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Objectives The aim of this study is to examine the relative contribution of acculturation, perceived social support, and perceived discrimination on psychological well-being (PWB) among Middle Eastern (ME) migrants in Australia. Method(s) A cross-sectional study was conducted in Queensland, Australia. A total of 382 first-generation young adult (aged 20–39 years) ME migrants completed a self-administered questionnaire. The hypothesised model was tested through a two-step process: measurement, and structural model testing. First, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was applied to test the fit of the measurement model and reliability and validity indices were calculated. Structural Equations Modelling (SEM) was then used to test the structural model. The significance of the mediating effect was tested using bootstrapping method. Results Mainstream acculturation had the greatest accumulated total effect on PWB through both a direct and an indirect effect via perceived discrimination. Ethnic acculturation had the second greatest total effect on PWB, with both a direct effect and indirect effects through perceived social support and perceived discrimination. Perceived discrimination demonstrated both a direct effect and an indirect effect on PWB through perceived social support. Perceived social support had only a direct effect on PWB. Conclusions Facilitating ME migrants’ active participation in both ethnic and mainstream societies is important. Moreover, developing ethnic communities associations and resources could be an effective option to provide social support to ME migrants and in turn to improve their PWB. To provide ME migrants with better mental health outcomes, there is still a need to minimize the discrimination against them.

The high school setting has been identified as an ideal setting to teach adolescents about healthy dietary behaviours. This study explored home economics teachers' (HETs) views on the role of high schools in enhancing adolescents' food literacy and promoting healthy dietary behaviours. Semi-structured interviews with 22 HETs were conducted. The interview questions focused on the perceived strengths/opportunities and the limitations/barriers in enhancing adolescents' food literacy and healthy dietary behaviours in Australian high schools. Thematic data analysis was used to identify five key themes from the interview transcripts: (1) the standing of food-related life skills; (2) food literacy in the Australian school curriculum; (3) emphasis on resources; (4) learning through school canteens; and (5) building a school to home and community nexus. Overall, HETs reported that home economics was regarded by parents and other school staff to be less important than Maths or English for adolescents to learn in Australian high schools. Some teachers indicated that their schools offered one year compulsory teaching of food related studies which is typically delivered in the leaning areas of Technologies or Health and Physical Education (HPE). However, HETs stated that the time was insufficient to develop sustainable food-related life skills and introduce broader concepts of food literacy such as environmental sustainability. The lack of financial resources and non-supportive school food environments, including school canteens, were reportedly major factors that prevented food literacy education and healthy dietary behaviours of adolescents. Increasing the status of food literacy education in schools would support adolescents to develop food-related life skills and mobilise them as agents of dietary behaviour change in the home setting.

Poor diet places children at significant risk of over and under-nutrition including micronutrient deficiencies, which is a public health threat to a middle-income country like Sri Lanka. Understanding factors that influence food choices in early childhood is necessary to promote healthy food choices. As parents are the main gatekeepers of children's food environment, this study aimed to explore parents/caregivers' perspectives on the factors that influence their children's food choices. Thirteen focus groups adopting a partial nominal group technique were conducted with 110 parents/caregivers of children aged 2-6 years living in an urban area, Kurunegala District, Sri Lanka. Parents/caregivers were provided with 22 potential factors and asked to rank six most influential and choose six least influential factors on their child's food decisions. Responses were discussed as a group and audio recorded discussions underwent content analysis. Child food preference was ranked as the core driving factor in food decisions of preschool children. Family income, nutritional knowledge of the family, maternal control of food choices and household food preparation facilities were ranked as the next four most influential. Most frequent choices of least influential factors were: individual characteristics of child including sex and nutritional knowledge; and community (environmental) characteristics including seasonal food availability and community cultural food beliefs. Additional influential factors proposed were having a single child, a supportive family network and healthy menu suggestions by the preschool centres. Findings suggest that modifying the food preference of the child and the family characteristics need to be central for effective eating interventions.

Objectives: Limited studies have investigated detailed insights into the experiences of women in transitioning countries such as Iran as active agents in their lives and their societies. This study explores how young Iranian women build and use their social capital to make a social change and improve their status. Methods: This study is the qualitative component of a larger mixed-method study exploring social capital and wellbeing in young Iranian women. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 17 young Iranian women aged 18–35. This data was supplemented with the open-ended responses provided by 87 of 391 participants in the quantitative phase of the study. Thematic analysis based on the Giorgi method was used for data analysis. Results: Two major themes that emerged from the data included “multiple identities” and “young women as agents of social change”, with more emphasis on the latter. Four main strategies were used by young Iranian women to enact social change and improve their position. These included building digital freedom, generating a new style of dressing, creating leisure opportunities, and changing social and sexual relationships. Conclusions: This study provides new insights into the necessity of moving away from simply looking at women as powerless victims within paternalistic societies to exploring their potential as agents of social change. Understanding the ways young Iranian women perceive themselves, their roles in society and their experience of enacting social change and building new social identities yields deeper insights into their expectations for transformational change.

The democratic mass matrix is an intriguing possibility for explaining the observed fermion mixings due to its inherent hierarchical mass eigenvalues and large mixing angles. Nevertheless, two of the three mass eigenvalues are zero if the flavor democracy is exact, in obvious contradiction with the experimental observations. One possibility is breaking the flavor democracy with anarchical perturbations as we proposed in an earlier work. However, even within the first two generations, the charged fermion masses are also hierarchical which may not be a coincidence. The democratic S 3 L × S 3 R symmetry of the three generations may first be broken down to an intermediate S 2 L × S 2 R symmetry among the first two generations to regulate the sequential hierarchies, followed by random perturbations, that generate the correct size of all measured observables. Unique predictions for neutrinoless double beta decay are also found.

Low and middle-income countries are experiencing the dual burden of malnutrition which is, at least in part, attributable to changes in eating behaviours of children under age five. Development of food choices is influenced by multiple factors and understanding the interplay of these factors in early childhood in these countries is necessary to promote healthy food choices. We conducted a systematic review to examine the evidence of family and community factors targeted in interventions to influence the eating behaviour of preschool-aged children in low and middle-income countries. A search for peer-reviewed papers was conducted using CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Scopus and ProQuest Health Management published prior to September 2018, in English language including preschool-aged children (PROSPERO registration CRD42018108474). Fourteen studies published between 1994 and 2017 were eligible for inclusion. Factors that were consistently and positively associated with children's healthy food consumption were household food availability, nutritional knowledge of family or caregivers and family income. Unhealthy food consumption in children was inversely associated with family or caregivers' nutritional knowledge. Children's micronutrient intake was positively associated with household food availability, nutritional knowledge of family or caregivers and food availability within the surrounding environment. Findings highlight the importance of targeting nutritional knowledge of family or caregivers to facilitate healthy eating behaviours in children. In addition, creating a supportive family environment via increasing household food availability and family income should be considered when designing interventions to promote healthy eating behaviours in preschool-aged children living in low and middle-income countries.

Objective To identify and review data collection techniques used to measure preschool children’s knowledge of food and nutrition. Design A systematic review of published research guided by the Preferred Reported Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses statement. Participants Published journal articles between 1980 and 2013 reporting research involving the measurement of preschool children’s (aged 3–5 years) knowledge of food and nutrition. Results Twenty studies were eligible for inclusion. The studies reported the use of a range of innovative age-appropriate techniques to assess children’s knowledge of food and nutrition. Data collection techniques were grouped under 3 broad approaches: (1) interviews, (2) use of stimulus material and prompts, and (3) structured play-based activities. Only 3 of the reviewed studies tested for both reliability (test-retest and internal consistency) and face and content validity. Only 9 of the reviewed studies reported pilot-testing their instruments before use. Conclusions and Implications Results from this review suggest that additional research is needed to develop more valid and reliable measures to assess preschool children’s knowledge of food and nutrition. Assessment tools need to be pilot-tested, refined, and adapted to suit both the specific audience and the components of the nutrition knowledge being targeted by an intervention before implementing a nutrition education program.

In this work we introduce a mixture of GPs to address the data association problem, i.e., to label a group of observations according to the sources that generated them. Unlike several previously proposed GP mixtures, the novel mixture has the distinct characteristic of using no gating function to determine the association of samples and mixture components. Instead, all the GPs in the mixture are global and samples are clustered following ''trajectories'' across input space. We use a non-standard variational Bayesian algorithm to efficiently recover sample labels and learn the hyperparameters. We show how multi-object tracking problems can be disambiguated and also explore the characteristics of the model in traditional regression settings.