‘Let's Talk About Children’: Investigating the Use of a Family‐focused Intervention in the Gambling Support Services Sector

The family‐focused mental health intervention, ‘Let's Talk About Children,’ has positively influenced the lives of families affected by parental mental illness. This paper outlines the use of this brief, strengths‐based intervention for parents with gambling and other co‐occurring issues from the gamblers’ support services sector. Over a six‐month period, a training manual and accompanying resources were adapted for the gamblers’ support services sector and a targeted training session developed. Nine problem gambling counsellors from three Victorian gambling support services trialled the Let's Talk About Children intervention over a four‐month period. Qualitative data were gathered through focus groups, interviews, and practice enquiry groups to determine the impact of the Let's Talk About Children model for gambling support services. The results are presented as ‘practice wisdoms and recommendations’ reporting on the impact of the trial and to provide some guidance to support others in the implementation of a specific family‐focused intervention. This paper reports on the first exploratory trial of Let's Talk About Children for the gambler's support services sector in Australia.     

Gendered Leadership: The Effects of Female Development Agency Leaders on Foreign Aid Spending

This article examines the effects of gender on the leadership of bilateral development aid agencies, particularly their official development assistance (ODA) allocations toward gender‐related programming. Drawing on earlier research on gendered leadership, the article tests the hypothesis that female director generals (DGs) and ministers responsible for aid agencies will allocate more ODA than their male counterparts toward gender programming. This existing literature on gendered leadership is divided: some scholars argue that women and men have distinct leadership styles on account of their gender, while others argue that the only distinguishing factor is the institutional context in which they lead. Drawing on data collected on aid flows and agency leadership within the major Western aid donors of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) over the period from 1995 through 2009, we use pooled time series analysis to examine the effects of gendered leadership on aid allocation. Our analysis reveals a tendency for female DGs and ministers to focus ODA on gender‐mainstreaming programs, while male DGs focus ODA on gender‐focused programs. We argue that these divergent priorities reflect the women's desire to reform gendered power structures within their respective aid agencies, and the men's desire to maintain existing gender power structures from which they benefit.     

Relational rurals: Some thoughts on relating things and theory in rural studies

This paper considers how shifts within the social sciences towards conceptualising spatiality in relational terms have unfolded in rural studies in particular ways over the past decade or so. A period in which networks, connections, flows and mobility have all established themselves as compelling conceptual frames for research, the rural has increasingly been recast in relational terms as a multi-authored and multi-faceted space, constituted through local-global interconnections and their place specific, sometimes contested, manifestations. In this way, the multiple meanings of the rural continues to be a focus of critical concern, as are the implications ‘of’ and ‘in’ rural spaces for some of the major issues currently being faced by governments and citizens around the world; including climate change and food security. Apprehending the complexity of the rural in these terms, we argue, requires not only thinking space relationally, but at the same time being epistemologically relational or theoretically pluralist. That is, recognising the co-constituent production of rural space through material and discursive phenomenon, processes and practices, and thus the value of existing theoretical resources (social constructionism, political and economic materialism) in relation with the critical and rigorous appraisal of ‘new’ concepts and ideas to better comprehend rural space in its multidimensional complexity and particularity. To this end, we identify Cindi Katz's notion of ‘countertopography’ as a promising conceptual and methodological addition to the rural scholar's toolkit insofar as it attends to a politics of location and differentation in relation to global processes. We conclude our discussion by sketching out possible objects of countertopographical analysis for understanding ongoing processes of change in rural space(s).     

Who Is the Residential Parent? Understanding Discrepancies in Unmarried Parents' Reports

Research examining parental reports of children's living arrangements has often relied on information about legally ordered custody agreements following divorce. This analysis used data from matched pairs of parents (N = 1,156) in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study who live apart to compare mother and father reports of their child's residence 5 years after a nonmarital birth. The authors found that over one third of unmarried parents disagreed about who their child lived with and that conflicting reports were much more likely when fathers spent nights with the mother (an indicator of part‐time cohabitation) and had overnights with the child on their own. The results further suggest that discrepancies in unmarried parents' reports were more closely associated with the complexity and ambiguity of their living situations than with the quality of their relationships with each other. Implications for measuring children's living arrangements in families formed outside of marriage are discussed.     

Social network effects on academic achievement

How peer groups contribute to educational outcomes has long interested researchers. However, the possibility that peer groups dominated by either low- or high-achieving youth can have substantively different effects on achievement has been largely ignored. In this paper, we show that while being embedded in a high-achieving network of friends is not associated with increased own achievement, being embedded in a low-achieving network is associated with decreased own achievement. In additional analyses, we present evidence that these associations are at least in part due to influence, as opposed to only selection effects or shared environment. We also examine whether the structure of the network in which a student is embedded might affect their educational achievement. We show that achieving at higher levels positively predicts how centrally located a student is in their network, but being more centrally located does not predict concurrent achievement. This finding suggests that the behavior of individuals is affecting the formation of network structure and not the reverse.     

The Role of Sexual Communication in Couples’ Sexual Outcomes: A Dyadic Path Analysis

In a study of 142 couples, we gathered survey data to show how sexual communication influences sexual and relationship satisfaction as well as sexual and orgasm frequency. In two dyadic data path analyses, we observed the significant paths of influence that sexual communication has on sexual and relationship satisfaction, as well as sexual and orgasm frequency. Our findings revealed greater amounts of sexual communication were associated with increased orgasm frequency in women and greater relationship and sexual satisfaction in both sexes. We also observed important differences in the associations of sexual communication and general communication on satisfaction levels. With these analyses, we expand the current literature to broaden our understanding of the role that sexual communication plays in committed relationships.     

Not either/or but both/and: An Academic/field partnership in practice

Abstract

The relationship between academia and the field and between theory and practice is often characterised in both the literature and the everyday practice of social work as either one or the other. In this paper, the author argues for a constructive integration of both/and rather than either/or. The paper reports on a constructive organisational partnership between academia and a field of practice that supports a both/and view.