Background:
These studies sought to investigate the relation between social desirability and self-reported health risk behaviors (e.g., alcohol use, drug use, smoking) in web-based research.
Methods:
Three longitudinal studies (Study 1: N = 5612, 51% women; Study 2: N = 619, 60%; Study 3: N = 846, 59%) among randomly selected members of two online panels (Dutch; German) using several social desirability measures (Marlowe-Crowne Scale; Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding; The Social Desirability Scale-17) were conducted.
Results:
Social desirability was not associated with self-reported current behavior or behavior frequency. Socio-demographics (age; sex; education) did not moderate the effect of social desirability on self-reported measures regarding health risk behaviors.
Conclusions:
The studies at hand provided no convincing evidence to throw doubt on the usefulness of the Internet as a medium to collect self-reports on health risk behaviors.
Cognitive-behavioural therapy for depression in people with a somatic disease: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.
Social desirability and self-reported health risk behaviors in web-based research: three longitudinal studies
State Community College Funding Strategies That Benefit Low-Income, Lower-Skilled Students
Publisher: Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Author(s): Choitz, Vickie
Published: November 2010
Outlines “student-centered” state funding strategies for community college financing to improve postsecondary access and success for lower-skilled and low-income students by limiting tuition growth, focusing on outcomes, and supporting career advancement.
Funder(s): Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Subject(s): Higher Education; Higher Education, Access/Cost; Public Affairs
Autobiographical Memory Narratives in Psychotherapy:
‘But you might be damaging your baby’: Constructing choice and risk in labour and childbirth
This article examines how choice is constructed in relation to risk in a UK ante-natal class. Discursive psychology was applied to transcripts of 50 hours of audio recordings collected from local UK National Childbirth Trust classes. We found that consent to medical control of the birth environment is positively encouraged through Class Leaders’ persuasive advice-giving and the delivery of cautionary (moral) tales in the form of extreme horror stories. Whilst parental agency is embedded in a ‘rhetoric of choice’, regulatory mechanisms of ‘coercive choice’ operate in tandem through a rhetoric of risk that positions medical intervention as the safer option. The right to choose seems to take on the status of a ‘required element’, which is both observed and resisted in discourse but, as previous research has suggested, may not necessarily be sustainable in practice. Our analysis suggests that the normativity of medical interventions in labour and childbirth is discursively reproduced in ante-natal classes whilst parental choice is limited by a powerful ‘rhetoric of risk’.
Trends in Exposure to Television Food Advertisements Among Children and Adolescents in the United States
In this study, researchers examined changes in children’s and adolescents’ total exposure to food advertising. The study reports that children and teens are seeing fewer television advertisements for fruit drinks, regular soda and sweets such as candy, cookies and…