Digital media are settings in which early adolescents negotiate privacy, respect, consent, responsibility and care. This focused mixed-methods secondary analysis brings together responses from 612 Year 8 students in Malta and interviews with 19 education and youth-support professionals. Students strongly endorsed privacy and respectful communication: 96.0% considered online privacy important, 90.3% agreed that they tried to communicate respectfully, 77.2% reported always or often seeking permission before sharing another person’s image, and 80.0% reported always or often checking information before sharing it. Responses were more varied for cyberbullying and screen-time self-regulation: 24.4% selected ignoring online bullying as their most representative response, and 22.4% were unsure whether they prevented screen time from interfering with important activities. Students’ open responses foregrounded kindness, non-harm, privacy, consent and reflection. Professionals highlighted peer belonging, visibility, social validation and reduced inhibition in adolescents’ digital environments. Bringing these perspectives together identifies common concerns alongside tensions between endorsed values, reported practices and the social settings of online interaction. The findings position digital citizenship as a relational dimension of applied values education and indicate directions for further student-centred research.
Student-athletes are individuals who are simultaneously involved in sports and academic activities—a dual career. In order to support their parallel career paths, public support policies are necessary, including those related to athletic grants. This article aimed to analyze institutional athletic grant programs for student-athletes affiliated with Brazilian federal universities. This is a quantitative, cross-sectional, exploratory, and documentary study based on the analysis of public calls for athletic grants. The sample consisted of 69 Brazilian federal universities, of which 68 responded to the survey, but only 11 reported having implemented an athletic grant program for athletes in 2023. Only 16% of Brazilian federal universities offer institutional athletic grants. The results indicate a median of 32 athletic grants advertised, with a median amount of R$ 400.00 (four hundred reais), to be paid for a median of 8.5 months. The maximum amounts advertised were 72 athletic grants, R$ 700.00 (seven hundred reais), and 12 months. The minimum amount was 1 athletic grant, R$ 195.00 (one hundred ninety-five reais), and five months. It can be concluded that the policy of awarding athletic grants in Brazilian federal universities is in an early stage of development, predominantly located in regions that do not have sports clubs, with appropriate amounts that are funded for only a limited number of months.
Despite the existence of formal Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for homicide investigation, little is known about how these procedures are implemented in resource-constrained policing environments. This study explores the disconnection between formally prescribed homicide investigation procedures and everyday investigative practice within the Nigeria Police Force (NPF). Guided by Meyer and Rowan’s institutional theory and Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy theory, the study employed a qualitative research design involving semi-structured interviews with 15 experienced homicide investigators drawn from the Homicide Sections of the Lagos State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) and the Force Criminal Investigation Department (FCID), Lagos. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings revealed three interrelated themes: (1) resource constraints and investigative improvisation; (2) sociocultural and religious practices; and (3) organisational culture and homicide investigative practice. Participants described how chronic shortages of personnel, operational funding, logistics, and forensic resources routinely necessitated discretionary decision-making and informal investigative practices. Deeply rooted cultural and religious beliefs, particularly those surrounding postmortem examinations, further constrained the application of standard investigative procedures. The findings also demonstrate that organisational norms and institutional practices frequently diverged from formal procedural expectations, resulting in routine procedural adaptations. Rather than representing individual non-compliance, these departures reflect institutional decoupling in which frontline investigators adapt their practices to sustain investigations under structural constraints. The study contributes to the literature on policing in resource-constrained settings by demonstrating how institutional conditions shape investigative practice. It argues that improving homicide investigations requires not only stronger procedural guidance but also sustained investment in forensic infrastructure, operational resources, personnel development, and organisational accountability to reduce the persistent gap between policy and practice.
Deaths from natural causes (e.g., cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and cancers) are increasing in prisons in England and Wales. Many are believed to be avoidable and related to prisoner premature mortality. The circumstances around each death in custody are investigated by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO), who provides recommendations for improvement. Learning from these recommendations can inform future healthcare to prevent avoidable deaths and improve the management of chronic diseases related to natural-cause deaths. Fatal Incident reports were accessed from the PPO website for deaths from natural causes in Welsh prisons between January 2013 and December 2022. Inductive content analysis was used to organise the recommendations into themes. Descriptive analyses subsequently profiled the characteristics of the deaths. Themes were analysed to inform the design of future prison healthcare. A total of 165 PPO recommendations were analysed from 51 reports. Six themes were identified: care planning and provision, transportation, emergency response, administrative, fundamental safety, and system level. Learning from natural-cause deaths can inform suggestions for future models of prison healthcare delivery. Learning emphasises the need for improvements in electronic sharing of clinical records, strengthening the links between prison health services and governance processes of national health provision, and sharing learning at a system level to drive system improvements.
What counts as meaningful change in a closed forensic inpatient institution when social reintegration and independent living are not realistic possibilities? Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian forensic psychiatry, this article follows Albert, a man who entered medium-security care after nearly forty years of imprisonment. Through participant observation, informal conversation, shared activities and collaborative discussions of ethnographic writing, I explore how Albert navigates what he calls his ‘blue’ and ‘black’ world: the familiar and relatively predictable, and the unfamiliar and unsettling. Over time, these worlds shifted through ordinary encounters involving caregivers, familiar objects and shared spaces. An invitation to pull weeds opened a previously avoided courtyard, caring for a sunflower extended this movement into a communal garden, where its subsequent destruction exposed the fragility of these openings. Drawing on phenomenological anthropology, I approach ‘inhabitability’ as a way of examining how particular relations make a constrained world possible to live in, without necessarily making it safe or one’s own. Albert’s singular trajectory suggests that meaningful change may emerge not through increasing independence, but through changing possibilities for engagement, retreat, and return within enduring institutional constraints.
