Increasing food insecurity severity is associated with lower diet quality.

OBJECTIVE: Food insecurity may reduce diet quality, but the relationship between food insecurity severity and diet quality is under-researched. This study aimed to examine the relationship between diet quality and severity of household food insecurity. DESIGN: A cross-sectional, online survey used the United States Department of Agriculture Household Food Security Six-item Short Form to classify respondents as food secure or marginally, moderately or severely food insecure. The Australian Recommended Food Score (ARFS; scored 0­73) determined diet quality (ARFS total and sub-scale scores). Survey-weighted linear regression (adjusted for age, sex, income, education, location and household composition) was conducted. SETTING: Tasmania, Australia. PARTICIPANTS: Community-dwelling adults (aged 18 years and over). RESULTS: The mean ARFS total for the sample (n 804, 53 % female, 29 % aged > 65 years) was 32·4 (sd = 9·8). As the severity of household food insecurity increased, ARFS total decreased. Marginally food-insecure respondents reported a mean ARFS score three points lower than food-secure adults (B = ­2·7; 95 % CI (­5·11, ­0·34); P = 0·03) and reduced by six points for moderately (B = ­5·6; 95 % CI (­7·26, ­3·90); P < 0·001) and twelve points for severely food-insecure respondents (B = ­11·5; 95 % CI (­13·21, ­9·78); P < 0·001). Marginally food-insecure respondents had significantly lower vegetable sub-scale scores, moderately food-insecure respondents had significantly lower sub-scale scores for all food groups except dairy and severely food-insecure respondents had significantly lower scores for all sub-scale scores. CONCLUSIONS: Poorer diet quality is evident in marginally, moderately and severely food-insecure adults. Interventions to reduce food insecurity and increase diet quality are required to prevent poorer nutrition-related health outcomes in food-insecure populations in Australia.

The impact of academic disciplines on a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum.

Internationalisation has moved to the core of universities' mission, emphasising the qualitative elements of internationalisation, which is inter alia evident in the implementation of an internationalised curriculum. The latter must be implemented following the constructive alignment model; thus, the framework for a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum is proposed in this article, combining an internationalised curriculum with Biggs' constructive alignment model. Since academics are the owners of an internationalised curriculum and they are determined by their academic disciplines, in this paper, the impact of disciplines on a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum is evaluated, following Biglan's typology of academic disciplines. It was found from the sample of 1367 academics from all Slovenian higher education institutions that an internationalised curriculum is constructively aligned in practice, wherein we observed relevant disciplinary differences in the level/rate of appearance of international perspectives in the individual steps of a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum, with a noticeably higher incidence in the case of soft disciplines. Besides introducing the framework for a constructively aligned internationalised curriculum and identifying relevant differences between disciplines, an important contribution to the research topic is in several other characteristics of academic professions that were identified as having an impact on the implementation of an internationalised curriculum. Examples of these were academics' inclusion in pedagogical courses and academics' various modes of international engagement. The authors also highlight several opportunities for improvement and further research, as well as implications for the enhancement of curriculum internationalisation in hard disciplines.

The power of online panel paradata to predict unit nonresponse and voluntary attrition in a longitudinal design.

The objective of this study is to identify factors affecting participation rates, i.e., nonresponse and voluntary attrition rates, and their predictive power in a probability-based online panel. Participation for this panel had already been investigated in the literature according to the socio-demographic and socio-psychological characteristics of respondents and different types of paradata, such as device type or questionnaire navigation, had also been explored. In this study, the predictive power of online panel participation paradata was instead evaluated, which was expected (at least in theory) to offer even more complex insight into respondents' behavior over time. This kind of paradata would also enable the derivation of longitudinal variables measuring respondents' panel activity, such as survey outcome rates and consecutive waves with a particular survey outcome prior to a wave (e.g., response, noncontact, refusal), and could also be used in models controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. Using the Life in Australia™ participation data for all recruited members for the first 30 waves, multiple linear, binary logistic and panel random-effect logit regression analyses were carried out to assess socio-demographic and online panel paradata predictors of nonresponse and attrition that were available and contributed to the accuracy of prediction and the best statistical modeling. The proposed approach with the derived paradata predictors and random-effect logistic regression proved to be reasonably accurate for predicting nonresponse-with just 15 waves of online panel paradata (even without sociodemographics) and logit random-effect modeling almost four out of five nonrespondents could be correctly identified in the subsequent wave.