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A major concern for the Social Work profession concerns the frequency of burn-out and high turnover of staff. The characteristic of resilience has been identified as playing a crucial role in social workers’ ability to have a satisfying and successful career. Thus a critical role for social work education is to develop resilience in social work students. We currently need to know more about how to train resilient social workers who will also increase the academic standing of the profession. The specific aim of this research was to quantify characteristics that may contribute towards resilience and academic success among student social workers in order to mitigate against the problems of burn-out and low academic standing. These three characteristics were competence (effectiveness at mastering the environment), autonomy (sense of control and free will), and relatedness (interacting and connecting with others), as specified in Self-Determination Theory (SDT). When these three needs are satisfied, we experience higher degrees of motivation to succeed and wellbeing. Thus when these three needs are met in social work students, they have the potential to raise academic standards and promote wellbeing characteristics that contribute to the development of resilience. The current study tested the hypothesis that higher levels of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as defined by SDT, will predict levels of academic success and resilience in social work students. Two hundred and ten social work students studying at a number of universities completed well-established questionnaires to assess autonomy, competence, and relatedness, level of academic performance and resilience (The Brief Resilience Scale). In this scale, students rated their agreement with items e.g., ‘I bounce back quickly after hard times’ and ‘I usually come through difficult times with little struggle’. After controlling for various factors, including age, gender, ethnicity, and course (undergraduate or pos

We examined children's judgments of the real/not-real status of fictional characters given that such judgments can be based either on the ontological status of the character or on the authenticity of a representation of the character. Sixty 3 - 5 year-olds and 20 adults were shown paired photographs of fictional characters (e.g., Bob the Builder) and people dressing up as those characters (e.g., a person wearing a Bob the Builder costume). They were asked whether each depicted character lives in ‘the real world’ (ontology question) and whether each character is ‘the real’ fictional character (authenticity question), and why. As expected, younger children, and to some extent older children, made more accurate authenticity judgments than ontology judgments about the characters, whereas adults made accurate judgments in reply to both questions. Furthermore, younger children did not differentiate between the two questions in their justifications, unlike the older children and adults. Implications for the development of children's ability to make reality judgments about fictional characters are discussed.

Children's ability to develop an accurate perception of reality, that is differentiate between what is 'real' and 'not-real', is an important issue for research (Harris, 2001). Their understanding of real/not-real distinctions is often assessed using questions containing words such as real and pretend. This is problematic because these words can be used to refer to two different perceptions of reality: existence and authenticity; for example, a question about whether Father Christmas is 'real' can be interpreted as a question about existence (i.e. whether he exists) or about authenticity (i.e. whether someone dressed-up as him is the genuine Father Christmas). The current studies explored children's use and interpretation of words such as real in relation to their understanding of real/not-real distinctions. In Study 1, children's everyday uses of real were analysed from parental diary records and this revealed that they described the authenticity of objects and both the authenticity and existence of fantasy characters. This suggested that in experimental tests children may not interpret a question about existence as intended. This hypothesis was supported in Studies 2-4 in which children justified their real/not-real judgements for everyday objects and fantasy characters by referring to aspects of authenticity and existence. In light of these findings, in Studies 5-7 children's understanding of the ontological status of fantasy characters was compared in two different paradigms: one relied on use of the terms real and not-real (a categorisation task) and the other did not (the Scenarios task, a novel paradigm in which children chose appropriate characters to fulfil certain role$). The results from these tasks revealed that children had a better understanding of the fictional nature of fantasy when the terms real and not-real were not used, suggesting that previous research has underestimated children's understanding in this domain. The discussion centres on the imp