Children and their parents may undergo challenging experiences when admitted for inpatient care at pediatric hospitals. While most hospitals make efforts to provide socio-emotional support for patients and their families during care, gaps still exist between human resource supply and demand. The Huggable project aims to close this gap by creating a social robot able to mitigate stress, anxiety, and pain in pediatric patients by engaging them in playful interactive activities. In this paper, we introduce a larger experimental design to compare the effects of the Huggable robot to a virtual character on a screen and a plush teddy bear, and provide initial qualitative analyses of patients' and parents' behaviors during intervention sessions collected thus far. We demonstrate preliminarily that children are more eager to emotionally connect with and be physically activated by a robot than a virtual character, illustrating the potential of social robots to provide socio-emotional support during inpatient pediatric care.

Despite a long history of critical scholarship in physical education (PE), current research continues to show that PE is an exclusionary and marginalising space for many students. Hawkins suggests that philosophical pragmatism, cultural materialism, and health concerns are driving the field, to the extent that the foundations of PE are in jeopardy, and even in ‘crisis’. These trends are at odds with poststructuralist approaches to the field, and with (continued) calls for critical pedagogical practice. In this article, I reflect on these issues and consider four different approaches to critical pedagogy in the work of: Richard Tinning; Laura Azzarito; my own work with a teacher called Dan; and Kim Oliver and David Kirk. Drawing on this scholarship, I argue that critical practice is needed now more than ever, and I offer some thoughts about the future of this work.

Residents of neighborhoods with limited access to grocery stores may face barriers to obtaining adequate food for a healthy diet. Low‐income elderly may be uniquely affected by these so‐called “food deserts” due to limited transportation options, strong attachments to local neighborhoods, fixed incomes, and physical limitations for food shopping. Using 2006 and 2010 Health and Retirement Study data linked to census tract‐level measures of food deserts, this study measures whether living in a food desert affects food and material hardship, participation in food assistance programs, and the food spending of elderly adults. In both cross‐sectional and fixed effects regressions of elderly residents of urban counties, we find little evidence that living in a food desert affects these outcomes. We find, however, that individuals residing in a food desert without a vehicle are 12 percentage points more likely to report food insufficiency. Those SNAP recipients living in food deserts are 11 percentage points more likely to receive subsidized meals, while nonparticipants in food deserts and SNAP recipients outside of food deserts are less likely to receive subsidized meals. Our findings suggest that seniors without vehicles and SNAP recipients in food deserts may be the most vulnerable to limited food store access.

Beginning in the 1990s, states have received unprecedented flexibility to determine Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility and program administration. We find state SNAP policies accounted for nearly half of the 2000–2016 caseload increase. State economic conditions also play an important role in caseload changes, accounting for almost half of the 2007 through 2013 increase. Within distinct periods of our 1990–2016 data, policy and the economy make different contributions to caseload changes. Policy simulations indicate that mandating states to maintain their 2000 SNAP policies, prior to the greatest expansion in latitude, would have lowered 2000–2016 caseload growth by 38%.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract