International Child Development Initiatives (ICDI) is a Dutch non-profit organization with a world-wide brief, and a focus on transitional and developing countries. ICDI promotes the well-being of children growing up in difficult circumstances. As a result of the global recession, 2009 was a challenging year for many organizations working in the…

Higher rates of smoking initiation and continuation by female compared with male adolescents, as found in many developed countries, may call for gender-specific prevention programs. Risk factors of smoking initiation and continuation were examined prospectively (1997-2002) among 3205 Dutch elementary schoolchildren (mean age 11.64) in an…

Contends that developmental, determinist, and contextualist psychologists, although all studying reminiscence in older adults, have not fully acknowledged the role the environment plays in establishing reminiscent behavior in elderly people. Suggests including sociological life course theory in the analyses and interpretation of this behavior.…

Accumulating evidence suggests that anxiety sensitivity (fear of arousal-related sensations) plays an important role in many clinical conditions, particularly anxiety disorders. Research has increasingly focused on how the basic dimensions of anxiety sensitivity are related to various forms of psychopathology. Such work has been hampered because…

To enable improvements in school health promotion, this paper examines associations between the number of health-promotion issues addressed by primary school teachers in the Netherlands and factors thought to influence this behavior. The main factors studied are context characteristics and constructs of attitude, social influence, self-efficacy…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to explore the beliefs of 15-17 year-old Dutch adolescents about starting or quitting smoking and to explore their preferences regarding education concerning this topic. Design/methodology/approach: The paper shows that a total of 12 group interviews were held with 101 students in the highest classes in secondary…

Randomized response (RR) is a well-known method for measuring sensitive behavior. Yet this method is not often applied because: (i) of its lower efficiency and the resulting need for larger sample sizes which make applications of RR costly; (ii) despite its privacy-protection mechanism the RR design may not be followed by every respondent; and…

Current educational reforms encompass increasing freedom of parental choice. Parental choice is seen as a stimulus for school improvement and school quality control. One of the central thoughts behind freedom of parental choice is that the quality of education will increase when the educational system has to act using market mechanisms, in which…

Studied positive and negative self-esteem among 1,070 Turkish and Moroccan early adolescents in the Netherlands. Findings show the usefulness of distinguishing between positive and negative self-esteem when studying global self-esteem among a dolescents. (SLD)

This article describes preschool social understanding and difficult behaviors (hot temper, disobedience, bossiness and bullying) as predictors of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and aggressive conduct disorder (ACD) in a Dutch population sample of (pre)adolescents (N = 1943), measured at age 10-12 and at age 13-15. ODD and ACD were assessed by…

Virtual environments are able to extend the space of interaction beyond the classroom. In order to analyze how distributed cognition functions in such an extended space, we suggest focusing on the architecture of intersubjectivity. The Euroland project--a virtual land created and populated by seven classrooms supported by a team of…

On March 5, 1980, the "World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development" (WCS) report was submitted to the Dutch government. The Nature Conservation Education Committee (CNBE) was then asked to prepare another report based on its initial reactions to the WCS, particularly to section 13, which deals…

A STUDY WAS CONDUCTED WHICH CONSIDERED SELECTED EUROPEAN EXPERIENCES INVOLVING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN RELIGION AND PUBLIC EDUCATION AS RELATED TO ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY, NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL POLICY. THE PUBLIC EDUCATIONAL POLICIES OF ENGLAND, THE NETHERLANDS, AND SWEDEN WERE EXAMINED BY MEANS OF LITERATURE SEARCHES, OBSERVATIONS, INTERVIEWS, AND…

The background and development of "capacity planning," the procedure of reconciling social demand with government funding, in non-university-based professional education in the Netherlands is outlined. Issues arising from it are discussed. (MSE)

Education is a dynamic cultural process to which individuals contribute their cultural identity and in which they enter into dialogue with each other. Each participant gives a personal meaning to the subject matter and to the interpersonal behavior norms. The question in this article is: what does education perceive of major cultural incidents in…