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Emotional and physical challenges faced by parents and caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder
(The University of Waikato, 2026) Kikale, Viraj Vikram; Curtis, Cate
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has a significant impact on the broader family, with parents and other carers experiencing high levels of parenting stress, caregiver burden and psychological distress. A body of research has explored emotional and practical/physical impacts of ASD caregiving, but the degree to which these outcomes co-occur across child, carer and contextual factors has not been synthesised within recent quantitative evidence. This systematic review aimed to synthesise quantitative empirical studies published mainly from 2015 onwards for exploring emotional and physical/practical caregiving outcomes in ASD caregiving. Methods: PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, CINAHL and ERIC were searched using pre-defined eligibility criteria. One hundred and fourteen records were screened and twenty studies were included in the main synthesis and additional sources were used for contextual and measurement purposes, but were not counted as included studies. Data were extracted and synthesised using structured narrative comparison, with consideration of methodological quality and contextual moderators. Across included studies, child clinical characteristics and caregiving context were commonly associated with variation in carer outcomes, including psychological distress and indicators of practical/physical burden (e.g. time demands and fatigue where measured). Carer characteristics (including gender, socioeconomic circumstances, health status, resilience and social support) were frequently explored as correlates or moderators. Intervention studies most commonly reported modest improvements in carer distress, while practical/physical caregiving demands were less consistently targeted where structural caregiving responsibilities remained unchanged. Methodological limitations commonly identified included the use of cross-sectional designs, dominance of self-report measures and poor representation of fathers and non-Western samples. This review emphasizes the multidimensional and context-dependent nature of ASD caregiving outcomes and highlights key priorities for enhancing the rigour of future quantitative research in this field.
Biomechanical determinants of placekicking success in professional Rugby Union players
(Taylor & Francis, 2020) Hébert-Losier, Kim; Lamb, Peter; Beaven, Christopher Martyn
The ability to score from placekicks discriminates winning from losing Rugby Union teams. We aimed to identify which biomechanical variables related to successful placekicking in professional Rugby Union players, and use self-organising maps (SOM) to determine whether meaningful sub-groups existed. Three professional placekickers performed 10 kicks outdoors. Placekicks were categorised into best, worst, and typical performances based on outcomes and coach and player perceptions. Seven 3D biomechanical variables consistently and meaningfully (moderate Cohen’s effect size) discriminated best from worst placekicks in all players. The three-cluster solution from SOM on these seven variables highlighted differences between players rather than best, worst, and typical attempts. Within-clusters, however, the best and worst placekicks tended to be represented in separate map regions. The seven variables identified using standardised effect sizes can be useful for group-level coaching of placekicking skills in absence of individual data, and translated in an applied setting using verbal and visual cues to promote overall placekicking performance. However, players’ idiosyncrasies formed the main SOM boundaries, indicating that optimising placekicking success would benefit from an individualised approach and numerous effective movement templates may exist.
Sketching social robots: Visualising futures of human–robot interaction through participatory imagination
(Design Research Society, 2026) Vanderschantz, Nicholas; Turner, Jessica Dawn; Konig, Jemma Lynette; Timpany, Claire; Siddika, Rafeea; Shakes, Nathan
In this paper, we explore sketching as a speculative and reflective practice for imagining social robots. Through a series of participatory design workshops, participants observed two prototype robots and then produced sketches and word maps envisioning possible appearances, behaviours, and social roles for robots in everyday life. Analysing the artefacts of these workshops reveals how non-expert human users perceive and imagine future robots in their worlds. We examine common themes of emotion, familiarity, discomfort, and relational values in the artefacts produced by the workshop participants. Our work highlights a way that sketching and written idea generation by non-designers can serve as a tool for thinking through affective, aesthetic, and relational possibilities in human-robot interaction. By situating sketching as a medium for speculative imagination rather than technical specification, our paper contributes to an emerging understanding of Sketching Futures as a relational, situated, and iterative process.
Multiple instance verification
(Microtome Publishing, 2025) Xu, Xin; Frank, Eibe; Holmes, Geoffrey
We explore multiple instance verification, a problem setting in which a query instance is verified against a bag of target instances with heterogeneous, unknown relevancy. We show that naive adaptations of attention-based multiple instance learning (MIL) methods and standard verification methods like Siamese neural networks are unsuitable for this setting: directly combining state-of-the-art (SOTA) MIL methods and Siamese networks is shown to be no better, and sometimes significantly worse, than a simple baseline model. Postulating that this may be caused by the failure of the representation of the target bag to incorporate the query instance, we introduce a new pooling approach named “cross-attention pooling” (CAP). Under the CAP framework, we propose two novel attention functions to address the challenge of distinguishing between highly similar instances in a target bag. Through empirical studies on three different verification tasks, we demonstrate that CAP outperforms adaptations of SOTA MIL methods and the baseline by substantial margins, in terms of both classification accuracy and the ability to detect key instances. The superior ability to identify key instances is attributed to the new attention functions by ablation studies.
“I don’t want to be this chaos that I live in”: Stories of resilience from adult survivors of child maltreatment
(The University of Waikato, 2026) Cameron, Lita; Jackson, Kimberly M.
Child maltreatment is a devastating public health issue with enduring effects across the lifespan. Research has focused on resilience to understand how individuals cope and adapt following adversity. However, psychological research predominately characterises resilience as an individual trait, focusing on protective factors to inform individual, therapy based interventions. Drawing on community psychology’s liberatory orientation, this thesis takes a qualitative, relational approach to resilience research, exploring how adult survivors of childhood maltreatment understand and experience resilience. It investigates what survivors find meaningful in facilitating their resilience, the role of community and social supports, and how their accounts compare with the dominant model of resilience as adaptive ‘bouncing back’. Narrative methods were used to explore how participants storied their resilience, contextualised by my insider researcher position. Semi-structured interviews, incorporating a mind mapping activity, were conducted with three participants. Narrative analysis was used to examine the function of participants’ stories of resilience. Participants’ accounts reflected a broader landscape of healing than typically emphasised in resilience literature, with therapeutic resources and interventions forming a small role. Participants also storied their resilience through ‘giving back’, using their experiences to prevent others’ suffering. Finally, resilience was formed and maintained through ongoing, exhausting labour. Overall, this thesis argues that recognising resilience as labour has important implications for conceptualising resilience and supporting survivors.