Analysing Normative Influences on the Prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting among 0–14 Years Old Girls in Senegal: A Spatial Bayesian Hierarchical Regression Approach

Background: Female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) is a harmful traditional practice affecting the health and rights of women and girls. This has raised global attention on the implementation of strategies to eliminate the practice in conformity with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A recent study on the trends of FGM/C among Senegalese women (aged 15–49) which examined how individual- and community-level factors affected the practice, found significant regional variations in the practice. However, the dynamics of the practice among girls (0–14 years old) is not fully understood. This paper attempts to fill this knowledge gap by investigating normative influences in the persistence of the practice among Senegalese girls, identify and map ‘hotspots’. Methods: We do so by using a class of Bayesian hierarchical geospatial modelling approach implemented in R statistical software (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) using R2BayesX package. We employed Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques for full Bayesian inference, while model fit and complexity assessment utilised deviance information criterion (DIC). Results: We found that a girl’s probability of cutting was higher if her mother was cut, supported FGM/C continuation or believed that the practice was a religious obligation. In addition, living in rural areas and being born to a mother from Diola, Mandingue, Soninke or Poular ethnic group increased a girl’s likelihood of being cut. The hotspots identified included Matam, Tambacounda and Kolda regions. Conclusions: Our findings offer a clearer picture of the dynamics of FGM/C practice among Senegalese girls and prove useful in informing evidence-based intervention policies designed to achieve the abandonment of the practice in Senegal.

Unpacking “OK, Boomer”: Using Lifespan Concepts to Ease Intergenerational Conflict

With the “OK, Boomer” media exchange in late 2019, intergenerational conflict is touted as existing at an all-time high. Although the age diversity of today’s workforce is unprecedented, spanning nearly five generations of workers, generational stereotyping and its influence on the identities and experiences of those individuals is not new. In this talk, we will advocate for the role that lifespan developmental psychology can play in preparing students to enter a sometimes contentious, misrepresented multigenerational workforce. We will demonstrate the value of helping students distinguish normative age-graded, normative history-graded, and non-normative influences to better understand individual similarities and differences in developmental experiences. We will discuss research on age identity and generational identity as distinct and self-enhancing life-span processes. Finally, we will highlight the developmental barriers that must be navigated in order to foster intergenerational cohesion.

The Persnickety Pervasiveness of Rating Enhancement in Personality Assessment

The current paper explores whether self and observer reports of personality are properly viewed through a contrasting lens (as opposed to a more consonant framework). Specifically, we challenge the assumption that self-reports are more susceptible to certain forms of response bias than are informant reports. We do so by examining whether selves and observers are similarly or differently drawn to socially desirable and/or normative influences in personality assessment. Targets rated their own personalities and recommended another person to also do so along shared sets of items diversely contaminated with socially desirable content. The recommended informant then invited a third individual to additionally make ratings of the original target. Profile correlations, analysis of variances (ANOVAs), and simple patterns of agreement/disagreement consistently converged on a strong normative effect paralleling item desirability, with all three rater types exhibiting a tendency to reject socially undesirable descriptors while also endorsing desirable indicators. These tendencies were, in fact, more prominent for informants than they were for self-raters. In their entirety, our results provide a note of caution regarding the strategy of using non-self informants as a comforting comparative benchmark within psychological measurement applications.