The current study aimed to develop a measure for assessing the various motivations for sexual risk behavior (SRB) across commercial (involving the exchange of sex for money or drugs) and casual (nonregular) partners in a sample of inner-city, primarily African American drug users, and to examine the relationship of these motivations with a history…

We examine the roles of neighborhood characteristics in the development of the aggressive behavior of 1,409 urban boys and girls between the first and seventh grades. The multilevel, longitudinal growth analyses find strong neighborhood effects in all models, while controlling for individual-level variables. Results indicated that the effects of…

The present study examined consistency and inconsistency in adolescents' ethnic identification (i.e., self-reported ethnicity) across the 6 middle-school semesters. The sample (N = 1,589, of whom 46% were boys and 54% were girls) included African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Caucasian/White, Latino/Latina, Mexican/Mexican American, and…

The role of context in the development of child aggression was studied. The effects of peer aggregation and group composition on aggression development in intervention contexts and classroom contexts were compared using 71 elementary school children. We hypothesized that, due to peer group effects, group-trained children would benefit less from a…

Guided by theories of cultural participation, the authors examined mother-child, father-child, and triadic interactive behaviors in 141 Israeli and Palestinian couples and their firstborn child at 5 and 33 months as antecedents of children's social competence. Four parent-child measures (parent sensitivity, child social engagement, parental…

The purpose of this review was threefold. First, the theorized sources of self-efficacy beliefs proposed by A. Bandura (1986) are described and explained, including how they are typically assessed and analyzed. Second, findings from investigations of these sources in academic contexts are reviewed and critiqued, and problems and oversights in…

Narrative psychology theoreticians emphasized the importance of context to the construction, communication, and understanding of individuals' life stories. Still, the various contexts in which, and in reference to which, life stories are told, the methodological implications of the importance of context, and the possible interpretive moves…

Information literacy (IL) has been described as a core literacy. However emerging empirical research indicates that the phenomenon will have different characteristics in different contexts and will be played out in culturally different ways. This paper reviews the nature and growth of IL to ascertain how researchers understand the phenomenon in…

Children on the autism spectrum often demonstrate atypical joint attention, leading some researchers to consider joint attention deficits a core feature of the autism spectrum. Structured measures, such as the Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS), are commonly used to provide a metric of joint attention. To explore the assessment of joint…

This paper explores the application of distributed cognition theory to educational contexts by examining a common learning interaction, the "Copy and Paste" function. After a discussion of distributed cognition and the role of mediating artefacts in real world cognitions, the "Copy and Paste" function is redesigned to embed an effective…

The role of the educational psychology service in crisis support is well established. This paper examines a key aspect of this role, the impact on psychologists themselves, and reviews literature on secondary stress, considering the term "stress" itself as part of the discussion. It examines recommendations for professional practice and self care…

This article reports on students' learning through conjecturing, by drawing on a semester-long teaching experiment with 6 sixth-grade students. It focuses on 1 of the students, Josh, who developed especially powerful ways of operating over the course of the teaching experiment. Through a fine-grained analysis of Josh's actions, this article…

The current research extends three research areas in relational demography: considering deep-level dissimilarity in theory building, assessing dissimilarity perceptions directly in theory testing, and examining the antecedents of dissimilarity perceptions. The results, based on two field studies using diverse samples, demonstrate the effects of…

This research explores, within the framework of Relevance Theory, how children's ability to answer questions and explain their answers develops between the ages of 3 and 9 years. Two hundred and ten normally developing Finnish-speaking children participated in this study. The children were asked questions requiring processing of inferential…

Grammars of signed languages tend to be based on grammars established for written languages, particularly the written language in use in the surrounding hearing community of a sign language. Such grammars presuppose categories of discrete elements which are combined into various sorts of structures. Recent analyses of signed languages go beyond…