Can Children Recognize Bodily Expressions of Emotion?

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior - Past research has demonstrated that children understand distinct emotion concepts and can accurately recognize facial expressions of distinct emotions by a young...     

Mistreatment of Older People in the United Kingdom: Findings from the First National Prevalence Study

There have been few national studies of the prevalence of elder mistreatment (abuse and neglect) in private households. This article provides an overview of the UK National Prevalence Study of Elder Mistreatment that took place in 2006. It addressed 2,111 respondents in four countries who answered a face-to-face survey questionnaire. The achieved sample was weighted to be representative of the UK older population. Of respondents, 2.6% reported mistreatment by family members, close friends, or care workers. The predominant type of reported mistreatment was neglect (1.1%) followed by financial abuse (0.6%), with 0.4% of respondents reporting psychological abuse, 0.4% physical abuse, and 0.2% sexual abuse. Women were significantly more likely to have experienced mistreatment than men, but there were gender differences according to type of abuse and perpetrator characteristics. Divergent patterns were found for neglect, financial, and interpersonal abuse. Further analysis of the data indicated that the likelihood of mistreatment varied with socioeconomic position and health status.     

Promoting Readiness to Practice: Which Learning Activities Promote Competence and Professional Identity for Student Social Workers During Practice Learning?

Practice learning is integral to the curriculum for qualifying social work students. Accreditation standards require regular student supervision and exposure to specific learning activities. Most agencies offer high-quality placements, but organizational cutbacks may affect supervision and restrict the development of competence and professional identity. Undergraduate social work students in Northern Ireland universities (n=396) were surveyed about the usefulness of the learning activities they received on placement for developing practice competence and professional social work identity. Results suggest that students most valued regular supervision, constructive feedback, observing social workers, and thinking critically about the social work role. Differences were reported across placements with students feeling disadvantaged in agencies where there was no clear social work role.     

Employment programs for people with psychiatric disability: the case for change

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of disability employment policy in assisting people with psychiatric disability to find, or return to, paid work. We argue that the poor employment outcomes from current programs establish the need for a paradigmatic shift in the form of a state‐provided Job Guarantee (JG) for people with psychiatric disability. In the absence of measures to generate suitable jobs, forthcoming changes to the eligibility criteria for Disability Support Pension will create risks rather than opportunities. Under the JG, the Federal Government would maintain a ‘buffer stock’ of minimum wage, public sector jobs to provide secure paid employment for this highly disadvantaged group. The role of the state in this alternative model is two fold. First, the state must provide the quantum of JG jobs required. Second, the state must ensure the design of jobs is flexible enough to meet the heterogeneous and variable support needs of workers. This will require effective integration of the JG scheme with mental health, rehabilitation and employment support services.     

Examining the relationship between commuting patterns,employment growth and unemployment in the NSW Greater Metropolitan Region

This paper employs the Labour Market Accounts framework to explore how employment growth and commuting patterns interacted to determine changes in the spatial distribution of unemployment in Statistical Local Areas within the NSW GMR over the period 1996–2001. Separate regression models (including control variables) for men and women provide estimates of the relative strength of the relationships between these labour market adjustment responses and the percentage local employment change. The results show that employment growth between 1996 and 2001 has elicited substantial changes in commuting behaviour. Men reveal greater in‐commuting and migration responsiveness to employment growth. Unemployment changes in local areas of the Greater Metropolitan Sydney region have been swamped by commuting responses, potentially posing problems for locally targeted employment strategies.     

A comparative study of legitimation strategies in hybrid regimes

Despite the growing body of research on ‘hybrid regimes’, few studies address the issue of their domestic legitimacy. Targeting this gap in the literature, this article explores the legitimation strategies of three hybrid regimes around the globe: Russia, Venezuela, and Seychelles. Although these countries differ markedly in almost every aspect that can be thought of, the political systems of all three cases combine formally democratic institutions with authoritarian political dynamics. The qualitative, comparative analysis presented in this article uncovers a number of remarkable similarities between the regimes’ respective legitimization strategies. However, while the strategies for engendering legitimacy are similar across the cases, the content of these strategies is different: the Russian leadership mainly relies on preserving order and nationalism, the Venezuelan regime employs a more populist strategy, and the Seychellois regime uses a more personal and particularistic approach. Our findings not only provide insights into the mechanisms hybrid regimes use to consolidate their authority, but also highlight important differences and similarities between hybrid regimes around the world.     

Random Effects Modeling and the Zero-Inflated Poisson Distribution

Overdispersion due to a large proportion of zero observations in data sets is a common occurrence in many applications of many fields of research; we consider such scenarios in count panel (longitudinal) data. A well-known and widely implemented technique for handling such data is that of random effects modeling, which addresses the serial correlation inherent in panel data, as well as overdispersion. To deal with the excess zeros, a zero-inflated Poisson distribution has come to be canonical, which relaxes the equal mean-variance specification of a traditional Poisson model and allows for the larger variance characteristic of overdispersed data. A natural proposal then to approach count panel data with overdispersion due to excess zeros is to combine these two methodologies, deriving a likelihood from the resulting conditional probability. In performing simulation studies, we find that this approach in fact poses problems of identifiability. In this article, we construct and explain in full detail why a model obtained from the marriage of two classical and well-established techniques is unidentifiable and provide results of simulation studies demonstrating this effect. A discussion on alternative methodologies to resolve the problem is provided in the conclusion.     

Kindness in Australia: an empirical critique of moral decline sociology

A new sociological agenda is emerging that interrogates how morality can be established in the absence of the moral certainties of the past but there is a shortage of empirical work on this topic. This article establishes a theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of everyday morality drawing on the work of theorists including Ahmed, Bauman and Taylor. It uses the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to assess the state and shape of contemporary moralities by asking how kind are Australians, how is its expression socially distributed, and what are the motivations for kindness. The findings demonstrate that Australians exhibit a strong attachment and commitment to kindness as a moral value that is primarily motivated by interiorized sources of moral authority. We argue these findings support the work of theorists such as Ahmed and Taylor who argue authenticity and embodied emotion are legitimate sources of morality in today's secular societies. The research also provides new evidence that generational changes are shaping understandings and practices of kindness in unexpected ways.     

Admission to Nursing Homes in Taiwan

The population of Taiwan is facing a radical ageing process. A proportion of the growing number of people aged 65 and over is expected to need nursing home care. This research concerns the family context of decision‐making in the process of admission to a nursing home in Taiwan. Employing survey data from interviews with elderly people in nursing homes (235 interviews) and their carers/key families (265 interviews), the factors affecting their views about admission were explored. Bivariate analysis and a logistic regression model were also used to examine perceptions of alternatives to nursing home care among family members with elderly relatives in nursing homes. Most elderly people in Taiwan are cared for in their own homes by their families but, in some circumstances, entry to a nursing home seemed inevitable. This research found that the decisions were taken mainly within a family context. The adult children of the elderly people, carers/key families’ preferences and the availability of carers influenced the decision. Apart from the important need factors of elders, families’ views about alternatives to nursing homes were significantly influenced by their preferences. This study has important implications for long‐term care in Taiwan. It is hoped that this will be needs‐led, both by elderly people and their families.