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Population-based physical activity promotion with a focus on health equity: a review of reviews
(2023)
Background
The extent to which people are physically active is dependent upon social gradients. Numerous studies have shown that especially people with social disadvantages do not meet the physical activity (PA) recommendations. A promising strategy to alleviate this issue are approaches that promote PA in the general population. In addition, several researchers have raised concerns that population-based health interventions may increase health inequities. The aim of the current review of reviews was therefore to identify successful population-based PA promotion approaches with a particular focus on health equity.
Methods
Six electronic databases were examined for systematic reviews on population-based PA promotion for the period 2015 to 2021. A reference list and grey literature search were also conducted. Two independent reviewers used inclusion/exclusion criteria to screen titles and abstracts of the potentially relevant literature and conducted a quality assessment for each identified review. All included reviews of population-based approaches for PA promotion with a focus on disadvantaged populations and/or health equity were narratively summarized.
Results
Our search resulted in 4,411 hits. After a systematic review process, six reviews met the inclusion criteria and were included after they were all rated as high quality. We identified that mass-media campaigns, point-of-decision prompts, environmental approaches, policy approaches, and community-based multi-component approaches can promote PA in the general population. Across populations with social disadvantages mass-media campaigns, point-of-decision prompts and policy approaches are likely to be effective as long as they are tailored. Regarding environmental approaches, the results are inconsistent. None of the reviews on community-based multi-component approaches provided evidence on health equity.
Conclusion
There are several effective approaches to promote PA in the general population but evidence regarding health equity is still sparse. Future studies should therefore pay more attention to this missing focus. Furthermore, there is a lack of evidence regarding the type of tailoring and the long-term impact of population-based approaches to PA promotion. However, this requires appropriate funding programmes, complex study designs and evaluation methods.
Introduction
Depression has a significant impact on individuals and society, which is why preventive measures are important. Farmers represent an occupational group exposed to many risk factors for depression. The potential of guided, tailored internet-based interventions and a personalized telephone coaching is evaluated in a German project of the Social Insurance for Agriculture, Forestry and Horticulture (SVLFG). While user outcomes are promising, not much is known about actual routine care use and implementation of the two digital health interventions. This study evaluates the implementation from the perspective of social insurance employees to understand determinants influencing the uptake and implementation of digital interventions to prevent depression in farmers.
Methods
The data collection and analysis are based on the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR). Health care workers (n = 86) and implementers (n = 7) completed online surveys and/or participated in focus groups. The surveys consisted of validated questionnaires used in implementation research, adapted items from the CFIR guide or from other CFIR studies. In addition, we used reporting data to map implementation based on selected CFIR constructs.
Results
Within the five CFIR dimensions, many facilitating factors emerged in relation to intervention characteristics (e.g., relative advantage compared to existing services, evidence and quality) and the inner setting of the SVLFG (e.g., tension for change, compatibility with values and existing working processes). In addition, barriers to implementation were identified in relation to the outer setting (patient needs and resources), inner setting (e.g., available resources, access to knowledge and information) and characteristics of individuals (e.g., self-efficacy). With regard to the implementation process, facilitating factors (formal implementation leaders) as well as hindering factors (reflecting and evaluating) were identified.
Discussion
The findings shed light on the implementation of two digital prevention services in an agricultural setting. While both offerings seem to be widely accepted by health care workers, the results also point to revealed barriers and contribute to recommendations for further service implementation. For instance, special attention should be given to “patient needs and resources” by raising awareness of mental health issues among the target population as well as barriers regarding the inner setting.
Clinical Trial Registration
German Clinical Trial Registration: [DRKS00017078]. Registered on 18.04.2019
Chemical phenomena are only observable on a macroscopic level, whereas they are explained by entities on a non-visible level. Students often demonstrate limited ability to link these different levels. Augmented reality (AR) offers the possibility to increase contiguity by embedding virtual models into hands-on experiments. Therefore, this paper presents a pre- and post-test study investigating how learning and cognitive load are influenced by AR during hands-on experiments. Three comparison groups (AR, animation and filmstrip), with a total of N = 104 German secondary school students, conducted and explained two hands-on experiments. Whereas the AR group was allowed to use an AR app showing virtual models of the processes on the submicroscopic level during the experiments, the two other groups were provided with the same dynamic or static models after experimenting. Results indicate no significant learning gain for the AR group in contrast to the two other groups. The perceived intrinsic cognitive load was higher for the AR group in both experiments as well as the extraneous load in the second experiment. It can be concluded that AR could not unleash its theoretically derived potential in the present study.
Im Gegensatz zu den früheren Modellen der Begabungs- und Expertiseforschung geht die systemische Begabungsforschung von einem ganzheitlichen Forschungsansatz aus: Die lernende Person wird dabei als eine Art System verstanden, die in ihrer Entwicklung Phasen der Stabilität und des Wachstums durchläuft. Um diese Phasen erfolgreich regulieren zu können, greift das Individuum auf verschiedene, miteinander interagierende intra- und extrapersonale Ressourcen – sogenanntes Bildungs- und Lernkapital – zurück. Durch die Verbundenheit aller Systemelemente kann es dabei – neben den zielgerichteten Regulationen – auch zu sogenannten regulatorischen Nebeneffekten kommen, welche das System nicht nur stärken, sondern auch schwächen können. Ziel der vorliegenden empirischen Untersuchung ist es nun, diese Regulationsprozesse zu analysieren und in Hinblick auf die beteiligten Ressourcen zu untersuchen sowie mögliche geschlechts- und leistungsspezifische Unterschiede zu ermitteln. Dazu wird die Vielzahl an Regulationsprozessen auf drei zentrale Formen reduziert: Positiv verstärkende akzelerierende Prozesse, kompensierende Prozesse, sowie negativ verstärkende destruktive Prozesse.
Die überwiegend qualitative Untersuchung gliedert sich in insgesamt drei Einzelstudien: Studie I (NI = 68) untersucht die Forschungsfragen in Hinblick auf den akademischen Leistungskontext, Studie II (NII = 25) bezüglich des schulischen Leistungskontexts und Studie III (NIII = 10) im außerschulischen Lernbereich der Domäne Musik. Alle Daten werden mithilfe eines teilstandardisierten Interviews erhoben und anhand der qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet. Geschlechts- und leistungsspezifische Unterschiede werden mithilfe von statistischen Tests ermittelt.
Die Untersuchungsergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass alle Ressourcen miteinander verbunden sind und so das Potenzial haben, sich gegenseitig zu beeinflussen. Dabei sind die Ressourcen jedoch nicht alle gleichermaßen in Regulationsprozesse involviert: Auffallend ist, dass Bildungskapitale häufig eine aktive, beeinflussende Funktion im Regulationsprozess einnehmen, während Lernkapitale häufiger von anderen beeinflusst werden. In akzelerierenden und destruktiven Regulationsprozessen sticht insbesondere das didaktische Bildungskapital heraus, während vom sozialen Bildungskapital und episodischen Lernkapital häufig kompensierende Prozesse ausgehen. Signifikante leistungsspezifische Unterschiede können in Studie I und II nachgewiesen werden. Signifikante geschlechtsspezifische Unterschiede zeigen sich hingegen nicht.
Background
While effective physical activity referral schemes (PARSs) and related structures for promoting physical activity (PA) already exist in several countries, in Germany, PARSs have not yet been implemented systematically and nationwide. Through a co-production approach with relevant actors in the German healthcare system, a PARS was developed, and an implementation plan was created (e.g. financing). This study protocol aims to evaluate the developed PARS for people with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Germany regarding its potential effectiveness and implementation success.
Methods
To evaluate the effectiveness and implementation success of the PARS, we will apply a pragmatic cluster-randomised controlled trial (cRCT) in Hybrid II design by comparing two intervention groups (PARS vs PA advice [PAA]). The trial will take place in the Nürnberg metropolitan region, with 24 physician practices recruiting 567 people with NCDs. Both groups will receive brief PA advice from a physician to initially increase the participants’ motivation to change their activity level. Subsequently, the PARS group will be given individualised support from an exercise professional to increase their PA levels and be transferred to local exercise opportunities. In contrast, participants in the PAA group will receive only the brief PA advice as well as information and an overview of regional PA offerings to become more active at their own initiative. After 12 and 24 weeks, changes in moderate to vigorous PA and in physical activity-related health competence (movement competence, control competence, self-regulation competence) will be measured as primary outcomes. Secondary outcomes will include changes in quality of life. To measure implementation success, we refer to the RE-AIM framework and draw on patient documentation, interviews, focus groups and surveys of the participating actors (physicians, exercise professionals).
Discussion
Through a between-group comparison, we will investigate whether additional individual support by an exercise professional compared to brief PA advice alone leads to higher PA levels in people with NCDs. The acceptance and feasibility of both interventions in routine care in the German healthcare system will also be evaluated.
Background
Co-creation approaches are increasingly used in physical activity promotion to develop interventions tailored to the target group and setting. The resulting complexity of such interventions raises challenges in evaluation. Accordingly, little is known about the effectiveness of co-created interventions and the underlying processes that impact their sustainable implementation. In this study, we attempt to fill this gap by evaluating co-created multi-component physical activity interventions in vocational education and training in nursing care and automotive mechatronics regarding (1) their sustainable implementation at the institutional level and (2) the effectiveness of single intervention components at the individual level.
Methods
Following a multimethod design, we conducted a questionnaire survey (n = 7) and semi-structured interviews (n = 4) to evaluate the sustainability of the interventions. Quantitative data were analyzed descriptively, and qualitative data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. To examine the interventions’ effectiveness, we conducted two non-randomized controlled trials (n = 111). Analysis of variance was used to examine differences between groups.
Results
At the institutional level, long-term implementation of single intervention components in nursing care was observed; in contrast, long-term implementation in automotive mechatronics was not observed. In this context, various factors at the outer contextual (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic), inner contextual (e.g., health-promoting leadership), intervention (e.g., acceptance), and personal levels (e.g., champion) influenced sustainability. At the individual level, no significant intervention effects were found for changes in physical activity behavior and physical activity-related health competence.
Conclusion
The role of co-creation on the effectiveness and sustainability of physical activity promotion in vocational education and training cannot be answered conclusively. Only in the nursing care sector, a co-creation approach appeared promising for long-term intervention implementation. Sustainable implementation depends on various influencing factors that should be considered from the outset. Demonstrating effectiveness at the individual level was challenging. To conclusively clarify both the role and impact of co-creation, methodologically complex and elaborate evaluation designs will be required in future research projects.
Statusfragen: Neue Forschungen zu Herrscherinnen der Frühen Neuzeit in intersektionaler Perspektive
(2022)
Dieser Band eröffnet einen neuen, intersektionalen Blick auf die Kunstpatronage und künstlerische Repräsentation von Herrscherinnen der Frühen Neuzeit. Unter dem Begriff „Herrscherinnen“ werden dabei sowohl Herrscherinnen aus eigenem Recht als auch Frauen, die als Gemahlinnen, Regentinnen oder Witwen ihren Einfluss bei Hofe geltend machten, verstanden. Untersucht wird die Auftraggeberschaft von Herrscherinnen speziell im Hinblick auf die intersektionale Verschränkung von Differenzkategorien sowie deren Einfluss auf die Handlungsspielräume der Akteurinnen. Somit liegt der Schwerpunkt auf den vielfältigen Faktoren, die neben dem Faktor Geschlecht die Präsentation und Repräsentation von Frauen an frühneuzeitlichen Höfen konditionierten. Die versammelten Fallstudien leuchten den Zeitraum zwischen dem 15. und späten 18. Jahrhundert aus und ermöglichen einen Vergleich der Situation in den verschiedenen, intensiv miteinander verflochtenen Staaten Europas.
Background
Policy regulations of ethically controversial genetic technologies should, on the one hand, be based on ethical principles. On the other hand, they should be socially acceptable to ensure implementation. In addition, they should align with ethical theory. Yet to date we lack a reliable and valid scale to measure the relevant ethical judgements in laypeople. We target this lacuna.
Methods
We developed a scale based on ethical principles to elicit lay judgments: the Genetic Technologies Questionnaire (GTQ). In two pilot studies and a pre-registered main study, we validated the scale in a representative sample of the US population.
Results
The final version of the scale contains 20 items but remains highly reliable even when reduced to five. It also predicts behaviour; for example, ethical judgments as measured by the GTQ predicted hypothetical donations and grocery shopping. In addition, the GTQ may be of interest to policymakers and ethicists because it reveals coherent and ethically justified judgments in laypeople. For instance, the GTQ indicates that ethical judgments are sensitive to possible benefits and harms (in line with utilitarian ethics), but also to ethical principles such as the value of consent-autonomy.
Conclusions
The GTQ can be recommended for research in both experimental psychology and applied ethics, as well as a tool for ethically and empirically informed policymaking.
Background
Chronic low-grade inflammation has been suggested as a key factor in the association between stress exposure and long-term health. Care work is recognized as a profession with a high degree of job stress and health risks. However, for care professionals, the study base on inflammatory activity due to adverse working conditions is limited.
Objective
The aim of this study was to explore associations between self-reported psychosocial working conditions and care professionals’ biomarkers of systemic low-grade inflammation.
Methods
N = 140 geriatric care professionals (79.3% females, mean age = 44.1 years) of six care facilities were enrolled in a cross-sectional study consisting of standardized medical examinations and employee surveys. Standardized questionnaires were used for evaluation of psychosocial work characteristics (work overload, job autonomy, social support) based on Karasek’s job strain model. Blood samples were drawn for two biomarkers of inflammatory activity: C-reactive protein (CRP) and leukocyte count. Analyses comprised uni- and multivariate logistic and linear regression analyses.
Results
We determined a proportion of 5.4% of care professionals with increased low-grade inflammation. We further observed a relationship between job autonomy and CRP, such that reports of high job autonomy were associated with increased levels of CRP (adjusted OR = 4.10, 95% CI [1.10, 15.26], p = .035), which was robust in additional analyses on further potential confounders. No significant associations with participants’ leukocyte numbers were found.
Conclusions
This exploratory study contributes to the research base on links between workplace stress and ensuing illness in care professionals. Our findings may help to identify risk and protective factors of the work environment for chronic low-grade inflammation. The results require further scrutiny, and future prospective studies on associations of psychosocial working conditions, low-grade inflammation and long-term health outcomes in care professionals are needed.
In the name of health security, individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries, democratic or authoritarian, all over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the constraints have not been consistent across countries, which motivates this paper to examine the relevance of value preferences towards freedom or security in the society for COVID-19 policies. Based on data for 40 democratic and authoritarian countries, the analyses show that the variation in the stringency of COVID-19 policies can be explained by value preferences of the population only in autocracies. In democracies, however, we do not find such a relationship. Governments in democratic political systems, we argue, are responsive to their constitutions and face prosecution by the judiciary if they violate the law or provisions of the constitution, limiting their capacity to implement strong COVID-19 policies. Nevertheless, their COVID-19 policies restricted citizens’ freedoms and liberties, which means that these policies were rather not responsive to citizens’ preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties. By highlighting how autocracies respond to their citizens’ value preferences for security, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how autocracies might gain legitimacy in times of crises.
Article presents the results of a complex traceological research of the famous statue of the „prince”of Glauberg, found in an Early La Tène funeral complex in Glauberg (Hesse). Research focused also on two other fragments of related sandstone sculptures, found together with the Glauberger prince. The sandstone „prince”of Glauberg was already in the past a subject of many archaeological studies. Nevertheless, all or absolute majority of them were focused on aspects of art historian nature or on the question of the origin, role and function of such sculptures in the Early Iron Age Central Europe. On the contrary, the aim of our research is oriented exclusively on the questions related to the manufacture of this sculpture, identification of used sculptor´s tools and applied working techniques. Our research was realised by means of digital documentation followed by the aplication of traceological methods. The character of the survived working traces on the sculpture´s surfaces was studied by mechanoscopy, while the material of used tools was determined by X-ray fluorescence. The reconstructions of used tools were compared with the existing tools as represented by the Iron Age archaeological finds. This comparison was oriented on the most relevant regions of developed La Tène culture, particularly on South Western Germany and Bohemia. However, also other relevant area, significant as the possible source of inspiration of Celtic sculptors for the creation of the monumental sculpture–Apennine peninsula, was taken into consideration. Our research revealed individual steps and phases during the sculpture´s manufacture, enabled the reconstrucion of used tools and confirmed real existence of such tools in mentioned regions. Finally it has brought first indices of the necessity of the distinguishing between ideological and technological aspects of related Celtic sculpture, when considering possible influence of Apennine peninsula on transalpine Central Europe.
The Cueva de Ardales is a hugely important Palaeolithic site in the south of the Iberian Peninsula owing to its rich inventory of rock art. From 2011–2018, excavations were carried out in the cave for the first time ever by a Spanish-German research team. The excavation focused on the entrance area of the cave, where the largest assemblage of non-figurative red paintings in the cave is found. A series of 50 AMS dates from the excavations prove a long, albeit discontinuous, occupation history spanning from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. The dating of the Middle Palaeolithic layers agrees with the U/Th dating of some red non-figurative paintings in the entrance area. In addition, a large assemblage of ochre lumps was discovered in the Middle Palaeolithic layers. Human visits of the cave in the Gravettian and Solutrean can be recognized, but evidence from the Aurignacian and Magdalenian cannot be confirmed with certainty. The quantity and nature of materials found during the excavations indicate that Cueva de Ardales was not a campsite, but was mainly visited to carry out non-domestic tasks, such as the production of rock art or the burial of the dead.
Language is fundamentally predictable, both on a higher schematic level as well as low-level lexical items. Regarding predictability on a lexical level, collocations are frequent co-occurrences of words that are often characterized by high strength of association. So far, psycho- and neurolinguistic studies have mostly employed highly artificial experimental paradigms in the investigation of collocations by focusing on the processing of single words or isolated sentences. In contrast, here we analyze EEG brain responses recorded during stimulation with continuous speech, i.e., audio books. We find that the N400 response to collocations is significantly different from that of non-collocations, whereas the effect varies with respect to cortical region (anterior/posterior) and laterality (left/right). Our results are in line with studies using continuous speech, and they mostly contradict those using artificial paradigms and stimuli. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first neurolinguistic study on collocations using continuous speech stimulation.
Aptitude and experience as predictors of grammatical proficiency in adult Greek-English bilinguals
(2022)
It has been shown that individuals exhibit great variability in second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Some speakers reach native-like proficiency, others only achieve a rudimentary command and many lie in the middle. Individual differences research has partly attributed different degrees of L2 attainment to (language) aptitude. Initially considered irrelevant for first language (L1) acquisition, aptitude was viewed as a compensatory ability for adults’ disadvantage in L2 learning. In this line of thought, adults and children are viewed as fundamentally different and rely on different language learning mechanisms. However, aptitude might not be so irrelevant for the L1. Together with input the two factors are found to account for individual differences not only in L2 but also L1 development. Recent research has specifically shown that native grammatical attainment may be modulated by aptitude and input. In this respect, the aim of the current study is to examine the effects of these two predictors (namely input and aptitude) on both L1 and L2 grammatical attainment in the same speakers. Our participants (N = 75) were all native speakers of Greek who learned English as a foreign language in their home country and immigrated to the United Kingdom in adulthood (mean age of arrival = 27.3, SD = 6.4). Grammatical proficiency was measured through a grammaticality judgement task administered in both the L1 and the L2. Aptitude was measured through the Sentence Pairs task (based on the Words In Sentences test from the MLAT battery). Amount of input was measured using the traditional measure, length of residence (LoR) and a new cumulative measure that spanned across the participants’ life. The two measures were pitted against each other in the analysis. We found robust effects of aptitude in both the L1 and the L2, with the effect being even stronger for the L1. As expected, our new cumulative measure of exposure proved to be a better predictor of individual differences in grammatical proficiency. Last but not least, the effects of input were larger for the L2 than the L1.
Introduction
Artificial intelligence–driven decision support systems (AI–DSS) have the potential to help physicians analyze data and facilitate the search for a correct diagnosis or suitable intervention. The potential of such systems is often emphasized. However, implementation in clinical practice deserves continuous attention. This article aims to shed light on the needs and challenges arising from the use of AI-DSS from physicians’ perspectives.
Methods
The basis for this study is a qualitative content analysis of expert interviews with experienced nephrologists after testing an AI-DSS in a straightforward usage scenario.
Results
The results provide insights on the basics of clinical decision-making, expected challenges when using AI-DSS as well as a reflection on the test run.
Discussion
While we can confirm the somewhat expectable demand for better explainability and control, other insights highlight the need to uphold classical strengths of the medical profession when using AI-DSS as well as the importance of broadening the view of AI-related challenges to the clinical environment, especially during treatment. Our results stress the necessity for adjusting AI-DSS to shared decision-making. We conclude that explainability must be context-specific while fostering meaningful interaction with the systems available.
Background
In recent years, there has been a global trend toward an increase in life expectancy and the proportion of elderly people among the population. In this regard, it becomes important to promote active and healthy aging. Physical inactivity and social isolation are both risk factors of many chronic illnesses and highly prevalent in older adults. This challenges communities to develop interventions that reduce these risk factors among elderly populations. The main aims of this study were to summarize community-based interventions that aim to simultaneously promote social participation and physical activity in older adults and to examine their effects.
Methods
We performed a systematic review based on the PRISMA standards. Literature searches were conducted in six scientific databases in July 2021. Articles were included if they had an interventional design, focused on older adults living in the community and measured social participation and physical activity as an outcome. The data were summarized narratively due to the heterogeneity of studies and the variety of outcome measures.
Results
Overall, 46 articles published in English were included. The studies were grouped in (1) interventions with main focus on physical activity promotion; (2) social activities that included a physical activity component; (3) health behavior interventions/ health education interventions; (4) multicomponent interventions; (5) environmental interventions. The majority of the reviewed studies reported positive effects of interventions on physical activity and/or social participation. No study reported negative effects. Analysis of quantitative studies showed that multicomponent interventions have great positive effects on both outcomes. In qualitative studies positive effects were found regardless of intervention type.
Conclusion
This review summarizes the evidence about the effects of community-based interventions that aim to promote social participation and physical activity in older adults. Multicomponent interventions seem to be most suitable for simultaneous promotion of physical activity and social participation. However, high variability in measurement methods used to assess both social participation and physical activity in the included studies made it difficult to compare studies and to indicate the most effective.
Systematic review registration
www.crd.york.ac.uk, identifier: PROSPERO [CRD42021268270].
For more than 300 years, familial intimacies between ‘white’ and ‘black’ Americans were stigmatized and criminalized in US culture. While the American Supreme Court’s decision Loving v. Virginia in 1967 marks the moment (heterosexual) interracial families became legitimate on paper, the turn of the twenty- first century represents a paradigm shift toward the cultural recognition of interraciality. This crossover has manifested itself, for instance, in the formation of multiracial activism, in a reform of the census that now allows the indication of multiple racial affiliations, and prominently in Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, which translated his interracial origins from a longstanding taboo of ‘miscegenation’ into quintessential Americanness by way of an updated melting pot rhetoric. This study takes stock of the role of memoir production within this cultural shift.
Chapter 1, “The Rise of the Interracial Family Memoir,” addresses the emergence of a plethora of autobiographical works since the 1990s that demand familial recognition across the historic color line. I subsume these works under my umbrella term ‘interracial family memoirs’ and develop a typology of ‘genealogies’ as an elastic term to categorize, contextualize, and interrogate these acts of cross-racial affiliation. What emerges from this method are insights into the ways in which these memoirs seek to authorize new family formations through old, valorizing narrative models. Each chapter of my typology provides an overview section that is followed by a close reading of a narrative that is at once paradigmatic of the identified narrative script as well as a case study of another mode of autobiographical storytelling, for instance, autobiographical film. Through this systematic approach, I cover bestsellers as well as lesser-known works and shed light on the poetics and politics of this phenomenon. In so doing, I intend to create a first preliminary ‘archive’ and critical assessment of interracial family memoirs as a broad contribution to the burgeoning discipline of ‘critical mixed race studies.’ In this field, the memoir boom is frequently referenced as a crucial site of multiracialism. Yet, the phenomenon has only been engaged with in scattered essays and book chapters that have dominantly remained within descriptive and affirmative frameworks. While the increasing acknowledgement of interraciality has often been understood as an exclusively progressive phenomenon, my study follows scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Jared Sexton, Tavia Nyong’o, and Habiba Ibrahim to examine how multiracialism can be implicitly tied to politics of anti-blackness, heteronormativity, and classism that obscure enduring effects of enslavement.
The various autobiographical kinship claims in my typology cannot be included into one uniform theoretical paradigm, because ‘the’ interracial family, after all, does not exist. Each case study is thus prefaced with an individual theoretical section. Chapter 2, “Theoretical Genealogies,” however, outlines the scholarship and methodological premises upon which the typology is built. In subchapter 2.1, “Critical Mixed Race Studies,” I first address celebratory research on interraciality in the 1990s as a compensatory project that overwrites a longstanding epistemological paradigm of pathologization. I then carve out intersectional interventions from the field of black studies that have shaped a recent reorientation toward ‘critical mixed race studies’ which places questions of power at the center of analysis.
Subchapter 2.2, “Critical Kinship Studies,” theorizes the term ‘family’ and the practice of ‘genealogy.’ On the one hand, multiracialism’s ideal of family as an inherently unifying formation is deconstructed by outlining an often-naturalized state- regulated family system as a historically oppressive and exclusionary institution along axes of biologism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and particularly racism. On the other hand, I outline genealogy—the documentation of personal lineage—as a central practice by which US Americans construct national belonging. This practice has expanded into forms such as the interracial family memoir, which often seeks to legitimize a tabooed background of miscegenation by recoding it as part of a larger national project of the melting pot.
Subchapter 2.3, “Critical Life Writing Studies,” pursues three objectives. First, I sketch traditional autobiography studies’ efforts to produce a transhistorical, formal definition of autobiography within covert power hierarchies. Second, I situate my study in a larger turn toward life writing studies that shifts the understanding of autobiography from a narrow genre into a discourse that is operative across a wide medial and formal spectrum. Third, I contextualize my material as ‘memoir’ to frame an autobiographical discourse that revolves around relationality rather than the construction of an individualist timeline.
Chapter 3, “The Formula of the Interracial Family Memoir,” provides an overview of the phenomenon of the interracial family memoir, by identifying an overarching pattern in these works. I argue that the initial step in the formula usually lies in the framing peritext of the cover which, time and again, implies a transcendence of the color line through familial intimacy. Then I move on to locate and discuss three components of a recurring narrative formula. First, I examine the prologue of these memoirs—where the autobiographical subject thematizes interracial belonging as a fundamental conflict—as an address to the public sphere. Second, I demonstrate how the main narrative adapts the template of the quest narrative to spatialize the social obstacle of the color line across which kinship is claimed. Over the course of this quest, the narrator usually constructs the ‘discovery’ of an insight that seemingly unites the designated family constellation across race and multiple generations. Third, I discuss how the final part of the formula frequently recruits the reproductive metaphor of the melting pot in order to inscribe events of interracial familial (re)union as a putatively unifying national allegory of progress, reconciliation, and upward mobility—from which representations of queerness and black motherhood are usually absent.
In the ensuing typology, I examine how interracial family memoirs have deployed specific cultural scripts within the larger quest-narrative template to demand recognition of particular familial attachments across the color line. I open my typology with Chapter 4, “Transnational Genealogies,” and a case study on the perhaps most famous interracial family memoir, Barack Obama’s bestseller 'Dreams from My Father' (1995/2004). I read his memoir as a paradigmatic example of a range of diasporic narratives where the autobiographical subject attempts to level the complexity of competing racial, familial, and cultural ascriptions through a script of ‘homecoming’ that installs one dominant point of reference. In particular, my analysis reveals how an active turn toward biologistic and patrilineal ancestry is mediated as a seemingly ‘natural’ return to one’s homeland. My close reading focuses on Dreams from My Father’s last section “Kenya” as the most important but most understudied part of the memoir. I unfold the myriad strategies by which Obama encodes his first-time visit to Kenya as an ostensible return, for instance, through Africanisms and a strategic ratio of narration time and narrated time. However, I zoom in on how his search most prominently generates an unequivocal and linear trajectory toward Kenya as homeland through the creation of a masculinist genealogy of biological and symbolic black forefathers, which gradually and strategically eclipses the role of his white maternal upbringing as formative to his quest.
In Chapter 5, “White Maternal Genealogies,” I analyze how white women have sought recognition as mothers of black-identified children through the script of the ‘conversion’ narrative. Via different forms of secularization, I chart how its traditional function of asserting new religious beliefs and affiliations is transposed into a claim to an anti-racist consciousness that serves to authorize cross-racial familial belonging. In the process, these narratives implicitly transform the rhetoric of the frontier from the American Puritan conversion script into the twentieth-century color line. Turning to Jane Lazarre’s experimental memoir 'Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness' (1996/2016), I demonstrate how this trajectory of ‘conversion’ often culminates in a dissociation from whiteness. As Lazarre puts it at the end of her quest, “I am a person of color now” (135). My analysis scrutinizes such ambivalent declarations of pride as affects of shame over racism but also identifies links to residual discourses around interracial heterosexuality and the predominantly Jewish positionality of the autobiographical subject.
Chapter 6, “Black Maternal Genealogies,” examines the role of black motherhood through a multilayered paradigm of ‘elegy’ as a practice of negotiating loss and absences. On the one hand, ‘elegy’ stands for my intervention into the frequent absence of black maternal representation in the memoir formula as an ongoing resonance of “social death” (Patterson 35), in which black mothering has been construed as antithetical to the American kinship system through physical, symbolic, and epistemic violence. On the other hand, I identify instances in which black mothers do appear in the background of the narratives in romanticizing terms as “compensatory elegies” (Fuss 6) that seek to manage and repress violence at the foundation of familial and national origins. Additionally, I hone in on two autobiographical works as “wake work” (Sharpe, Wake 18), where the quest for black maternal belonging takes the physical death of the mother as a point of departure to grieve collective conditions of black social death. The latter scenario is illustrated through a close reading of the fictional mourning diary 'The Wind Done Gone' (2001) by Alice Randall as an allegorical quest for black motherhood in a black feminist tradition of “fabulation” (Hartman, “Venus” 11).
Chapter 7, “Ex-Secret Genealogies,” spans a range of sensationalist works in which autobiographical subjects employ the script of ‘confession’ to disclose interracial ancestry against the backdrop of enslavement. While these narratives have been often praised as subversively addressing a repressed national past of slavery, I draw attention to confession as an act that can implicitly construct forms of individual and collective ‘self-absolution.’ Through a detailed analysis of Macky Alston’s documentary 'Family Name' (1997/2009), I elucidate how such endeavors first address but ultimately repress ongoing effects of enslavement, for example, by exclusively foregrounding stories of black upward mobility. Most importantly, I demonstrate how the search for the implications of a legacy of slavery, time and again, is gradually limited to an exclusive project of cross-racial kinship recognition. Through a biologistic approach, the quester only claims interracial lineage under slavery within an unburdening logic of family that replaces sexual violence as the revised family tree’s point of origin.
Chapter 8, “Non-Biocentric Genealogies,” sheds light on queer-interracial family constellations. A number of scholars have criticized an absence of queerness in multiracialism’s self-representations as the movement’s “normalizing ballast” (Nyong’o, Waltz 175). My analysis goes beyond a diagnosis of absence and locates a set of self-published works—from graphic memoirs to essays—in which queer interracial adoptive families implicitly and explicitly seek visibility through a paradigm of ‘coming out.’ Drawing on queer-of-color critique, I address ‘coming out’ as a one-dimensional script that often eclipses intersecting racial concerns in a majority of queer adoption memoirs. On the one hand, I reconstruct the terms on which their ‘colorblind’ politics overwrite the significance of racial difference in the formation of queer kinship. On the other hand, I highlight how adoption memoirs also overwrite preceding traditions of queer kinship in the aftermath of the 1980s AIDS crisis. In order to illustrate this multifaceted paradigm, I provide close readings of two works that each mobilize the metaphor of ‘coming out’ to frame their demand for familial recognition. First, Tony Hynes’s self-published memoir 'The Son with Two Moms' (2015) serves to examine the dominant paradigm of ‘colorblind’ politics as well as the perspective of a black adoptee. Second, I turn to the autoethnography “Where She Comes From” (2014) by the white adoptive father Don Romesburg as an instance that seeks to render visible queer interracial familiality as much as the structural racism that often underlies the possibility of queer adoption.
My concluding chapter, “The End of the Interracial Family Memoir,” expands the metaphor of the closet to critically review what has to remain concealed to enable specific forms of kinship to ‘come out’ within the phenomenon of the interracial family memoir since the 1990s. I introduce this summary of my findings by positioning the popular formula of the interracial family memoir as the aesthetic and ideological successor to Stanley Cramer’s iconic movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), which reached the public the same year as the Loving v. Virginia decision. I close my study by pondering about the probable end of the interracial family memoir formula in the near future.
Objective: Opioid substitution treatment (OST) is a common treatment for individuals who use opioids; however, empirical evidence on the effects of OST during incarceration is scarce. Our aim was to conduct a meta-analysis on the effects of incarceration-based OST on substance use, treatment engagement post-release and re-incarceration. Method: We searched for studies on individuals who were incarcerated and treated with OST, compared to a comparison group. Studies were only included if they reported data post-release. Results: N = 15 studies met the inclusion criteria. We found less opioid use, less other drug use, higher treatment engagement post-release and less re-incarceration among treated individuals compared to the comparison group. Moderator analyses showed some influence of length of follow-up period and study quality. Conclusions: Incarceration-based OST reduces drug use, re-incarceration and leads to higher treatment engagement after release. More research is needed on the effects of incarceration-based OST on secondary outcomes (e.g. health and social integration) and on factors that moderate these effects.
Governments of numerous countries implemented school closures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Several investigations have shown the negative impact of social-distancing policies and school closures on children worldwide. Recently, research also demonstrated adverse effects on adults’ well-being. The development of children is strongly affected by their parent’s emotional state. The present study aimed to examine parental stress levels caused by a short period of homeschooling in December 2020 in Germany. A structured survey was set up and distributed randomly via social media and parent associations. We observed a significant increase in stress and concerns. Family conflicts significantly increased, social isolation was feared, and powerlessness and helplessness ascended. Risk factors were parental education levels, parental working time, and teaching features like the frequency of feedback, correction, and accessibility.
Collocations are a ubiquitous phenomenon. Without consciously thinking about them, people encounter them continuously during language use in both comprehension and production. In linguistics, however, collocations have been extensively studied in the last one hundred years and often characterized either as phraseological phenomena (e.g., bitter enemy) or frequent co-occurrences (e.g., annual meeting). In particular, the two structures that were paid most attention to are verb+noun (e.g., abuse trust) and adjective+noun (e.g., high hopes). And although there is evidence from various fields (e.g., first language acquisition, corpus linguistics, cognitive grammar to name a few) about selection preferences towards the use of certain categories in general and for collocations in particular, there are still no comprehensive studies of collocations involving a broad range of different structural groups.
Therefore, one of the aims of this thesis is to study whether there are any preferences in the collocational competence towards certain structural groups and if yes, whether this preference is different across languages. For this reason, over 200 native and advanced non-native speakers of English and German as well as native speakers of Russian were tested on their knowledge of phraseological collocations using a multiple-choice collocations test in Experiment 1. Within the same experiment, it was attempted to discover the predictors of collocation competence: e.g., reading habit, alphabetic script, education level, age, onset of language learning, residence in the L2 country, etc. It was established that the morpho-syntactic properties of the language as well as the phenomenon of collocation predict collocation competence. For example, participants were significantly better in those collocational structures the components of which were adjacent and were not often interrupted by insertions in forms of other lexical units.
In addition, given the fact that collocational competence can be facilitated by reading, the reading habit/skill was measured using three different measures though various questions in the paper-based questionnaire and in Experiment 2 which was a self-paced reading task. Surprisingly, it was discovered that certain measures of the reading habit can predict collocations reliably better than others. For example, asking a participant how much time they spend reading per week significantly predicted collocational competence in all native speaker groups (i.e., English, German and Russian), but not the non-native groups. The
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contribution of this finding could be methodologically valuable for researchers searching for correlations between the reading habit and different aspects of language use. According to another interesting finding, the similarity of the orthographic systems of L1 and L2 is associated with better collocational competence. In other words, the collocational competence of non-native speakers of German having alphabetic script similar to the L2 (e.g., Ukrainian, Hungarian or Greek) was more likely to be better than of those learners whose alphabetic script was different from the L2 (e.g., Chinese, Arabic, Armenian) suggesting that similarity of script would result in an easier recognition of patterns in the L2 if the script of the L2 is familiar to the language users.
It was then hypothesized that this selection preference towards particular collocational structures might stretch to processing differences. Thus, the same participants were tested in Experiment 3, which was a phrasal decision task, and which revealed that adjective+noun collocations were processed the fastest among the four structural groups of collocations. The results also showed that phrasal-like collocations (i.e., adjective+noun and adverb+adjective) were generally processed faster than clausal-like collocations (i.e., verb+noun and verb+adverb) suggesting that processing collocations is easier and faster when the argument structure construction involving the verb does not have to be activated. Processing collocations of various structures was also dependent on whether the base of the collocation belonged to the primary categories from cognitive grammar or to secondary ones. Thus, collocation containing bases that belonged to primary categories (e.g., things or actions) were processed significantly faster than collocations containing words from secondary categories (e.g., qualities). However, the effect is not robust across the five groups tested and it remains unclear whether this effect is specific to the processing of collocations, or it unfolds on higher levels of language processing. These results suggest that a theory of collocation processing should be explicit about the base of the collocation and what role it plays in the processing of a collocation.
Similarly to previous findings, it was also established that collocations are processed faster than free combinations suggesting that collocations as chunks (e.g., bitter enemy) are processed in a holistic fashion in comparison to free combinations (e.g., common enemy) that are novel language. The effect was robust across all participant groups, both native and non-native, which speaks in favour of the fact that collocations are a psychologically valid phenomenon for both native and non-native populations.
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Finally, it has been attempted to study the neural correlates of collocation processing. In Experiment 4, available (electroencephalography) EEG measurements from 31 participants listening to a German audio book were analyzed. Given the fact that the speech stimuli were pre-determined, i.e., the text of the audio book, the interpretation of collocation in this part of the study was different from that employed in Experiments 1- 3. Therefore, collocations were seen as frequently co-occurring word combinations which are different from non-collocations based on a corpus-derived association measure, in this case, mutual information. The brain response for the two conditions was compared in the N400 time window. It was hypothesized that since N400 is an ERP component that is a marker of unpredictability, surprisal and higher processing load, non-collocations should exhibit a larger N400 in comparison to collocations. The results of the permutation tests revealed that collocations were processed statistically differently from non-collocations at all electrode sites. The exact configurations of the effect, however, are mixed. The largest differences were observed in the left-anterior area where collocations were modulated by larger negativities in the N400 time window, and in the right-posterior area where non-collocations displayed larger negativities. Given that previous studies of collocations (including Experiment 3 of the current thesis) often employed artificial designs in studying these word combinations, the result of Experiment 4 are especially valuable for the understanding of collocations since the target items were neither matched with non-collocations containing semantic violation nor presented in isolation. In fact, all items were embedded in a coherent piece of discourse presented in the form of a continuous speech signal that presents a highly naturalistic task.
To sum up, this work has managed to provide evidence that collocations are both psychologically and neurophysiologically valid using both standard behavioural paradigms as well as elaborate electrophysiological (naturalistic) methods, which presents triangulation of methods in the study of collocation processing. Given that the differences between collocation processing in native and non-native populations have been extensively studied previously, a further step can be seen in researching the neural correlates of collocation processing in non-native speakers, which will bring us closer to gaining a comprehensive picture of the nature of collocations.