مطالب

Objective: The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of organizational support on life satisfaction and job satisfaction of female coaches in Isfahan with the mediating role of work-family conflict. Methods:  It was a descriptive – field study and a practical one. The research population was female coaches in Isfahan and 206 coaches in sport complexes were selected through convenience sampling. Cammann’s questionnaire (1983) was used to evaluate job satisfaction, and Diener et al.'s (1985) questionnaire was used to measure life satisfaction. Netemeyer et al.’s questionnaire (1996) was used to assess work-family conflict, and organizational support scale of Eizenberger et al. (1996) was used for measuring organizational support. The reliability of questionnaire was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha; and content, face and structural validity were also conducted to investigate the questionnaire validity. To measure the validity and fitness of the model, structural equation modeling by AMOS20 has been applied. Results: The findings demonstrated that “Organizational support” had a significant effect on “work-family conflict” (β= -0.37), “Job satisfaction” (β= 0.54), “Life satisfaction” (β= 0.48). In addition, “work-family conflict” had a significant effect on “Job satisfaction” (β= -0.31), and “Life satisfaction” (β= -0.26). Moreover, the Sobel test confirmed the role of the mediating variable. The fit indices also confirmed the research model fitness. Conclusion: According to the role of organizational support in decreasing the work-family conflict as well as the effect of work-family conflict on job satisfaction and life satisfaction, to pave the way for presence of females in sport field, sports organizations should plan their strategies by focusing on the concepts and results of this research.

Objective: Unmanaged stress during parenthood can lead to poor performance of the family and inappropriate parenting in general. Therefore, it is necessary to identify optimal methods of dealing with stress. Methods:  The present qualitative study was based on a grounded theory approach. The population included women (living in Tehran in 2021), who were satisfied with their lives and had at least one 6-year old child. After the initial investigation, from among 51 women, 11 women whose level of satisfaction with life was above the mean were selected through purposive sampling method. The research instrument included Diener's (1985) Satisfaction with Life scale and semi-structured interviews. The data obtained from the interview were analyzed through Strauss and Corbin’s method. Results: The qualitative analysis of the interviews showed that satisfied women used strategies, such as preventing the spread of the problem, changing the situation, self-empowerment in processing negative emotions, communication activism, educational activism, conscious problem solving, and seeking professional help to deal with their maternal stress. The central factors included not giving up, solving the problem and activism to solve it. The causal factors included worrying about child's developmental delay/ developmental disorders, financial pressure, and role density/ role conflict. The underlying factors included agreement or disagreement in spouses' training methods, dynamism and activism, modeling and gaining experience, persistence and perseverance, feeling self-inefficiency in training, realism/ perfectionism, mother's independent personality/ feeling lonely, and living in the present time/ worrying about the future. The intervening factors included unwanted pregnancy/ spouse’ unwillingness to have children, perceiving the ineffectiveness of the efforts, comparing the growth of peers, worrying about providing facilities for the child's growth, and weakness in emotional regulation/ depression. The facilitating factors included the calmness of the child, the mother's personal space and recreation, the support of the spouse and families, and the mother's openness to experience. Finally, the consequences of coping with maternal stress included managing the emotions of the mother and the child, the child's taking responsibility, the enrichment of the marital relationship, the intimate relationship/ acceptance, and parents’ acceptance of the child and their companionship. Conclusion: The results of the current study can be the basis for future studies. It can also assist formulating educational and therapeutic programs aimed at dealing with the stress caused by the birth of the first child.

Aim: The sudden outbreak of Covid-19 virus in March and April 2020, sparked an emotional state of anxiety among different groups of society. The aim of the present study was to investigate the psychological predictors of coronavirus anxiety in Iranian young adults. Method: The sample included 517 women and men who responded to four electronic questionnaires which posted on the researchers' Instagram pages between March 11th and 28th 2020. The e-questionnaires included the Corona Anxiety Inventory, the Distress Tolerance Scale (DTS), Revised Health Hardiness (RHHI-24) and the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile (HPLP-II). Results: Data was analyzed by using multi regression method in SPSS -24. The results of regression analysis showed that tolerating emotional distress, health hardiness, and a lifestyle that promotes health can significantly predict the anxiety caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, it turned out that women experience more coronavirus anxiety than their male counterparts. Discussion & Conclusion: It can be concluded that psychological variables in stressful and ambiguous situations can determine the levels of anxiety that individuals experience. Implications for these results and limitations of the present study have been discussed.

The purpose of the present research, investigate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on the fear of negative evaluation and quality of life in people with social anxiety disorder. The current research method was a semi-experimental type with a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of this research consisted of all people with a social anxiety disorder who is 1401, they had referred to the psychology clinics of Mahabad city. From among the statistical population, 20 people were selected as accessible sampling and were randomly divided into 2 groups of 10 people (control group and experimental group). Data collection was done by using of Jerabek Social Anxiety Scale, Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (BFNES), and Brief Quality of Life scale (QOL). The acceptance and commitment therapy protocol was implemented in 8 sessions of 90 minutes, once a week for the experimental group. Data were analyzed by SPSS-22 software. In addition to descriptive statistics, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to analyze the data. The findings obtained from the analysis of variance showed that there is a significant difference between the control and experimental groups in the post-test stage in reducing the fear of negative evaluation and increasing the quality of life. This research shows that acceptance and commitment therapy is useful for people with social anxiety disorder and can be used as a psychological intervention along with other interventions.

The measurement of test-taking strategies and practices, mostly studied through qualitative methods, has been an important aspect of language testing and assessment research. The current study examines the test-taking strategies of International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test-takers and reports the process of designing and validating an IELTS test-taking strategy questionnaire. To achieve this aim, a questionnaire with 62 items was developed and piloted on 534 IELTS test-takers. To ensure its validity, the questionnaire results were analyzed through Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses (EFA and CFA). The final 49-item instrument with eight factors, “test-management (TM)” and “test-wiseness (TW)” strategies in each skill, had adequate psychometric properties. The findings revealed positive correlations between TM and TW strategies, representing strong correlations between Reading TM and Listening TM, Reading TW and Listening TW, and Listening TM and Speaking TM. The developed questionnaire can serve as a diagnostic tool to monitor test-takers’ performance and strategies, mainly in high-stakes tests like IELTS.

The contemporary era of learning-oriented assessment demands for teacher professional efforts to appropriately and accurately assess learners' attainment and use the assessment results for the enhancement of learning. In second/foreign language (L2) teaching discipline, this has recently brought language assessment literacy (LAL) to the forefront, with an increasing emphasis on teachers' professionalism of this concept. Given this, L2 teachers' mastery of practical and technical skills, as prescribed by the exiting LAL models, could not be entirely complete nor enhanced without their conceptions of assessment and beliefs system. To illuminate these dimensions, the present study aimed to develop and validate a LAL scale which could have relevance to L2 localized contexts. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses of data from a sample of L2 teachers (N=213) provided empirical evidence supporting the utility and validity of the scale. The paper concludes with the importance of teachers' conceptions of LAL and implications of the findings.

The present qualitative research sought to investigate EFL teacher educators’ experiences and attitudes toward critical thinking and its role in teacher professional development. The adopted design was a case study and the theoretical framework was the theory of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1978). For the data collection purpose, 30 EFL teacher educators participated in in-depth interviews. The  whole procedure of  the data collection was audiotaped for further reference in data analysis. The interviews were transcribed to familiarize with the data and the transcribed interviews were member checked with the participants. The collected data were analyzed through reflective thematic analysis. The data analyzed paved the way for generating three themes: cognition, metacognition , and personal growth/self attainment . The findings of the study comprise a number of implicatios for both theory and practice. One aspect of our contribution is that the notion of critical thinking can be conceived as more than cognitive and metacognitive one; it should be conceptualized as possessing both facets as well as other possible subsets. Beyond that, we suggest that critical thinking should be conjectured as being both a process and a product.

Given the seemingly important link between children’s working memory (WM) and their scholastic performance, it would be a worthwhile research enquiry to explore language learning as one potential way to improve WM. To this end, the present study examined the impact of two language teaching paradigms, namely, Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) and Total Physical Response (TPR), on children’s WM over time. Seventy participants, aged 8 to 9 years, were administered tests of phonological, visuo-spatial sketchpad and central executive components, and made up TPR, PPP and control groups for a period of three months. Then, a posttest and a delayed posttest were administered to identify whether the treatments led to significant improvements. The results of the 3 WM measures indicated that the 2 interventions led to certain improvements. Whereas TPR led to significant improvements in the central executive, PPP produced significantly higher gains in phonological memory over time. Neither treatment induced any positive impact on the visuospatial sketchpad. The results lend evidence to the trainability of WM. It is also suggested that language learning experiences have long-lasting repercussions and that each language learning experience can impact certain components of WM.