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The use of religious signs in schools, as in other areas of the public sphere, is a current topic, given that legislative changes are constantly taking place. In countries as close as Germany, France, England and Spain, the legislation governing the wearing of the Islamic veil differs considerably due to their different historical, cultural, social, economic and idiosyncratic contexts. Leaving aside the ethnocentric perspective, in this paper a comparative study of the situation was carried out in these four countries. The main results include a negative attitude towards the wearing of the Islamic veil in France as opposed to a more tolerant position in England and Spain. In the case of Germany, there is a greater diversity of positions due to the characteristic autonomy of each federal state. Given the different types of veils, the reasons for wearing them, the traditions of each society and regional idiosyncrasies, it is considered that, a priori, there should not be a fight against its use, although it is recommended to adopt a belligerent stance against its imposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores practice examples relating to young people's transitions from care to adulthood. It discusses examples drawn from young people's pathways to adulthood, leaving care law and policy and participation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the research evidence on promoting the resilience of young people from care to adulthood, by proposing a framework for evaluating the impact of practice. It is suggested that practice should be interrogated in respect of the contribution made to stability and continuity, educational achievement, involving young people, preparation and support into adulthood, and health and well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Palliative care is insufficiently integrated in the continuum of care for older people. It is unclear to what extent healthcare policy for older people includes elements of palliative care and thus supports its integration. Aim: (1) To develop a reference framework for identifying palliative care contents in policy documents; (2) to determine inclusion of palliative care in public policy documents on healthcare for older people in 13 rapidly ageing countries. Design: Directed documentary analysis of public policy documents (legislation, policies/strategies, guidelines, white papers) on healthcare for older people. Using existing literature, we developed a reference framework and data extraction form assessing 10 criteria of palliative care inclusion. Country experts identified documents and extracted data. Setting: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, England, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain. Results: Of 139 identified documents, 50 met inclusion criteria. The most frequently addressed palliative care elements were coordination and continuity of care (12 countries), communication and care planning, care for family, and ethical and legal aspects (11 countries). Documents in 10 countries explicitly mentioned palliative care, nine addressed symptom management, eight mentioned end-of-life care, and five referred to existing palliative care strategies (out of nine that had them). Conclusions: Health care policies for older people need revising to include reference to end-of-life care and dying and ensure linkage to existing national or regional palliative care strategies. The strong policy focus on care coordination and continuity in policies for older people is an opportunity window for palliative care advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children's engagements with digital technologies form part of their emergent everyday literacy practices. The study reported here derives from the pan-European study 'A Day in the Digital Lives of Children aged 0-3'. The methodology was centred on the videoing of an entire day's experiences of a child aged under 3, together with a reflective interview with the parents and inventories related to digital access, skills and activities of the child. In this paper, we look at three children in Spain, Sweden and England, respectively. We examine our data through three prisms. (1) Spatio-temporal: We consider the children's engagements in terms of their appropriation of space, in relationships with others in the home and the intimate geographies of young children's digital literacies. (2) Parental discourse: We use the tensions and contradictions for families framework to examine the selection and monitoring of digital literacies. (3) Practice: Drawing on the first two prisms, we zoom into how children engage with tablet devices and television. Our research demonstrates richness, diversity and agency in these young children's practices with technologies. We propose the concept of living-room assemblage as an analytical metaphor to understand the macrohabitats of young children's digital literacies and practices, which emerge as multi-layered, creative and co-occurring with other family activities.Our analysis also explores the challenges presented to parents and the ways in which they navigate tensions and contradictions in their media and digital environments, which are condensed in family practices and discourses around tablets and television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much comparative research into education-related beliefs has exploited questionnaires developed in one culture for use in another. This has been particularly the case in mathematics education, the focus of this paper. In so doing, researchers have tended to assume that translation alone is sufficient to warrant a reliable and valid instrument for cross-cultural research, prompting concerns that a number of necessary equivalences are unlikely to have been addressed. In this paper, we consider the nature of these equivalences before examining the literature of a different field, healthcare research, to synthesise an approach to instrument adaptation that is pragmatic but rigorous. Finally, we demonstrate how this pragmatic approach, incorporating extensive cognitive interviews, enabled us to adapt and refine a mathematics-related beliefs questionnaire, developed in Flanders, for use with students aged 14–15 in England and Spain. Analyses indicate that the instrument so developed is multidimensional, reliable and cross-culturally valid. Some implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Introduction and objective: The ODHIN trial found that training and support and financial reimbursement increased the proportion of patients that were screened and given advice for their heavy drinking in primary health care. However, the impact of these strategies on professional accuracy in delivering screening and brief advice is underresearched and is the focus of this paper. Method: From 120 primary health care units (24 in each jurisdiction: Catalonia, England, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden), 746 providers participated in the baseline and the 12‐week implementation periods. Accuracy was measured in 2 ways: correctness in completing and scoring the screening instrument, AUDIT‐C; the proportion of screen‐negative patients given advice, and the proportion of screen‐positive patients not given advice. Odds ratios of accuracy were calculated for type of profession and for intervention group: training and support, financial reimbursement, and internet‐based counselling. Results: Thirty‐two of 36 711 questionnaires were incorrectly completed, and 65 of 29 641 screen‐negative patients were falsely classified. At baseline, 27% of screen‐negative patients were given advice, and 22.5% screen‐positive patients were not given advice. These proportions halved during the 12‐week implementation period, unaffected by training. Financial reimbursement reduced the proportion of screen‐positive patients not given advice (OR = 0.56; 95% CI, 0.31‐0.99; P < .05). Conclusion: Although the use of AUDIT‐C as a screening tool was accurate, a considerable proportion of risky drinkers did not receive advice, which was reduced with financial incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1990s, a proposal for a World of Language museum was planned in London. This paper discusses the motivation behind the proposal, outlines its content, and explains the strategy behind it – as well as the reasons for its failure. Initiatives of a similar kind in other countries are briefly reviewed, and the principles underlying the Linguamón House of Languages in Barcelona explained and compared to the London project. The paper concludes with a reflection on the possible future for such a project in the UK in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the grand narratives that have been produced in the post 9/11 era in Europe by looking at the March 11, 2004 attacks in Madrid, and the July 7, 2005 attacks in London. The paper will posit that the random nature of the Madrid and London attacks, and the apparent lack of meaning behind the 'message' of these attacks, destabilises a fundamental and mythological narrative of the European project: that the 'new Europe' is somehow beyond politics and has entered into a Kantian 'perpetual peace'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postgraduate education in gerontology is now widespread within European universities, but, even so, such developments remain very uneven. This paper outlines the variety of provision by describing Master's programmes in a sample of countries: England, Scotland, Finland, and Spain. These programmes illustrate some of the common problems: lack of funding for students, limited availability of academic staff, and reliance on a small core of dedicated teachers. They exhibit many strengths, including the breadth of curricula, high academic standards, high calibre and varied backgrounds of the students, the value of the qualification in employment, and meeting the demands of an ageing Europe. At the same time, these courses are faced with important issues about their sustainability. This paper argues that the demand for generalist courses such as gerontology taught Master's may fall in the coming years due to a combination of factors, such as employers' unwillingness to allow day release and demands by older people themselves for treatment and care by specialists. Generalist courses, this paper argues, may only survive in the biggest and best universities serving large populations and in cities able to attract overseas students. doi:10.1300/J021v27n03_03 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the diversity in patients' experience of biomedicine and contrasts it with the normative view characteristic of health professionals. Ethnographic fieldwork among Polish migrant women in London, Barcelona and Berlin included interviews about their experiences with local healthcare and health professionals. Themes drawn from the narratives are differences between the cities in terms of communication between patients and health professionals, respect for patients' choices and dignity, attitudes to pregnancy and birth (different levels of medicalization), and paediatric care. It is argued that patients continuously negotiate among their own views and expectations based on previous experiences and knowledge from personal communication; internet forums and publications; and the offer of medical services in the countries of their settlement. Patients experience pluralism of therapeutic traditions within and outside bio-medicine. In turn, representatives of bio-medicine are rarely aware of other medical practices and beliefs and this leads to various misunderstandings. By highlighting the pluralism of medical practices in European countries and the increasing mobility of patients, this case study has useful implications for medical anthropologists and health professionals in a broader Western context, such as raising sensitivity to different communication strategies and a diversity of curing traditions and expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the prevalence of incapacity in performing daily activities and the associations between household composition and availability of family members and receipt of care among older adults with functioning problems in Spain, England and the United States of America (USA). We examine how living arrangements, marital status, child availability, limitations in functioning ability, age and gender affect the probability of receiving formal care and informal care from household members and from others in three countries with different family structures, living arrangements and policies supporting care of the incapacitated. Data sources include the 2006 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe for Spain, the third wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2006), and the eighth wave of the USA Health and Retirement Study (2006). Logistic and multinomial logistic regressions are used to estimate the probability of receiving care and the sources of care among persons age 50 and older. The percentage of people with functional limitations receiving care is higher in Spain. More care comes from outside the household in the USA and England than in Spain. The use of formal care among the incapacitated is lowest in the USA and highest in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• Experience of certain material deprivation pattern varies significantly across the world. • Children from Europe have almost no likelihood of belonging to the Extreme Deprivation class. • Children living in MENA are more likely to experience housing and mobile deprivation. • Children living in Africa are more likely to experience lack of access to digital resources in addition to deficit of basic necessities. • Children living in Eastern Europe are more likely to experience transportation deprivation. Current research suggests that poverty affects children at different rates across the world (OECD, 2018; Unicef Innocenti Research Center, 2007). Additionally, poverty affects children differently – from deprivation of basic needs (ex. lack of food, clothing) to lack of access to digital technology. Previous studies of child poverty and its impact on children have predominantly approached this topic using income-based measures of poverty. This paper employs a material deprivation approach to study child poverty in different cultural contexts. Therefore, this study answers the following questions: Does child material deprivation have different patterns across world regions? If so, what characteristics do these patterns of material deprivation have? Are these patterns of material deprivation more likely to affect certain world regions? This paper utilizes data from the International Survey of Child Well-Being. The data includes children at the age of 12 from Norway, Germany, England, Spain, Malta, Estonia, Romania, Algeria, Israel, Turkey, Ethiopia, and South Africa. The analyses were based on the items available in the Child Material Resource Index. Latent class analysis and multinomial logistic regression were utilized to explore patterns of material deprivation. Findings suggest five patterns of child material deprivation, ranging from extreme to no deprivation. The distribution of these patterns varies significantly across world regions. This study suggests that the distribution of resources to eliminate poverty should be based not only on income-based indicators but should also include an assessment based on perceived deprivation scales, especially in international contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the relation between different national cost-sharing models and how students from different socio-economic backgrounds finance their higher education in six different European countries: the Czech Republic, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain. The findings reveal considerable differences both between the countries and also between different socio-economic groups of students within each country. Even though there are only small social differences in the students' level of income, there are considerable social differences in the students' sources of income. The findings are discussed related to the country's specific policy and higher education funding structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Videotape is an increasingly used tool in cross-national studies of mathematics teaching. However, the means by which videotaped lessons are coded and analysed remains an underdeveloped area with scholars adopting substantially different approaches to the task. In this paper we present an approach based on generic descriptors of mathematics learning objectives. Exploiting live observations in five European countries, the descriptors were developed in a bottom-up recursive manner for application to videotaped lessons from four of these countries, Belgium (Flanders), England, Hungary and Spain. The analyses showed not only that the descriptors were consistently operationalised but also that they facilitated the identification of both similarities and differences in the ways in which teachers conceptualise and present mathematics that resonated with the available literature. In so doing we make both methodological and theoretical contributions to comparative mathematics research in general and debates concerning the national mathematics teaching script in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is ultimately to contribute new insights from current explorations of Englishness in Spain. More specifically, a selected narrative written by Jacinto Salas y Quiroga in 1846 is carefully analysed from a cross-cultural standpoint, taking into account the ideological and discursive bases on which nations are built. The article focuses on how A-S England is constructed in Salas' book, as opposed to the image portrayed in other narratives of a similar nature, published in Spain during the nineteenth century. After the analysis of Salas' textual, rhetorical and linguistic strategies, results show that in this original contribution, the expected Anglo-Saxons' territorial and ethnic identity occupies only a background position, whereas the dynamic interaction of two conceptual types or characters, the powerful vs. the weak, is driven to the forefront. Through the use of heterodox schemes Salas deviates from the Spanish common cultural and historiographic practice, and completes a powerful and novel image of Anglo-Saxons, which performs a well-defined function in mid-nineteenth century Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a study of quality perceptions and attitudes towards farmed cod amongst 90 chefs in up-market restaurants in England, Norway and Spain. Findings show that the chefs perceived the quality of farmed cod as favourable. More specifically, survey results show that product attributes such as freshness, texture of flesh, skin colour, odour and flavour received high scores, albeit with some variation across the three countries. Qualitative interviews confirm the positive assessment, but also show that stability in supply and freshness are valued quality dimensions. The qualitative interviews also revealed that several of the chefs discovered that the farmed cod needs less cooking time than wild cod. Further, negative attitudes towards fish farming were found. Despite this, 65 percent said they were likely or very likely to purchase farmed cod in the future. Findings are discussed and marketing implications highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the European context the continuing training of early childhood educators in terms of information and communications technology (ICT) remains limited and is in need of development. The KINDERET project has been funded through the European Commission’s Leonardo da Vinci programme aimed to identify and understand the theoretical and practical needs of practitioners and is developing course materials to support the development of courses (see ). The KINDERET project has therefore been structured according to five main objectives, namely to: identify and understand the theoretical and practical needs of kindergarten teachers with regard to ICT education;establish plans for the training of educators, in the application of ICT;develop interactive learning materials for educators in order to support the established plans for continuing training in ICT;implement pilot training schemes and promote transnational collaboration between tutors and students through the use of ICTs;evaluate the pilot training schemes. In the framework of these overall aims set by the KINDERET project, this paper reports upon the joint work that was developed by the partnership as the first stage of analysis in the training needs of kindergarten teachers. The analysis of the information that was collected at this stage has provided an empirical basis for the development of the pilot training schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the function of protected nature in rural living environments is discussed in relation to residential choice, appreciation of the residential environment and rural development policy. In five case studies a comparison is made between the situation of protected natural areas in the Netherlands, England and Spain. The research results show that protected natural areas are an increasingly popular endogenous quality of rural regions as they have the ability to influence the residential choice and satisfaction of households. Therefore, they have not only become an important driving factor in the attraction of residential and other consumption-orientated activities towards rural areas but also need to be considered in policy formulation. After all, choices have to be made when different functions need to be combined in rural areas. Different activities may have both positive and negative effects on each other and regulatory measures are needed to tune their co-existence. For a sustainable and balanced development of rural areas it is therefore very important to create basic conditions that will make the combination of activities possible within the specific national and regional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A calendar of events related to various congresses and conventions is presented which include one titled "RSM Clinicopathology Papers Prize Meeting and Stater of the Art Lecture" by the Royal Society of Medicine on March 18, 2010 in London, England, one titled "25th Annual EAU Congress" on April 16-20, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain, and one titled "1st World Congress of Pediatric Urology" on May 28-30, 2010 in San Francisco, California.