This paper explores the role of digital media and creativity in the processes of learning that occur in groups of urban skateboarders. In particular, it examines how the production and consumption of amateur videos contribute to both skaters' mastery of the techniques of the sport and their integration into the culture of the sport. The data come from an ethnographic study of skateboarders in Hong Kong, which included in-depth interviews, participant observation and the collection of texts and artifacts like magazines, blog entries and amateur skating videos. Skateboarders use video in a number of ways that significantly impact their learning and integration into their communities. They use it to analyze tricks and techniques, to document the stages of their learning and socialization into the group, to set community standards, to build a sense of belonging with their 'crews' and to imagine 'idealized futures' for themselves and their communities. Understanding the value and function of such 'semiotic mediation' in learning and socialization into sport cultures, I suggest, can contribute to helping physical educators design tasks that integrate training in physical skills with opportunities for students to make meaning around their experiences of sport and physical education.
[Copyright of Roeper Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2011.601139]

The lay conceptions and beliefs about spousal abuse among social work undergraduates in Hong Kong were studied and lay conceptions were compared with legal and experts' perspectives. Adopting an ecological model, it was hypothesized that gender, attitudes toward gender, socialization of gender stereotypes and violence approval, and identification with Chinese traditional and modern cultural values were psychosocial correlates of conceptions and beliefs about spousal abuse.
A post-positivistic research paradigm was adopted and a qualitative (less dominant) with quantitative (dominant) method was the research design. Phase I Study was a focus group study aiming at understanding conceptions and beliefs about spousal abuse with five focus groups involving 40 undergraduates. Phase II Study was a questionnaire survey with some of the items in questionnaire derived from the qualitative findings of the focus groups. Based on a stratified sampling strategy, 361 social work undergraduates were randomly selected from all undergraduate social work training institutions to participate in this survey. They completed a 252-item questionnaire which measured their conceptions and beliefs about spousal abuse and the psychosocial correlates within the proposed ecological model.
Results showed that social work undergraduates' conceptions of physical abuse were highly consistent with legal and experts' perspectives, while their conceptions of psychological abuse were more from laymen's perspectives, which were relatively unclear and less consistent with legal and experts' perspectives. They also had broader conceptions of wife abuse than husband abuse by identifying more behavioral manifestations as wife abuse. In general, the breadth of their conceptions of spousal abuse depended on their gender (same sex favoritism), victims' gender, and types of abuse (physical vs. psychological). Furthermore, they endorsed more biased beliefs about husband abuse than wife abuse. Male students