High School and Social Support Essay Example for Free

High School and Social Support Essay The purpose of the study was to determine possible differences in leadership behaviors, using the Revised Leadership for Sport Scale (RLSS), between male and female coaches and among different coaching levels. The researchers submitted two hypotheses. The first hypothesis was that male and female coaches would respond differently to the RLSS in overall leadership behaviors. The second hypothesis was that differences on the RLSS would occur among coaching levels: junior high, high school, and college. The sample was nonrandom, including 162 coaches that were chosen on a volunteer  basis. Within the sample, 118 (0. 73) of the coaches were male, while 44 (0. 27) were female. With regard to coaching level, 25 (0. 15) were junior high coaches, 99 (0. 61) high school, and 38 (0. 24) at the college level. While this is a good sample size, the problem lies with the distribution of the sample. The sample number for junior high coaches, in particular, is rather low. A larger sample with regard to all categories would have aided in the data analysis, particularly when looking for possible interactions between gender and coaching level. The instrument utilized was the Revised Leadership for Sport Scale (RLSS) developed by Zhang, Jensen, and Mann in 1996. This scale is used to measure six leadership behaviors: training and instruction, democratic, autocratic, social support, positive feedback, and situational consideration. The scale uses 60 statements, which were preceded by â€Å"In coaching, I:† A Likert scale was then given for each statement: 1 = never; 2 = seldom; 3 = occasionally; 4 = often; and 5 = always. This produced an ordinal level data set. Scales were administered in a number of environmental settings: classrooms, gymnasiums, practice  fields, and offices. The internal consistency for each section was calculated: 0. 84 for training and instruction; 0. 66 for democratic; 0. 70 for autocratic; 0. 52 for social support; 0. 78 for positive feedback; and 0. 69 for situational consideration. There was no information, however, regarding the validity of the RLSS. A MANOVA was used to analyze the data for differences between male and female coaches with regard to leadership behaviors. This is not consistent with the type of data collected. The RLSS used a Likert scale (ordinal), yet a MANOVA would be most  applicable for normally distributed, quantitative data. The analysis showed there were no significant differences between male and female coaches in overall leadership behaviors. When the six leadership styles were examined separately, there was a significant difference in social support between males and females. In general, females scored much higher than did the male coaches. A MANOVA was also used to examine the data for differences between the three levels of coaching (junior high, high school, and college) with regard to leadership behavior in general. There were significant differences between the three levels. When breaking down the six behaviors and examining them individually, an ANOVA was used to analyze the data. Again, because the data for the RLSS is ordinal, an ANOVA is not the best analysis tool. The three coaching levels scored differently on three of the six behaviors: democratic behaviors, training and instruction, and social support. High school coaches scored much higher than college level coaches in democratic behavior. Junior high coaches were significantly lower in training and instruction than either high school or college coaches. Junior high coaches also demonstrated a lesser degree of social support than either the high school or college coaches. A MANOVA was again used to analyze the data for any interaction between gender and coaching level with regard to overall leadership behavior. Once again, a better analysis method could have been chosen based on the nature of the data collected. The results indicated no significant interactions. The ecological generaliziability for the study is fairly high. The surveys were mailed out, and returned on a volunteer basis. However, due to the nonrandom nature of the sample, the results would not generalizable beyond the 162 participants in the study. There was no effect size is listed for the study. In order to reduce threats to internal validity, the participants were asked to respond honestly and confidentiality was stressed so that the â€Å"coaches might feel more at ease in responding. † No other efforts were indicated. The researchers mention that the scales were given in a variety of settings. This could present a threat to the internal validity in that participants might not have been entirely focused on completing the scale, but instead on coordinating practice, completing  paperwork, etc. There are a number of other factors that could effect the internal validity of the study, yet were not addressed by the researchers. Coaching experience would greatly effect the responses of the participants, yet this was not considered in the study. The gender of the athletes may be a contributing factor to the coaches’ responses. It is not unreasonable to suppose that coaches of female athletes, particularly at the junior high and high school levels, will demonstrate more social support than those of male athletes. The nature of the  sport could also be critical. Certain coaching styles are more applicable for individual sports (wrestling, track, and tennis) than for team sports (football, soccer, and basketball). The socioeconomics and population of the school itself could play a factor. Certain schools have better athletes and programs in a particular sport, while others may not be able to field a winning team. In addition, at the high school level, coaches are occasionally asked/forced to work with a program they have no knowledge of or desire to coach due to staffing  shortages. This could dramatically influence a coach’s response to the scale questions. The history of the program as well as the individual coach’s personal coaching history could greatly influence responses. If the program has had several losing seasons in a row, perhaps the attitude of the coach could be different than that of a coach who has recently won a state title. An additional set of questions regarding the personal history of the coach in question could have helped reduce many of these threats. With additional information, the  researchers may have been able to use a modified matching system when analyzing the results. By increasing the number of independent variables to include things such as coaching experience and gender of the athletes, the researchers could have reduced some of the potential threats to internal validity. In addition, bringing coaches together to a common setting could have reduced location threat. Coaches meet seasonally for clinics. Perhaps obtaining permission to administer the survey during these meetings would have been possible. It would have also been possible to actually go to individual  schools and meet with the coaches as a group to administer surveys. This method would have given a good cross-section of gender and coaching experience for a variety of sports. While the study has merit, the methods need to be re-evaluated. The power of the study needs to be increased by obtaining a larger sample size. The numerous potential threats to internal validity need to be addressed and minimized where possible. It would also be helpful to be given data regarding the validity of the RLSS. Without these, it is impossible to evaluate the potential meaningfulness of this study.

The Effects of Television Violence Essay -- Papers TV Media Violent Ch

The Effects of Television Violence Recent attention in the media relating violence and children has created much controversy and debate. Our society has brought much focus on violence in the media and how it has effected children of all ages and races. High school shootings and increasing crime in small towns all over the country has brought forth the question of whether or not children are exposed or desensitized to too much violence in television, movies, news, and other sources. Many people feel this violence is causing children to kill children and good towns go bad. Many people are also wondering if this violence could be a matter of survival for our society or if it has to do with the way parents are raising their children. However, this topic has not become an item for debate until it began to happen in white upper and middle-class parts of the United States. Many of these factors have been argued through legislature and generally in society since it has begun to plague our nation the past few years. Many debates have focused on the parents and their roles in their children?s everyday actions. Some people feel that a child?s parent or immediate caregivers are not paying enough attention to what the child is being exposed to in terms of media. Cartoons, video games, movies, and television shows are becoming more violent everyday and people are blaming the media for intoxicating our children?s minds with hatred and gratuitous violence. However, television has allotted a new form of screening what children may or may not be effected by. They have done this by associating a rating system with the television shows that are to be aired on a certain channel. This seems to solve the problem of televisio... ...hey blame high school shootings and racism on family values and brutality seen on a daily basis on TV or other places. If media violence persists, are we as a country to believe that we are all inevitably going to be violent ourselves? This question has a simple answer. Until our society is peaceful enough to not involve violence then violence will be a part of our everyday lives but if we do something to end violence in television, movies and other places our children will have a better environment. This environment will be one where they can live without gratuitous violence and get involved in more positive activities. Media violence is a huge problem that does relate to children being viscous and brutal. Video games, books, web sites, and other sources are making it easier for children to witness violence, become a part of it, and ultimately perform it.

“Inheritance” by Hannie Rayson Essay

Inheritance by Hannie Rayson is a play about the war between two families, the Delaneys and the Hamiltons, over property. Rayson questions the authenticity of Australian values, due to the human weaknesses the characters present in the play. The Australian values Rayson challenges in this play include a fair go for all and strong family ties. In this play, not every character is entitled to equal chances. Nugget is an example of this. He is the bastard son of Farley Hamilton, and an aborigine. His adopted mother, Dibs Hamilton, disowns him immediately after his father passes away. She also denies his promised land by tearing up Farley Hamiltons legal will, because of his origins. Julia Hamilton works for a multicultural company, with colleagues from different heritages. She is pregnant with a tall Indian bloke named Graham, meaning she will have a brown baby. However, her efforts to give a fair go to all are shadowed by her sister-in-law, Maureen Delaney. Maureen is a politician, campaigning to assimilate, or eliminate if they refuse, immigrants and aborigines to her standard of the true Australian way of life. It is a typical Australian value to have strong family ties. In this play, the cracks in the Hamilton and Delaney families begin to show. This is because of the different lifestyles they have lead over a long period. Farley Hamilton betrays his wife by having an affair with a younger woman, producing a child in the process. He betrays her again when he changes his will without Dibs notice, giving the property to his son Nugget instead. The whole family is usually arguing, and fighting. There are even characters who whisper in others ears. Almost every character acts for their individual interests, and not for the family. Sometimes a family member might stand up for another, but it is usually also for interests of their own. The Hamiltons and Delaneys barely represent authentic Australian values. The strong relationships that the family once had, has now broken down. No one is directly blamed for this chaos. It was broken simply because of the lack of equality and the lack of strong relationships. Bibliography: no sources used

Quarry Sites - The Archaeological Study of Ancient Mining

To an archaeologist, a quarry or mine site is where a particular raw material—stone, metal ore, or clay—was mined in the past to be used to make stone tools, to carve blocks for building or statuary, or to make ceramic pots. Significance Some quarries used by ancient people were located near their point of use, regularly visited and fiercely protected from other groups as part of claimed territory. Other quarries, especially those for portable goods such as stone tools, were hundreds of miles away from the point of use, where the stone tools were found. In those cases, the people might have found the quarry on a hunting trip, made tools there and then carried the tools with them for a few months or years. Some high quality materials might also have been traded as part of a long distance exchange network. Artifacts made from far away resources are called exotic compared to local artifacts. Quarry sites are significant because they provide a wealth of information concerning the day-to-day living of people in the past. How well did a particular group understand and use the resources in their neighborhoods? How important was it for them to use high quality materials, and for what? How do we determine what a high quality resource means for an object or building? Questions Posed at Quarries At the quarry site itself, there might be evidence of the technical knowledge a society had about mining, such as the types of tools they used to excavate and shape materials. Quarry sites can also have workshops—some quarries were also production sites, where objects might be partly or completely finished. There might be tool marks on the outcrop showing how the workers pried the material out. There might be spoil heaps and discarded materials, which can illustrate what attributes that made a resource unusable. There might be encampments, where the miners lived while they were working. There might be inscriptions on the outcrops, such as notes about the quality of the material, or prayers to gods for good luck, or graffiti from bored miners. There could also be cart ruts from wheeled vehicles or other evidence of infrastructure suggesting how the material was transported to the point of use. The Challenge of Quarries Quarries are difficult to discover, because sometimes they are hard to see and scattered across the region. Outcrops of a particular source can cover many acres across a wide landscape. An archaeologist could find a stone tool or a pot or a stone structure at an archaeological site, but finding where the raw material to make that object or building came from is difficult, unless there are already quarries for that type of material that have been identified. Potential quarry sources can be found by using bedrock maps of the area, which are produced for the U.S. by the United States Geological Survey, and for the United Kingdom by the British Geological Survey: similar government-backed bureaus can be found for almost any country. Finding an outcrop open to the surface near an archaeological site, and then looking for evidence there that it was mined, can be an effective technique. Evidence could be tool marks, or excavation pits or campsites; but those might be difficult to identify if hundreds or thousands of years have passed since the quarry was used. Once a potential quarry has been identified, the archaeologist submits samples to a laboratory for sourcing, a process that breaks down the chemical or mineral content of a material, using Neutron Activation Analysis, or X-ray Fluorescence or another analytical tool. That provides a greater assurance that the proposed connection between tool and quarry is likely correct. However, quarries can vary in quality and content within a single deposit, and it may be that the chemical make up of the object and the quarry may never be perfectly matched. Some Recent Studies The following are some recent quarry studies, only a fraction of the available research which has been conducted. Wadi Dara (Egypt). This gold and copper mine was used during the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods (3200–2160 BCE). Evidence includes pit trenches, tools (grooved stone axes and pounding slabs), smelting sites and slags from furnaces; as well as several huts where the miners lived. Described in Klemm and Klemm 2013. Carn Menyn (Preseli Hills, Wales, UK). The unique blend of rhyolites and dolerites at Carn Menyn mine were quarried for the 80 bluestones at Stonehenge, 136 miles (220 km) away. Evidence includes a scattering of broken or abandoned pillars of the same size and proportion as those at Stonehenge, and some hammer stones. The quarry was used before and after Stonehenge was built, between 5000–1000 BCE. See Darvill and Wainright 2014. Rano Raraku and Maunga Puna Pau Quarries (Rapa Nui aka Easter Island). Rano Raraku was the source of the volcanic tuff which was used to sculpt all 1,000 of the Easter Island statues (moai). The quarry faces are visible and several uncompleted statues are still connected to the bedrock. Described in Richards and others . Maunga Puna Pau was the source for the red scoria hats the moai wear, as well as other buildings used by the people of Rapa Nui between 1200–1650 CE. Described in Seager 2014. Rumiqolqa (Peru). Rumiqolqa was a quarry where Inca Enpire (1438–1532 CE) stonemasons excavated andesite for temples and other structures in the capital city of Cusco. Mning operations here entailed the creation of pits and cuts on the quarry landscape. Huge stone blocks were cut by using wedges placed in natural fractures, or by creating a line of holes then using wooden or bronze poles as pry bars, rock hammers and stone and bronze chisels. Some stones were further reduced in size before being dragged along the Inca road to their final destination. Inca temples were made of a variety of materials: granite, diorite, rhyolite, and andesite, and many of those quarries have been found and reported by Dennis Ogburn (2013). Pipestone National Monument (USA). This national monument in southwestern Minnesota was used as a source for catlinite, one of several mines scattered through the midwest that produce a sedimentary and metamorphic rock that was used by Native American communities to manufacture ornaments and pipes. Pipestone NM is known to have been an important religious and quarry site for historic period Native American groups during the 18th and 19th centuries CE. See Wisserman and colleagues (2012) and Emerson and colleagues (2013). Sources Bloxam, Elizabeth. Ancient Quarries in Mind: Pathways to a More Accessible Significance. World Archaeology 43.2 (2011): 149–66. Print.Darvill, Timothy, and Geoffrey Wainwright. Beyond Stonehenge: Carn Menyn Quarry and the Origin and Date of Bluestone Extraction in the Preseli Hills of South-West Wales. Antiquity 88.342:1099–14 (2014). Print.Emerson, Thomas, et al. The Allure of the Exotic: Reexamining the Use of Local and Distant Pipestone Quarries in Ohio Hopewell Pipe Caches. American Antiquity 78.1 (2013): 48–67. Print.Klemm, Rosemarie, and Dietrich Klemm. Gold Production Sites and Gold Mining in Ancient Egypt. Gold and Gold Mining in Ancient Egypt and Nubia. Natural Science in Archaeology: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013. 51–339. Print.Kloppmann, W., et al. Tracing Medieval and Renaissance Alabaster Works of Art Back to Quarries: A Multi-Isotope (Sr, S, O) Approach. Archaeometry 56.2 (2014): 203–19. Print.Ogburn, Dennis E. Variation in Inca Bui lding Stone Quarry Operations in Peru and Ecuador. Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes. Eds. Tripcevich, Nicholas and Kevin J. Vaughn. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology: Springer New York, 2013. 45–64. Print.Richards, Colin, et al. Road My Body Goes: Re-Creating Ancestors from Stone at the Great Moai Quarry of Rano Raraku, Rapa Nui (Easter Island). World Archaeology 43.2 (2011): 191–210. Print.Seager Thomas, Mike. Stone Use and Avoidance on Easter Island: Red Scoria from the Topknot Quarry at Puna Pau and Other Sources. Archaeology in Oceania 49.2 (2014): 95–109. Print.Summers, Geoffrey D., and Erol Ãâ€"zen. The Hittite Stone and Sculpture Quarry at Karakiz Kasabasi and Hapis Bogazi in the District of Sorgun, Yozgat, Central Anatolia. American Journal of Archaeology 116.3 (2012): 507–19. Print.Tripcevich, Nicholas, Jelmer W. Eerkens, and Tim R. Carpenter. Obsidian Hydration at High Elevation: Archaic Quarrying at the Chivay Source, Sou thern Peru. Journal of Archaeological Science 39.5 (2012): 1360–67. Print.Uchida, Etsuo, and Ichita Shimoda. Quarries and Transportation Routes of Angkor Monument Sandstone Blocks. Journal of Archaeological Science 40.2 (2013): 1158–64. Print.Wisseman, Sarah U., et al. Refining the Identification of Native American Pipestone Quarries in the Midcontinental United States. Journal of Archaeological Science 39.7 (2012): 2496–505. Print.