Category: Learning & Education

AVMA: Study seeks to explain feminization of veterinary profession

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 14, 2011

A Dec. 15 article on the web site of the American Veterinary Medical Association covers the research of SMU sociologist Anne E. Lincoln in which she explains the changing face of veterinary medicine.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at SMU, Lincoln is an expert on how occupations transition from being either male- or female-dominated.

AVMA writer Malinda Larkin notes that Lincoln’s research has found that women now dominate the field of veterinary medicine — the result of a nearly 40-year trend that is likely to repeat itself in the fields of medicine and law. Lincoln found three factors that appear to be driving the change: the 1972 federal amendment that outlaws discrimination against female students; male applicants to graduate schools who may be deterred by a growing number of women enrolling; and the increasing number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees in numbers that far exceed those of male graduates, Lincoln says.

Read the full story.

Excerpt:

By Malinda Larkin
American Veterinary Medical Association
The fact that women will soon dominate the field of veterinary medicine has been widely reported (see JAVMA, Feb. 15, 2010, page 376). As of 2010, the veterinary profession is about 50 percent men and 50 percent women for the first time, according to AVMA figures, while enrollment in veterinary colleges is about 80 percent women.

Yet, the cause behind this increase in the percentage of female veterinarians isn’t as well known. Recently, a sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas endeavored to find an answer.

Anne E. Lincoln, PhD, is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at SMU and an expert on how occupations transition from being male- or female-dominated.

Her study, “The Shifting Supply of Men and Women to Occupations: Feminization in Veterinary Education,” was published in the July 2010 issue of Social Forces.

Dr. Lincoln analyzed “the feminization of veterinary medicine” from a different perspective: by examining data from the pool of applicants to U.S. veterinary schools and colleges from 1975-1995. (After 1995, veterinary schools implemented varying application procedures, making comparisons unreliable.) The Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges supplied data from its annual, confidential survey of all U.S. veterinary schools and colleges for the study.

Conventional occupational research identifies a flip in the gender make-up of a profession by looking at the number of men and women who get hired into that profession, Dr. Lincoln said. Her study broke with that convention, and, instead, measured the number of men and women applying for enrollment in training programs.

Read the full story.

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News

Dallas Morning News: ‘Meta-parenting’ helps you give better guidance

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 10, 2011

Dallas Morning News reporter Tyra Damm interviewed SMU Psychology Professor George W. Holden about a new parenting theory he’s developed that bridges the long-standing conflict between the nature vs. nurture models of child development.

Called “meta-parenting, Holden’s model holds that how a child turns out is a factor of both nature and nurture — as well as parental guidance shaped by a child’s own strengths.

Holden calls the new theory meta-parenting and explains that it goes beyond the “either-or” conflict of nature vs. nurture. Damm’s article “‘Meta-parenting’ helps you give better guidance” features a question and answer with Holden.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Tyra Damm
Dallas Morning News
Dr. George Holden, a psychologist and professor at Southern Methodist University, studies relationships between parents and children. He’s also the proud dad of three children — a recent college graduate, a college junior and a high school student.

Holden’s most recent publication, in the journal Child Development Perspectives, describes the role that parents play in directing children along developmental paths.

His theory is that parents who provide the best guidance are those who recognize a child’s strengths, help that child according to his needs and redirect when obstacles get in the way.

I spoke with Dr. Holden this week about his research. Here are excerpts.

Can you explain the theory you’ve written about?

One of the unrecognized, important roles that parents play is to guide their children on positive pathways of development. There are many different kinds of pathways: academic, learning, school-focused, social competence, athletic, musical, religious.

Some parents are into politics and rear their children to be politically savvy. Some parents of girls think, “What do I need to do to raise my daughter so she can get married?” Some have a general pathway of keeping the child from becoming a criminal.

What I argue is that part of the role of parents is to help the child identify where strengths and talents lie so they can develop the strengths and foster self-esteem.

Is the ability to provide good guidance innate? Or do parents who provide the best guidance have to study and work to get there?

Generally I’d say parents who are more conscious about it are going to do a good job. It’s what I call meta-parenting, that is, parents thinking about their children and child-rearing outside of ongoing reactions.

Meta-parenting has four components: anticipating, assessing the child, problem solving and reflecting. All of those components are used and needed in the process of guidance.

When a child goes off track — with a peer problem, a health problem, dyslexia — how does the parent go about making course corrections? Do they take action or not? Do they choose a good solution? Who do they turn to? Do they get good sources of information to deal with the problem?

Read the full story.

Tags George W. Holden, SMU Department of Psychology

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2010 a year of advances for SMU scientific researchers at the vanguard of those helping civilization

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 21, 2010

From picking apart atomic particles at Switzerland’s CERN, to unraveling the mysterious past, to delving into the human psyche, SMU researchers are in the vanguard of those helping civilization understand more and live better.

With both public and private funding — and the assistance of their students — they are tackling such scientific and social problems as brain diseases, immigration, diabetes, evolution, volcanoes, panic disorders, childhood obesity, cancer, radiation, nuclear test monitoring, dark matter, the effects of drilling in the Barnett Shale, and the architecture of the universe.

The sun never sets on SMU research
Besides working in campus labs and within the Dallas-area community, SMU scientists conduct research throughout the world, including at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and in Angola, the Canary Islands, Mongolia, Kenya, Italy, China, the Congo Basin, Ethiopia, Mexico, the Northern Mariana Islands and South Korea.

“Research at SMU is exciting and expanding,” says Associate Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies James E. Quick, a professor in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. “Our projects cover a wide range of problems in basic and applied research, from the search for the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN to the search for new approaches to treat serious diseases. The University looks forward to creating increasing opportunities for undergraduates to become involved as research expands at SMU.”

Funding from public and private sources
In 2009-10, SMU received $25.6 million in external funding for research, up from $16.5 million the previous year.

“Research is a business that cannot be grown without investment,” Quick says. “Funding that builds the research enterprise is an investment that will go on giving by enabling the University to attract more federal grants in future years.”

The funding came from public and private sources, including the National Science Foundation; the National Institutes of Health; the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Energy; the U.S. Geological Survey; Google.org; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Texas’ own Hogg Foundation for Mental Health; and the Texas Instruments Foundation.

Worldwide, the news media are covering SMU research. See some of the coverage. Browse a sample of the research:

CERN and the origin of our universe
Led by Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU physics researchers belong to the global consortium of scientists investigating the origins of our universe by monitoring high-speed sub-atomic particle collisions at CERN, the world’s largest physics experiment.

Compounds to fight neurodegenerative diseases

Synthetic organic chemist and Chemistry Professor Edward Biehl leads a team developing organic compounds for possible treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s. Preliminary investigation of one compound found it was extremely potent as a strong, nontoxic neuroprotector in mice.

Hunting dark matter
Assistant Professor of Physics Jodi Cooley belongs to a high-profile international team of experimental particle physicists searching for elusive dark matter — believed to constitute the bulk of the matter in the universe — at an abandoned underground mine in Minnesota, and soon at an even deeper mine in Canada.

Robotic arms for injured war vets

Electrical Engineering Chairman and Professor Marc Christensen is director of a new $5.6 million center funded by the Department of Defense and industry. The center will develop for war veteran amputees a high-tech robotic arm with fiber-optic connectivity to the brain capable of “feeling” sensations.

Green energy from the Earth’s inner heat

The SMU Geothermal Laboratory, under Earth Sciences Professor David Blackwell, has identified and mapped U.S. geothermal resources capable of supplying a green source of commercial power generation, including resources that were much larger than expected under coal-rich West Virginia.

Exercise can be magic drug for depression and anxiety

Psychologist Jasper Smits, director of the Anxiety Research and Treatment Program at SMU, says exercise can help many people with depression and anxiety disorders and should be more widely prescribed by mental health care providers.

The traditional treatments of cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy don’t reach everyone who needs them, says Smits, an associate professor of psychology.

Virtual reality “dates” to prevent victimization

SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles, Renee McDonald and Lorelei Simpson have partnered with SMU Guildhall in developing an interactive video gaming environment where women on virtual-reality dates can learn and practice assertiveness skills to prevent sexual victimization.

With assertive resistance training, young women have reduced how often they are sexually victimized, the psychologists say.

Controlled drug delivery agents for diabetes
Associate Chemistry Professor Brent Sumerlin leads a team of SMU chemistry researchers — including postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students — who fuse the fields of polymer, organic and biochemistries to develop novel materials with composite properties. Their research includes developing nano-scale polymer particles to deliver insulin to diabetics.

Sumerlin, associate professor of chemistry, was named a 2010-2012 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, which carries a $50,000 national award to support his research.

Human speed
An expert on the locomotion of humans and other terrestrial animals, Associate Professor of Applied Physiology and Biomechanics Peter Weyand has analyzed the biomechanics of world-class athletes Usain Bolt and Oscar Pistorius. His research targets the relationships between muscle function, metabolic energy expenditure, whole body mechanics and performance.

Weyand’s research also looks at why smaller people tire faster. Finding that they have to take more steps to cover the same distance or travel at the same speed, he and other scientists derived an equation that can be used to calculate the energetic cost of walking.

Pacific Ring of Fire volcano monitoring
An SMU team of earth scientists led by Professor and Research Dean James Quick works with the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire near Guam on the Northern Mariana Islands. Their research will help predict and anticipate hazards to the islands, the U.S. military and commercial jets.

The two-year, $250,000 project will use infrasound — in addition to more conventional seismic monitoring — to “listen” for signs a volcano is about to blow.

Reducing anxiety and asthma
A system of monitoring breathing to reduce CO2 intake is proving useful for reducing the pain of chronic asthma and panic disorder in separate studies by Associate Psychology Professor Thomas Ritz and Assistant Psychology Professor Alicia Meuret.

The two have developed the four-week program to teach asthmatics and those with panic disorder how to better control their condition by changing the way they breathe.

Breast Cancer community engagement
Assistant Psychology Professor Georita Friersen is working with African-American and Hispanic women in Dallas to address the quality-of-life issues they face surrounding health care, particularly during diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

Friersen also examines health disparities regarding prevention and treatment of chronic diseases among medically underserved women and men.

Paleoclimate in humans’ first environment
Paleobotanist and Associate Earth Sciences Professor Bonnie Jacobs researches ancient Africa’s vegetation to better understand the environmental and ecological context in which our ancient human ancestors and other mammals evolved.

Jacobs is part of an international team of researchers who combine independent lines of evidence from various fossil and geochemical sources to reconstruct the prehistoric climate, landscape and ecosystems of Ethiopia in particular. She also identifies and prepares flora fossil discoveries for Ethiopia’s national museum.

Ice Age humans

Anthropology Professor David Meltzer explores the western Rockies of Colorado to understand the prehistoric Folsom hunters who adapted to high-elevation environments during the Ice Age.

Meltzer, a world-recognized expert on paleoIndians and early human migration from eastern continents to North America, was inducted into the National Academy of Scientists in 2009.

Understanding evolution
The research of paleontologist Alisa WInkler focuses on the systematics, paleobiogeography and paleoecology of fossil mammals, in particular rodents and rabbits.

Her study of prehistoric rodents in East Africa and Texas, such as the portion of jaw fossil pictured, is helping shed more light on human evolution.

Tags Alicia Meuret, Alisa J. WInkler, Bonnie F. Jacobs, Brent Sumerlin, David Blackwell, David Meltzer, Edward Biehl, Ernest Jouriles, Georita Friersen, James E. Quick, Jasper Smits, Jodi Cooley, Lorelei Simpson, Lorelei Simpson Rowe, Marc Christensen, Peter Weyand, Renee McDonald, Ryszard Stroynowski, Thomas Ritz

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New child development theory bridges nature vs. nurture; parental guidance shapes child’s strengths

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 1, 2010

How a child turns out determined by nature, nurture — and parental guidance shaped by child’s strengths

Why does a child grow up to become a lawyer, a politician, a professional athlete, an environmentalist or a churchgoer?

It’s determined by our inherited genes, say some researchers. Still others say the driving force is our upbringing and the nurturing we get from our parents.

But a new child-development theory bridges those two models, says psychologist George W. Holden at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Holden’s theory holds that the way a child turns out can be determined in large part by the day-to-day decisions made by the parents who guide that child’s growth.

“This model helps to resolve the nature-nurture debate,” Holden says. “Effective parents are taking nature into account in their nurturing. It’s a slightly different twist.”

Parental guidance is key
Child development researchers largely have ignored the importance of parental “guidance,” Holden says. In his model, effective parents observe, recognize and assess their child’s individual genetic characteristics, then cultivate their child’s strengths.

“It’s been said that parents are the ‘architect’ or the ‘conductor’ of a child’s development. There are lots of different synonyms, but the terms don’t capture the essence that parents are trying to ‘guide,'” Holden says. “Some parents have more refined goals — like wanting their child to be an athlete or to have a particular career. Some have more general goals — such as not wanting their child to become a criminal. But all are positive goals.”

Holden describes and explains his theory and research in the article “Childrearing and Developmental Trajectories: Positive Pathways, Off-ramps, and Dynamic Processes” in the current issue of the journal Child Development Perspectives. The theory is also detailed in his child psychology textbook, “Parenting, A Dynamic Perspective,” published by Sage Publications Inc., 2010.

Parents help or hinder progress
In decades past, researchers have studied many aspects of parenting that Holden describes as “unidimensional” and easier to quantify than guidance. Examples include: how parents reinforce their children’s behavior, punish their children or show them love and warmth.

Only in the last decade have researchers studied the role parents play in helping or hindering their child’s progress toward — or abandonment of — a particular course of development, he says.

“It’s not an easy set of behaviors to observe and quantify because it’s more complex in that it relates to parental goals that they have for their children,” he says. “It’s also multi-faceted. It’s not a simple unitary behavior that can be easily and reliably counted up. So there are methodological reasons it hasn’t been studied, and there are also biases and theoretical orientations that have neglected this.”

The time has come, however, to understand the impact of parental guidance, Holden says. Sophisticated statistical procedures now allow new research techniques such as growth-curve modeling and group-based trajectory analysis. Other child development experts have ventured into the interaction between child and parent trajectories, says Holden. He hopes many more will join in advancing the concept, which he considers critical to understanding child development.

“I’m certainly not the first to think of this, but I’ve framed it a little differently and a little more comprehensively than it’s been discussed before,” Holden says. “I’m sure there are things I haven’t thought of, so hopefully this will generate discussion, research and modification. And I hope it will trickle down to parents so they can see the critical role they can play in helping their children develop in positive ways.”

Pathways or trajectories
In his conceptual framework, Holden hypothesizes that parents guide their children’s development in four complex and dynamic ways:

Parents initiate trajectories, sometimes trying to steer their child in a preferred developmental path based on either the parents’ preferences or their observations of the child’s characteristics and abilities, such as enrolling their child in a class, exposing them to people and places, or taking a child to practices or lessons;
Parents also sustain their child’s progress along trajectories with encouragement and praise, by providing material assistance such as books, equipment or tutoring, and by allocating time to practice or participate in certain activities;
Parents mediate trajectories, which influences how their child perceives and understands a trajectory, and help their child steer clear of negative trajectories by preparing the child to deal with potential problems;
Finally, parents react to child-initiated trajectories.

Trajectories are useful images for thinking about development because one can easily visualize concepts like “detours,” “roadblocks” and “off-ramps,” Holden says. Detours, he says, are transitional events that can redirect a pathway, such as divorce. Roadblocks are events or behavior that shut down a potential trajectory, such as teen pregnancy, which can block an educational path. Off-ramps are exits from a positive trajectory, such as abusing drugs, getting bullied or joining a gang.

Holden says there are other ways parents influence a child’s progress on a trajectory, such as through modeling desired behaviors, or modifying the speed of development by controlling the type and number of experiences.

Some of the ways in which children react to trajectories include accepting, negotiating, resisting or rejecting them, he says.

“Some factors that also can influence trajectories include the family’s culture, their income and family resources, and the quality of the parent-child relationship,” says Holden. “What this model of parenting helps to point out is that effective parenting involves guiding children in such a way as to ensure that they are developing along positive trajectories.”

Holden is a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology. — Margaret Allen

SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with Dr. Holden or to book him in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

Tags George W. Holden, SMU Department of Psychology

Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

Toronto Star: Male students getting rare as hen’s teeth at Ontario Veterinary College

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 29, 2010

A Nov. 27 article in the Toronto Star newspaper cites the research of SMU sociologist Anne E. Lincoln in which she explains the changing face of veterinary medicine.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at SMU, Lincoln is an expert on how occupations transition from being either male- or female-dominated.

Toronto Star journalist Leslie Scrivener notes that Lincoln’s research has found that women now dominate the field of veterinary medicine — the result of a nearly 40-year trend that is likely to repeat itself in the fields of medicine and law. Lincoln found three factors that appear to be driving the change: the 1972 federal amendment that outlaws discrimination against female students; male applicants to graduate schools who may be deterred by a growing number of women enrolling; and the increasing number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees in numbers that far exceed those of male graduates, Lincoln says.

Read the full story.

Excerpt:

By Leslie Scrivener
Toronto Star
At this time of year, as Elizabeth Lowenger scouts out new students for the venerable Ontario Veterinary College, she eyes candidates with good marks — usually the mid-80s.

Among those high achievers she’s particularly interested in are those who for generations were the mainstay of veterinary medicine and now are rare as white horses — men.

She makes sure there are images of men on recruitment pamphlets and videos. When choosing students to speak on behalf of the college at high school career days, she ensures that men are included. “Everything I do has to have a male on it, but not exclusively,” says Lowenger, diversity and careers coordinator for the oldest veterinary college in Canada and the United States. “We have to make sure that they can say, ‘I can see myself there.’ ”

That might be a problem these days. Of the 114 students who entered the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine program at the Guelph campus this fall, 87 per cent are women. The dean is also a woman, while the faculty is about 60 per cent male.

The feminization of veterinary medicine, as researchers call it, is not lost on practitioners. “It’s gotten so it’s like the last of the Mohicans out there,” says one woman veterinarian. “You occasionally work with a male.”

The gender disparity has evolved over decades.

Dr. John Reeve-Newson still remembers how an assistant dean targeted the handful of women students in a discouraging “welcome” address at the college in 1960.

It went something like: “Ladies, I don’t think you should be here and I will do everything in my power to see that you don’t stay.”

How did he intend to achieve that, one might wonder.

“Ride their ass,” recalls Reeve-Newson, a Toronto veterinarian with a Mutual Street practice.

By 1971, when Dr. Jiggs Gough of Mount Brydges, Ont., graduated from the college, she was one of eight women. “They were aghast,” she says of the administration. “They thought the place was going to the rats.”

Things at veterinary schools have shifted dramatically in 40 years, and those changes reflect shifts in society at large. Lowenger says statistics show fewer men are going to university — more than 60 per cent of university graduates are women. Men still want to go to vet school, she contends, but fewer of them are studying science, and women are outperforming them.

More women than men are graduating in other professions. Sixty per cent of the youngest lawyers in Ontario are women, and nearly 60 per cent of the 2010 graduates from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine are women.

Men tend to avoid professions that are dominated by women, argues Anne Lincoln, a professor of sociology at Southern Methodist University, adding that veterinary medicine was once the most male-dominated profession in the U.S. Until 1972, she reports, Cornell University capped women’s enrolment in veterinary medicine at two per year.

“There’s something about the presence of women (in the classroom) that serves as a deterrent,” she says in a phone interview. Her research, reported in the July issue of the journal Social Forces, notes that for every one per cent increase in women in veterinary college, about 1.7 fewer men apply the following year.

Read the full story.

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, SMU Department of Sociology

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How a child turns out determined by nature, nurture — and parental guidance shaped by child’s strengths

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