Does Music Education Have a Poverty Problem?

In this literature review, I explore poverty, the barriers to participation that exist for students in poverty, and why this issue should matter to music educators. Research findings about students and poverty generally fall into three categories: logistics, teacher attitudes, and policy. I identify participation barriers in each of these categories and offer suggestions how they might be addressed. Overall, findings involving poverty and music education indicate that when teachers are well-supported at the micro and macro level by legislators, administrators, parents, and other teachers, most barriers can be reduced or eliminated, and participation increases.

Making the Case for Women-Specific Recreational Sports

Many men and women participate in recreational sports; however, women often face unique constraints to participation. Because recreational sports should reflect the needs and desires of all, we believe recreational administrators must implement strategies to support women in their communities. Through this commentary, we advocate for best practices that will curtail participation barriers specific to women while, at the same time, create a supportive environment for all participants. The creation of women-specific sporting events and programs may provide a setting where women experience fewer barriers, resulting in increased participation.

Participation in Citizen Science: Insights from the CONECT-e Case Study

Citizen science (CS) is growing quickly, given its potential to enhance knowledge coproduction by diverse participants, generating large and global data sets. However, uneven participation in CS is still an important concern. This work aims to understand (1) participation dynamics in CS and (2) how they are shaped by participation barriers and drivers. We do so by examining participation in CONECT-e, a CS project that uses a wiki-like platform to document traditional ecological knowledge. More precisely, we analyze quantitative data on participants’ profile and activity patterns and qualitative data on barriers and drivers of participation. Our findings suggest that overcoming the education, age, and residence participation barriers is challenging even in cocreated CS projects. This is potentially due to issues of perceived self-illegitimacy and low access to information and communication technologies. Our results also point out that participants’ alliance with the project’s objectives and trust relationships with the project team are important drivers of participation in CS projects. Finally, we also highlight the need to think beyond participation as single actions and rather consider participation diversity in CS as functional diversity in ecosystems, with participants performing a diverse set of interconnected tasks or functions.

An Investigation into the Barriers for University Students to the Use of Recreation Areas

In this research, it is aimed to determine the participation barriers of the students who are studying in sports departments of the university and living in different geographical areas related to the use of recreation area by the municipalities. The study group, the universities in four regions in Turkey 135 girls and 197 boys studying sports science constitute a total of 332 students. As a data collection tool; Gümüs, H. & Alay Özgül, S. The scale of participation barriers to the use of recreation area consisting of 17 questions and five sub-dimensions developed in 2017 was used. The findings show that the data do not have a normal distribution. In the evaluation of the data, Mann Whitney-U test was used for paired comparisons and Kruskall Wallis Analysis test was used for three and more comparisons, and significant differences were found in the sub-dimensions of department variable, gender, place of residence and use of private vehicles (P <0.05).

Reducing research waste by promoting informed responses to invitations to participate in clinical trials

Poor recruitment to, and retention in, clinical trials is a source of research waste that could be reduced by more informed choices about participation. Barriers to effective recruitment and retention can be wide-ranging but relevance of the questions being addressed by trials and the outcomes that they are assessing are key for potential participants. Decisions about trial participation should be informed by general and trial-specific information and by considering broader assessments of ‘informedness’ and how they impact on both recruitment and retention. We suggest that more informed decisions about trial participation should encourage personally appropriate decisions, increase recruitment and retention, and reduce research waste and increase its value.