Objectives-To review playground injury statistics over a five year period in order to develop an awareness of how and where children in the United States are being injured.

Context: The assessment of an individual's mental toughness would assist clinicians in enhancing an individual's performance, improving compliance with the rehabilitation program, and improving the individual treatment program. However, no sound measure of mental toughness exists.Objective: To develop a new measure of mental toughness, the Mental, Emotional, and Bodily Toughness Inventory (MeBTough).Design: Participants were invited to complete a 45-item questionnaire.Setting: University research laboratory. Patients or Other Participants: A total of 261 undergraduate students were recruited to complete the questionnaire.Main Outcome Measure(s): The Rasch-calibrated item difficulties, fit statistics, and persons' mental toughness ability estimates were examined for model-data fit of the MeBTough.Results: Forty-three of the 45 items had good model-data fit with acceptable fit statistics. Results indicated that the distribution of items was fittingly targeted to the people and the collapsed rating scale functioned well. The item separation index (6.31) and separation reliability statistic (.98) provided evidence that the items had good variability with a high degree of confidence in replicating placement of the items from another sample.Conclusions: Results provided support for using the new measure of mental, emotional, and bodily toughness. N The difficulty of the items had good variability along the measurement scale, meaning respondents' differences could be identified well.

Objectives-Our objective was to measure the impact attenuation performance of five types of loose-fill playground surfaces at a variety of drop heights, material depths, and conditions. Methods-In a laboratory setting, an instrumented head form was dropped on varying depths of loose-fill materials at one foot height increments until critical deceleration values were exceeded. The eVects of test box size, material temperature, and compression were also studied. Results-Data suggest that a larger test box size influences test results. Uncompressed materials performed quite unexpectedly, that is, resilience did not necessarily increase with increasing depth of material and temperature did not have uniform eVects. Compression before testing improved consistency of results. Conclusion-The current standard test procedure (ASTM F1292) appears problematic for loose-fill materials. Our results indicate that (1) shredded rubber was the best performer; (2) there was little diVerence between sand, wood fibers, and wood chips; and (3) pea gravel had the worst performance, making it a poor choice for playground surfacing.

No abstract

This study examined the effects of length and movements of preshot routines on free throw shooting in basketball. 17 members of an intercollegiate men's basketball team attempted 20 free throws in each of four different conditions: (1) normal routine and time, (2) normal routine with altered time, (3) altered routine with normal time, and (4) altered routine with altered time. Free throw performance was measured using an objective 5-point scoring system. A multivariate analysis of variance indicated a significant effect for routine. Neither time nor routine by time was significant. Results indicated that altering the movements in the routine had a significant effect on performance while lengthening the time did not.