Karen Thorpe
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 92118 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Karen Thorpe |
| NOMBRES | Karen |
| APELLIDO | Thorpe |
| FIRMA | THORPE K |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8927-4064 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 115 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 59 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1993 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The Challenge of Improving Sleep Practices in Childcare Services
In developed nations childcare attendance is an integral part of early life for most children. Provision for sleep in this context is commonly enacted as a single mandatory period of lying down. Yet, younger children often require multiple sleep-times, and many older children will cease to require daytime sleep. Waking of sleeping children and distress among non-sleepers is often observed with resulting adverse effects. The benefit of interventio…
Talking Minds
Children's exposure to mental state language (MSL) has implications for their social, emotional and cognitive developmental outcomes. Although parental MSL is found to vary as a function of child gender, gender differences in children's MSL exposure are yet to be considered in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) context. This study examined whether changes in the gender composition of child‐groups were associated with educators’ use of …
At the margin and in the centre
Men remain underrepresented in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), comprising fewer than 4% of the workforce across OECD countries including the site of this study, Australia. Despite global efforts to increase male participation, men are often the solo male educator and face both stigma as deviants and valorisation as pioneers. The extent to which these binary framings inform men’s professional identity is not well understood. Using frame…
The challenges of challenging behaviour
Amplifying children’s leadership roles and voice in decision-making through co-production in outside of school hours care
Background There is scant research examining evidence-based processes and practices that delineate how to include the voices of children in service design and delivery in school age care environments such as Outside of School Hours Care (OSHC). A possible structure to support children to share leadership in design of their OSHC program and have a meaningful voice in decision-making is co-production, whereby children and their OSHC communities hav…
Policy to practice
Each week, over a million Australian children are dropped-off and picked-up from an early childhood education and care (ECEC) service. The transitions between caregivers that occur at these times present opportunities to directly observe relationships between children, families, and educators at a point of potential stress. In this paper we converge analyses of two data sources to ask whether such transitions are barometers of quality in ECEC ser…
Improving Australia’s quality rating and improvement systems for early childhood education and care
Australia’s Productivity Commission report, A path to universal early childhood education and care (2024), recommended a review of the National Quality Framework for early childhood education and care (ECEC) and increased funding to support regulatory activity. Evidence underpinning the report identified an imperative to improve the frequency, fairness and focus of Australia’s quality assessment process and attendant value of ECEC service ratings…
Australia’s Ecec workforce pipeline
The significant shortfall of staff in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) workforce identifies an imperative not only to recruit educators but to support ongoing qualifications and career advancement of those within. Indeed, Shaping Our Future, Australia’s workforce strategy for 2022–2031 identifies qualifications and career development as key focus areas. Taking this imperative, we asked Who ? and How many ? within the Australian workf…
Meals, mealtimes and moments for learning
Objective: Early education and care (ECEC) is part of the everyday life of most children in developed economies, presenting exceptional opportunity to support nutrition and ongoing food preferences. Yet, the degree to which such opportunity is captured in policy-driven assessment and quality ratings of ECEC services is unknown. Design: Abductive thematic analysis was conducted, guided by key domains of knowledge in nutrition literature and examin…
Fighting for our children
Transition From Primary to Secondary School
Australia's Closing the Gap reform aims to address disparities experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. There are specific targets focussed on key educational transitions; yet, the transition to secondary education is not a targeted priority. This is surprising given that this transition point is one in which student disengagement is notably high generally, and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, intensified b…
Focused, fair and frequent
Support to stay and thrive
Poverty for lunch
Quality early care and education (ECE) presents an unparalleled opportunity to avert disadvantage and promote children's development. Mealtimes are essential daily routines, yet are often overlooked in research on ECE quality. This paper crystallises a composite case study of ECE mealtimes in highly disadvantaged communities by combining Departing Radically in Academic Writing (DRAW) methodology with parent surveys, scorings of educator‐child int…
How women educators frame the scarcity of men in early childhood education and care
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is one of the most highly sex-segregated sectors globally.Adopting frame analysis and drawing on 96 semi-structured interviews, this study asks how female educators, who are numerically dominant, discursively construct men's reluctance to seek roles in ECEC and/or sustain participation in the sector.Three primary frames were identified: men are viewed with suspicion; men lack the capacities required for E…
Access to high-quality early care and education
Whole-population analysis of access to high-quality ECE using a national standard. • Inequities of access associated with geographic and socio-economic disadvantage. • Recent immigrants over-represented in poor quality services. • Calls for interrogation and identification of effective thresholds of quality. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (4.2) calls for all children to have access to high quality Early Childhood Education (ECE),…
Discursive tensions
In early childhood education and care policy, there are two dominant discourses: ‘investment and outcomes’ and ‘children’s rights’. There is little research on how these discourses play out in educators’ accounts. In this article, the authors examine the case of discourse pertaining to children’s relaxation in early childhood education and care. They demonstrate that Australian relaxation policy for children in early childhood education and care …
Do the numbers add up? Questioning measurement that places Australian Ecec teaching as ‘low quality’
Internationally, standard observational measures of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) are used to assess the quality of provision. They are applied as research tools but, significantly, also guide policy decisions, distribution of resources and public opinion. Considerable faith is placed in such measures, yet their validity, reliability and functioning within context should all be considered in interpreting the findings they generate. We…
A Missed Opportunity? Meal Provision in Early Childhood Education and Care Services in the Context of Socioeconomic Disadvantage
Identifying factors for poorer educational outcomes that may be exacerbated by Covid ‐19
School closures across Australia in response to COVID‐19 have persisted since 2020, with rising mental health problems in children and adolescents, alongside rising negative family health and socioeconomic outcomes. Further, some children and young people who were already experiencing disadvantage pre‐pandemic may be at heightened risk of poorer educational outcomes. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the liter…
Communicating the complex lives of families that include a child with Down syndrome
Families of children with Down syndrome experience complex lives and needs, yet the few existing studies on these families are written in conventional academic prose that is not optimal for knowledge translation beyond academia, particularly for busy healthcare professionals. In this paper, we Depart Radically in Academic Writing (DRAW) (Mackinlay, 2022) and present data poetry and two case studies that draw upon semi-structured interviews with m…
Emotional quality of early education programs improves language learning
Observational studies comparing child outcomes in early care and education classrooms of differing quality are often confounded by between-child differences. A within-child design, tracking children across contexts, can identify the effects of quality with less confounding. An analysis of Australian children (N = 1128, mean age 5 years, 48% female, 2.9% Indigenous, ethnicity data unavailable) tracked across pre-K, K, and year 1 (2010–2012) was co…
Men times ten
Retention rates for men in early childhood education and care (ECEC) are low. Exit is associated with experience of feeling ‘other’ perpetuated by judgements of men’s sexuality, motives, and ability. In this paper, we take the unique circumstance of many men working together in ECEC to ask whether more men on staff improves experiences of inclusion. We analyse interviews with 10 men working in two Australian ECEC centres in which male educators c…
Discarded data
Qualitative researchers can discard data that are unsaturated or unrelated to research questions, but what do we do when these data affect us, or ‘haunt’ us, ‘long after collecting “it”’ (Taylor 2013, 691)? In this paper, we draw upon Sara Ahmed to guide our engagement with ‘discarded data’: young children’s gendered accounts of violence that unexpectedly arose during interviews about rest-time and relaxation in childcare. We show what it feels l…
Associations between food provision and feeding practices in socially disadvantaged childcare centres
The Novice Researcher
Being a novice researcher undertaking research interviews with young children requires understandings of the interview process. By investigating the interaction between a novice researcher undertaking her first interview and a child participant, the authors attend to theoretical principles, such as the competence of young children as informants, and highlight practical matters when interviewing young children. A conversation analysis approach exa…
Managing medical advice seeking in calls to Child Health Line
Child Health Line is a 24-hour Australian helpline that offers information and support for parents and families on child development and parenting. The helpline guidelines suggest that nurses should not offer medical advice; they do, however, regularly receive calls seeking such advice. This paper examines how the service guidelines are talked into being through the nurses' management of callers' requests for medical advice and information, and s…
Dads at the dinner table. A cross-sectional study of Australian fathers’ child feeding perceptions and practices
Parents as Coresearchers at Home
This article discusses the use of observational video recordings to document young children's use of technology in their homes. Although observational research practices have been used for decades, often with video-based techniques, the participant group in this study (i.e., very young children) and the setting (i.e., private homes) provide a rich space for exploring the benefits and limitations of qualitative observation. The data gathered in th…
The when and what of measuring ECE quality
Measurement invariance of the Feeding Practices and Structure Questionnaire-28 among a community of socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers and fathers
Digital access to knowledge in the preschool classroom
Women's views of ultrasonography
Let's see if you can see me
Bringing a social interaction approach to children's geographies to investigate how children accomplish place in everyday lives, we draw on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches that recognize children's competence to manipulate their social and digital worlds. An investigation of preschool-aged children engaged with Google EarthTM shows how they both claimed and displayed technological understandings and practices such as mano…
Men times ten
Retention rates for men in early childhood education and care (ECEC) are low. Exit is associated with experience of feeling ‘other’ perpetuated by judgements of men’s sexuality, motives, and ability. In this paper, we take the unique circumstance of many men working together in ECEC to ask whether more men on staff improves experiences of inclusion. We analyse interviews with 10 men working in two Australian ECEC centres in which male educators c…
What children bring to the table
Family Type and Depression in Pregnancy
Thomas G. O'Connor, Neil Hawkins, Judy Dunn, Karen Thorpe, Jean Golding, ALSPAC Study Team, Family Type and Depression in Pregnancy: Factors Mediating Risk in a Community Sample, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Aug., 1998), pp. 757-770
How women educators frame the scarcity of men in early childhood education and care
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is one of the most highly sex-segregated sectors globally.Adopting frame analysis and drawing on 96 semi-structured interviews, this study asks how female educators, who are numerically dominant, discursively construct men's reluctance to seek roles in ECEC and/or sustain participation in the sector.Three primary frames were identified: men are viewed with suspicion; men lack the capacities required for E…
Associations between food provision and feeding practices in socially disadvantaged childcare centres
A comparison of maternal feeding responses to child fussy eating in low-income food secure and food insecure households
How Talk and Interaction Unfold in a Digitally Enabled Preschool Classroom
The use of mobile digital devices, such as laptops and tablets, has implications for how teachers interact with young students within the institutional context of educational settings. This article examines language and participation in a digitally enabled preschool classroom as students engage with teachers and peers. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis are used to explicate video-recorded episodes of s…
Bonding and Bridging
This study reports on an intervention program designed to facilitate transition to school of a whole community of Indigenous Australian children who had previously not been attending. The children were from families displaced from their traditional lands and experienced on‐going social marginalisation and transience. A social capital framework was employed to track change in the children's social inclusion and family‐school engagement for two yea…
Accounting for quality in Australian childcare
This paper examines Australian policy on quality for early childhood education and care (ECEC). It investigates the existing national quality assurance system, Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) and its application in childcare centres. However, Australia's recently elected federal government has shown enormous interest in improving quality in ECEC with implications for policy change. While international research emphasises the i…
Communicating the complex lives of families that include a child with Down syndrome
Families of children with Down syndrome experience complex lives and needs, yet the few existing studies on these families are written in conventional academic prose that is not optimal for knowledge translation beyond academia, particularly for busy healthcare professionals. In this paper, we Depart Radically in Academic Writing (DRAW) (Mackinlay, 2022) and present data poetry and two case studies that draw upon semi-structured interviews with m…
Meal provision in early childhood education and care programs
Lie in the grass, the soft grass”
Emotional Climate and Behavioral Management during Sleep Time in Early Childhood Education Settings
Women's views of ultrasonography
Family Type and Depression in Pregnancy
Thomas G. O'Connor, Neil Hawkins, Judy Dunn, Karen Thorpe, Jean Golding, ALSPAC Study Team, Family Type and Depression in Pregnancy: Factors Mediating Risk in a Community Sample, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Aug., 1998), pp. 757-770
Accounting for quality in Australian childcare
This paper examines Australian policy on quality for early childhood education and care (ECEC). It investigates the existing national quality assurance system, Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) and its application in childcare centres. However, Australia's recently elected federal government has shown enormous interest in improving quality in ECEC with implications for policy change. While international research emphasises the i…
Managing medical advice seeking in calls to Child Health Line
Child Health Line is a 24-hour Australian helpline that offers information and support for parents and families on child development and parenting. The helpline guidelines suggest that nurses should not offer medical advice; they do, however, regularly receive calls seeking such advice. This paper examines how the service guidelines are talked into being through the nurses' management of callers' requests for medical advice and information, and s…
The Novice Researcher
Being a novice researcher undertaking research interviews with young children requires understandings of the interview process. By investigating the interaction between a novice researcher undertaking her first interview and a child participant, the authors attend to theoretical principles, such as the competence of young children as informants, and highlight practical matters when interviewing young children. A conversation analysis approach exa…
Testing the Vision
The OECD (2006 Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. OECD Publishing: Paris) envisions early childhood education and care settings as meeting places for diverse social groups; places that build social capital. This vision was assessed in a comparison of three preschools types: full‐fee paying, subsidised‐fee and publicly funded. The social composition within each was examined and the connectedness of the children (n = 472) who a…
To separate or not to separate? Parental decision-making regarding the separation of twins in the early years of schooling
In recent times concerns about possible adverse effects of early separation and advocacy for individual rights have resulted in a movement away from organizational level policies about the separation of twin children as they enter school. Instead, individualized approaches that focus on the twin children’s characteristics and family perspectives have been proposed. This study, conducted in Australia where all but a few families had choice about t…
Bonding and Bridging
This study reports on an intervention program designed to facilitate transition to school of a whole community of Indigenous Australian children who had previously not been attending. The children were from families displaced from their traditional lands and experienced on‐going social marginalisation and transience. A social capital framework was employed to track change in the children's social inclusion and family‐school engagement for two yea…
Getting There, Being There, Staying and Belonging
Indigenous Australians are among the most unhealthy populations in the world and yet they reside in a country where the non‐Indigenous population enjoys high standards of well‐being. Education has been identified as the key mechanism for closing this equity gap. At school commencement many Indigenous children are already at risk of disengagement. This four‐year longitudinal study of two Indigenous boys from a socially marginalised community exami…
Emotional Climate and Behavioral Management during Sleep Time in Early Childhood Education Settings
Dads at the dinner table. A cross-sectional study of Australian fathers’ child feeding perceptions and practices
Digital access to knowledge in the preschool classroom
‘I wonder what you know … ’ teachers designing requests for factual information
Assessing the effectiveness of Australian early childhood education and care experiences
Findings from the E4Kids study have the potential to influence the quality of ECEC available in Australia by providing up-to-date evidence on the impact of ECEC programs and program components to inform future policy decisions and research
Let's see if you can see me
Bringing a social interaction approach to children's geographies to investigate how children accomplish place in everyday lives, we draw on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches that recognize children's competence to manipulate their social and digital worlds. An investigation of preschool-aged children engaged with Google EarthTM shows how they both claimed and displayed technological understandings and practices such as mano…
How Talk and Interaction Unfold in a Digitally Enabled Preschool Classroom
The use of mobile digital devices, such as laptops and tablets, has implications for how teachers interact with young students within the institutional context of educational settings. This article examines language and participation in a digitally enabled preschool classroom as students engage with teachers and peers. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis are used to explicate video-recorded episodes of s…
Identifying and addressing equivocal trouble in understanding within classroom interaction
Maintaining intersubjectivity is crucial for accomplishing coordinated social action. Although conversational repair is a recognised defence of intersubjectivity and routinely used to address ostensible sources of trouble in social interaction, it is less clear how people address more equivocal trouble. This study uses conversation analysis to examine preschool classroom interaction, focusing on practices used to identify and address such trouble…
Parents as Coresearchers at Home
This article discusses the use of observational video recordings to document young children's use of technology in their homes. Although observational research practices have been used for decades, often with video-based techniques, the participant group in this study (i.e., very young children) and the setting (i.e., private homes) provide a rich space for exploring the benefits and limitations of qualitative observation. The data gathered in th…
A collaborative approach to adopting/adapting guidelines - The Australian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the early years (Birth to 5 years)
To our knowledge, this is only the second time the GRADE-ADOLOPMENT approach has been used. Following this approach, the judgments of the Australian Consensus Panel did not differ sufficiently to change the directions and strength of the recommendations and as such, the Canadian recommendations were adopted with very minor alterations. This allowed the Guidelines to be developed much faster and at lower cost. As such, we would recommend the GRADE…
Can a Call Make a Difference? Measured Change in Women’s Breastfeeding Self-efficacy Across Call Interactions on a Telephone Helpline
What’s the fuss about? Parent presentations of fussy eating to a parenting support helpline
Objective To characterise parent presentations of fussy eating and mealtime interactions at a point of crisis, through analyses of real-time recordings of calls to a parenting helpline. Design Qualitative analysis included an inductive thematic approach to examine clinical parent presentations of fussy eating and derive underlying themes relating to mealtime interactions. Setting Calls made to the Child Health Line regarding feeding concerns were…
Measurement invariance of the Feeding Practices and Structure Questionnaire-28 among a community of socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers and fathers
A comparison of maternal feeding responses to child fussy eating in low-income food secure and food insecure households
Beliefs and attributions
Theoretical perspectives, and a large body of empirical research examining sex-segregated occupations, identify the attitudinal barriers of the majority as pivotal for both workplace well-being and the retention of minorities. Globally, where more than 90% of the early childhood education and care workforce is female, understanding the attitudes of the majority is critical in informing actions to sustain men’s participation. So too are female edu…
Supporting, failing to support and undermining breastfeeding self‐efficacy
Although a complexity of factors explain early cessation of breastfeeding, the encounter of a problem is often a critical point in this decision. For this reason, breastfeeding self-efficacy, a mother's evaluations of her ability to successfully overcome challenges, is an effective target in interventions to sustain breastfeeding. This study examined factors affecting the success of one such intervention, reactive telephone support. Across a 4-we…
Psychology (43 obras) · Medicine (31 obras) · Early Childhood Education and Development (27 obras) · Developmental psychology (23 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Social Psychology (18 obras) · Early childhood education (13 obras) · Early childhood (12 obras) · Education Systems and Policy (12 obras)