-year multisite…

The authors work with 22 educators from a variety of disciplines during a 3-year time span to understand what authentic teaching means and to explore how authenticity is manifested in practice. Using a grounded theory approach, the authors interview participants twice per year, observe their classes, and hold focus groups at the end of the…

At the core of democratic citizenship is deliberation: citizens' tendency and capacity for debating issues of common importance. This study considers civic organizations--often found to be political mobilizers--as political microcultures: environments for political discourse that structure participants' understanding of the practice of…

The purpose of this research was to examine the campus experiences of undergraduate and graduate women students at a research university. Although it has been more than 20 years since the term "chilly campus climate" was described in Hall and Sandler's (1984) seminal work, this study found such a climate, in terms of campus safety, still exists…

Nationally approved adult numeracy teacher training programmes were started in September 2002 following the introduction of subject specifications by the Department for Education and Skills and the Further National Training Organisation in England. These programmes delivered by higher education institutions and further education colleges were…

In this article, Manju Varma-Joshi, Cynthia Baker, and Connie Tanaka examine the impact of racialized name-calling on a group of twenty-six "visible minority" youth from New Brunswick, Canada. Through one-on-one interviews and focus groups, the authors compare views held by visible minority students and their parents to the views of…

Action research studies in the United Kingdom with Open University students have shown that students come to distance education courses with variable expectations of the levels of service and support they will receive from their tutors. It has been further suggested that a specific expectations-led quality assurance process that enables the…

This study examined adolescents' ideas about girls' and boys' use and experience of physical and psychological abuse in heterosexual dating relationships. Canadian high school students who were enrolled in Grades 9 and 11 took part in single-gender focus groups. Eight themes emerged from the analysis. The themes highlight the importance teenagers…

This study explores urban teachers' perception of their mentoring experience in an alternative urban teacher education program. Fifteen teachers who had been teaching in urban schools for at least three years participated in focus groups. The findings support the need for continuing the development of new teachers through utilizing mentors in the…

Aggressive student behaviors are of concern to every school in the nation. Discovering ways to help teachers prevent and/or respond to such student behavior is of great importance. This reported research sought to discover if and how teacher behaviors impact student aggression in the classroom. In doing so, the researcher did not set out to blame…