The influence of students' sociocultural background on academic achievement is a well established fact. Research also points out that sociocultural background is related to students' cognitive abilities and these have an effect on their academic achievement. However, the mediator role of cognitive abilities on the relationship between sociocultural background and academic achievement is less we...

For Malaysian adolescents, writing in English covers various forms and serves a range of purposes. Outside the formal school context, students engage in more personalized forms of writing. This paper examines one such form, namely, the writing of short messages, using a sociocultural perspective of literacy as a social discursive practice that implicates identity construction. This paper draws ...

Cafri, Yamamiya, Brannick, and Thompson (this issue) reported results from a meta-analysis of relations between three sociocultural factors and body image dissatisfaction. Comparison of the effect sizes reveals that internalization of a thin ideal and perceived pressures have significantly stronger relations to body image dissatisfaction than does awareness of a thin ideal. The authors tested f...

This paper presents a sociocultural knowledge ontology (OntoSOC) modeling approach. OntoSOC modeling approach is based on Engeström‟s Human Activity Theory (HAT). That Theory allowed us to identify fundamental concepts and relationships between them. The top-down precess has been used to define differents sub-concepts. The modeled vocabulary permits us to organise data, to facilitate informatio...

The article outlines the problem of understanding mental disorders and the proposed distinctions significant in terms of all research done in the context of the philosophy of psychiatry. Inspired by the phenomenological and hermeneutic approach, engaged epistemology is presented as a tool which helps to reveal the significant aspects of mental illness and psychopathology. By revealing the embod...

Amid the frenzied consumption of villas, clothing, technology, and services characteristic of up-scale living in Amman, the most conspicuous of the conspicuous consumers are popularly identified as wealthy Palestinians who entered Jordan in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This presentation will focus on these “returnees” to Jordan – some of whom had never lived in Jordan pri...

Over the past decade, the Hispanic population has grown in areas with little to no history of recent immigration. Prior research comparing Hispanics in new and established destinations has chiefly focused on differences in socioeconomic indicators of assimilation. Our paper departs from this work by shifting the focus to sociocultural outcomes. Specifically, we use data from Los Angeles and Nor...