Young people’s experiences of parental involvement in youth sport

Recently parental involvement in youth sport has intensified, challenging the understanding of youth sports as an arena where adolescents can develop their identity and autonomy. On this background, our study explores how adolescents understand and negotiate their parents’ involvement in sport and how they define ideal and undesirable forms of parental involvement. Our empirical setting is Norway, and we draw on data from 16 focus group interviews among 13–14-year-olds (n?=?92) recruited from two lower secondary schools. The analysis shows that young people distinguish between different aspects of the sport activity when defining ideal and undesirable forms of parental involvement. When discussing sport as a healthy activity necessary for physical and social development, the young people interviewed approve of parents’ role in regulating and encouraging participation. When considering the athletic aspects and peer sociability, however, they see parental involvement as mostly undesirable. The analysis also shows that the adolescents generally describe their parents as attentive to the boundaries their children draw for them about levels and types of involvement. Therefore, young people should be seen not only as subjected to parental involvement but also as active co-constructors of valid parental roles in and beyond the sporting arena.     

Pollution monitoring by dosimetry and passive diffusion sampling for evaluation of environmental conditions for paintings in microclimate frames

Pollutants and their potential degradation of paintings have been measured for the first time in microclimate frames (mc-frames), which are used to protect paintings. The pollutants that were measured include both inorganic pollutants, which originate mainly from external sources, and organic pollutants from mainly internal sources. Those originating from the outdoors enter rooms and subsequently mc-frames at a rate depending on the ventilation rates (air exchange rates) of the mc-frames. The concentration of gaseous pollutants emitted within the mc-frames will depend on net emission rates of the materials used to make the mc-frames, their design, and their ventilation rates. In the EU PROPAINT project measurements of gaseous air pollutants and climatic conditions were performed at various locations both inside and outside different state-of-the-art mc-frames. Diffusive passive pollution gas samplers were used together with different types of dosimeters. Results show that the dosimeters respond to either the photo-oxidizing conditions or the level of volatile organic acids in the environments both in the museums and within the mc-frames. Two dosimeters, the Early Warning Organic (EWO) made from a synthetic polymer and the Resin Mastic coated Piezo electric Quartz Crystals (RM-PQC) respond to photo-oxidation and showed higher values outside than inside the mc-frames. Two other dosimeters, the Glass Slide Dosimeter (GSD) and the Lead coated Piezo electric Quartz Crystals (L-PQC) respond to volatile organic acids and yielded higher values inside than outside the mc-frames. This study emphasizes the need for further work to determine environmental damage functions for paintings, in particular for the effects of organic acids. Such information is essential for the evaluation of the protective effects of mc-frames for paintings. The use of mc-frames is increasing and it is very important to know that this protective measure does not introduce new risks.     

Infant-directed speech does not always involve exaggerated vowel distinctions: Evidence from Danish

This study compared the acoustic properties of 26 (100% female, 100% monolingual) Danish caregivers' spontaneous speech addressed to their 11- to 24-month-old infants (infant-directed speech, IDS) and an adult experimenter (adult-directed speech, ADS). The data were collected between 2016 and 2018 in Aarhus, Denmark. Prosodic properties of Danish IDS conformed to cross-linguistic patterns, with a higher pitch, greater pitch variability, and slower articulation rate than ADS. However, an acoustic analysis of vocalic properties revealed that Danish IDS had a reduced or similar vowel space, higher within-vowel variability, raised formants, and lower degree of vowel discriminability compared to ADS. None of the measures, except articulation rate, showed age-related differences. These results push for future research to conduct theory-driven comparisons across languages with distinct phonological systems.