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Children experience toxic stress if there is pronounced activation of their stress-response systems, in situations in which they do not have stable caregiving. Due to their exposure to multiple poverty-related risks, African American children may be more susceptible to exposure to toxic stress. Toxic stress affects young children’s brain and neurophysiologic functioning, which leads to a wide range of deleterious health, developmental, and mental health outcomes. Given the benefits of early care and education (ECE) for African American young children, ECE may represent a compensating experience for this group of children, and promote their positive development.

Using a national data set from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort, we examined factors associated with approximately 700 young African American boys’ pre-academic skills. The factors examined included (a) family characteristics, behaviors, and beliefs; (b) nonparental care literacy activities; and (c) child health, aggression, and approaches to learning (e.g., curiosity, independence, and persistence). High achieving boys are contrasted with other boys, along the following dimensions: familial, early childhood program, child characteristics and practices and their pre-academic skills, and whether the association was moderated by achievement status. Regression analyses indicated that some aspects of family, preschool, and child characteristics were associated with African American boys’ early outcomes, especially parental caretaking (e.g., bathing and brushing teeth) and approaches to learning (e.g., persistence and attention). Recommendations for educational practices and policies were offered.

We use Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) data from the United States and Great Britain to investigate the association between adults’ health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top income percentiles from the early 20th century. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to CNEF data from both countries that measure self-reported health of individuals between 1991 and 2007. Observationally, adult men and women in the United States and Great Britain less often report being in better health if inequality was higher in their first five years of life. Although the trend in inequality is similar in both countries over the past century, the empirical association between health and inequality in the United States differs substantially from the estimated relationship in Great Britain. When we control for demographic characteristics, measures of permanent income, and early-life socio-economic status, the health–inequality association remains robust only in the U.S. sample. For the British sample, the added controls drive the coefficient on inequality toward zero and statistical insignificance.

This chapter explores the unique issues related to assessing and instructing linguistically diverse children from birth to five years old in early education settings. This chapter provides a literature review of how family involvement aids in accurate assessment of DLLs language development. First, the chapter provides a summary of the importance of assessing DLLs and the related gaps in the literature. Next, there is a discussion of family involvement in the assessment process, specifically the importance of parent involvement, potential barriers, and the educational placement of DLLs. Then a section about bilingual language acquisition is presented to explain how DLLs acquire English. Drawing on the above literature, the authors advocate for a multifaceted approach in which assessments are conducted in multiple contexts and data are gathered from multiple sources, particularly from parents who are extremely knowledgeable of their children’s abilities and language experiences. Finally, the chapter concludes with a review of current best practices to involve DLL families in assessment and directions for further research.

The twentieth century started writing the history of modern health systems. Their evolvable rate is now higher than ever. The Western Europe was the forefront of setting up the national health systems (NHS) to protect citizens and let them thrive. Successful models progressively crossed the borders and experiences became universal. Hence, this chapter tackles data to perceive the underwent radical transformations and capture intricate aspects to envision the next and get answers time ahead the patients‘needs. Health organizational structures and human resources management play crucially in improving system’s performances: managerial qualities, medical entities’ functionality, results’ forecasting are essential to build up credibility and aid strategic patterns to evolve.

Changes are welcome to better tailor performances, assure successful implementation, avoid inadequate, distressing reforms. Stable and consistent policies are also called for.

Grounded on fundamental patterns, open to applicatory innovation, countries follow specific arrangements to resound with healthcare robustness if goals are well-thought-of: keeping people healthy and safe, identifying and treating defectiveness or abnormal physiological functions affecting people, operations, circuits, and preserving health budget wisely balanced.

Activities and citizens are touched by any structural changes maneuvered. To confront them, a keen eye should be addressed to those nobody’s areas into synergistic efforts to cope with internal causes, face external forces and improve life through fair profitability on the way of full satisfaction.

This discussion paper aims to provide an introduction to revised ways of understanding and approaching the study of hospitality.

In addition to the consideration of hospitality from an array of social science and arts perspectives, the paper advocates an engagement with critical studies tools and concepts. These perspectives allow the study of hospitality which is critical to the deconstruction of meanings of hospitality, and to present an array of insights which better inform visions of the subject.

The paper discusses the importance of critical thinking and outlines three philosophical positions relating to the study of hospitality and hospitality organisations. It suggests that too much academic research appears managerial in focus and is weakened by the lack of critical ways of thinking about hospitality. In particular, the paper goes on to highlight recent developments in hospitality research which are informed by different social science perspectives.

The study is based on a literature review though informed by a number of research projects. Future research projects picking up on the interplay between cultural, domestic and commercial hospitality contexts are major implications of this paper.

The paper implies that commercial and educational hospitality practice would be better informed by both critical perspectives and reference to a number of social science and arts perspectives on hospitality. Competitive business strategies based on customer quality experiences will in future need to be informed by these perspectives.

This paper provides a unique overview of hospitality informed both by hospitality research for careers in hospitality and the study of hospitality as a social interaction. As such it has value to both industry practitioners and to academics interested in studying hospitality and hospitableness.

The field of service research has devoted considerable attention to the customer’s role as value creator, but there is a lack of research on understanding customers’ psychological processes in value creation. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of psychological distance in value-creation processes. Psychological distance is the customer’s perceived distance from service interactions in terms of spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance and hypothetical distance. Critically, psychological distance influences cognitive processes and can influence how customers think and feel about the service interaction. An appreciation of psychological distance within service contexts can help managers to tailor the interaction in order to facilitate value creation.

In this conceptual paper, the authors build on psychology research and service research to develop seven propositions that explore how psychological distance can operate within service interactions and how this might influence value creation.

The authors divide the propositions into three sections. The first concerns how perceived psychological distance from the service interaction can act as a barrier to entering a service interaction. In particular, the authors consider the influence of social distance and spatial distance within the context of service interactions. The second section examines how psychological distance to the expected point of service use can influence how customers construe the service and the value creation. The third aspect addresses customer-specific characteristics that can impact on value creation by influencing perceived psychological distance toward the service.

Existing research suggests that customers ultimately decide if value is created in the interaction. This paper proposes that perceived psychological distance influences customers’ value creation by examining the service interaction from the customer perspective. The authors suggest that complex context-specific features of the service interaction can be understood by considering psychological distance from the service interaction and from the service itself and evaluating how this impacts on value-creation processes.

From a practical point of view, the paper helps managers to better understand how to manage the service interaction with customers by identifying psychological antecedents of customer value creation.

The paper introduces the notion of psychological distance into service research about value, proposing that the customer’s role in creating value in interactions with the service provider is influenced by the psychological distance to the interaction and to the service offered in this interaction.