Decision‐making under uncertainty in child protection: Creating a just and learning culture

The argument is made for having a positive error culture in child protection to improve decision‐making and risk management. This requires organizations to accept that mistakes are likely and to treat them as opportunities for learning and improving. In contrast, in many organizations, a punitive reaction to errors leads to workers hiding them and developing a defensive approach to their practice with children and families. The safety management literature has shown how human error is generally not simply due to a “bad apple” but made more or less likely by the work context that helps or hinders good performance. Improving safety requires learning about the weaknesses in the organization that contribute to poor performance. To create a learning culture, people need to feel that when they talk about mistakes or weak practice, there will be a constructive response from their organization. One aspect of reducing the blame culture is to develop a shared understanding of how practice will be judged and how those appraising practice will avoid the hindsight bias. To facilitate a positive error culture, a set of risk principles are presented that offer a set of criteria by which practice should be appraised.     

Middle School Children's Perceptions on Welfare and Poverty: An Exploratory, Qualitative Study

This study was undertaken to determine how middle school children assess the effects of welfare reform on their daily lives. The study consisted of thirty interviews with children and their mothers recruited from a middle school in a large, metropolitan area. From the children's perspective, multiple jobs and evening/night hours interfered with the child-parent relationship. Other consequences included grades going down and not getting to school on time. All the children stated that mothers should work, but most children felt mothers should only work when their children are in school. Welfare and poverty were issues about which children were teased at school.     

Life with and without heart disease among women and men over 50

This article uses a demographic approach and data from the Health and Retirement Survey, a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population, to investigate sex differences in the length of life lived with heart disease and after a heart attack for persons in the United States age 50 and older. On average, women live longer than men with heart disease. At age 50 women can expect to live 7.9 years and men 6.7 years with heart disease. The average woman experiences heart disease onset three years older and heart attacks 4.4 years older than men.     

Complex home care: challenges arising from the blurring of boundaries between family and professional care

Over the last 50 years, increasingly complex care (such as tracheostomy management, dialysis or enteral feeding) has shifted from hospital to home, with a concomitant rise in patient self-management and care given by family members. Recognition of the importance of the contribution of family care to the health system is also growing. This article reports the findings of a New Zealand study which explored the experiences of family carers who manage technical health procedures at home. It then draws attention to some broader issues raised by shifting complex care from professional management in hospital settings to family care at home, namely the ways in which complex home care blurs the boundaries between professional and family care (creating the ambiguous position of the expert carer) and questions of safety and responsibility in family care. We also discuss the implications for policy around family caregiving in New Zealand. Given the potential physical and mental health impacts of caring, it is time for renewed consideration of what family carers should be expected or allowed to manage and how the health system can support them in their important role.     

Endless Pressure: Life on a Low Income in Austere Times

Much has been written that details the decline in living standards following the ‘credit crunch’ in the UK. It remains that we understand to a lesser degree the lived reality of poverty through the Great Recession and into the era of austerity. This article draws on testimonies of 62 participants from low income households conducted in three different areas of the UK during 2012–13 to document the pressures that this period brought to bear on these households. According to these testimonies, the experience of poverty intensified in key respects: first, participants reported feeling, more than ever before, that they were ‘existing, rather than living’ due to the meagre budgets they were forced to live on; second, the precarious nature of work and social security contributed to a sense of insecurity that was all pervasive in our participants' lives; third, due to the pejorative political rhetoric and media coverage of poverty, our participants felt that their lives were placed under increased scrutiny which deleteriously impacted their wider relationships and sense of belonging. Our analysis demonstrates the profound consequences for those living on low incomes of the continued shift to residual forms of state welfare and the increased reliance on the ‘Big Society’ as a means to deal with the pressures identified in this article.     

The Good Grandparent: Perspectives of Young Adults

As life expectancy increases, the role of grandparent has increased in duration and is continually adapting as families change in structure, function and form. Across the past several decades, researchers have examined grandparenting styles, finding some consistency as well as the emergence of newer styles, and evidence that grandparenting styles are related to the age and gender of both the grandparents and the grandchildren. In this study, we investigated young adults’ perceptions of grandparenting quality. University Students (N?=?470) from a Midwestern university responded to an online survey that asked them to evaluate the quality of their grandparents grandparenting now and at two retrospective points in time, childhood and adolescence. We hypothesized that the grandparents' performance of multiple styles of their role would be related to grandparenting quality. In addition, we expected that preferred grandparental roles would vary in relation to grandchildren's gender. The results of regression analysis indicated that, although grandparenting quality tended to decline across the respondents' developmental stages, higher ratings at an earlier stage were related to higher ratings at the latter two stages. Further, grandsons preferred grandparents who performed as supporters and advisors, whereas granddaughters preferred grandparents who functioned as supporter and friend. Overall, grandmothers were likely to be the more significant grandparent. Continual research on both grandchildren and grandparents will be needed to chronicle the development of the grandparental role in changing times.     

Seeking Liberation,Facing Marginalization: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders' Conditional Acceptance in Hip‐Hop Culture

Using interview data with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hip‐hop participants, we analyze how respondents construct hip‐hop as a liberating space where they can circumvent limiting racial and ethnic stereotypes. However, an intersectional lens reveals the constraints that hip‐hop's hypermasculinity places on AAPI men as well as the ethnosexualized expectations that AAPI women must negotiate. The experience of AAPI men and women in hip‐hop due to their unique position in racial and gender hierarchies interacts with stereotypical notions of AAPI people in wider society to relegate these participants to the margin rather than center of hip‐hop culture. Thus, we find respondents' constructions of hip‐hop less an indicator of hip‐hop culture's openness than a statement of how constricting the mainstream U.S. culture is for AAPI Americans, rendering hip‐hop's conditional acceptance preferable by comparison.     

From Antiracism to Antiracisms

Although antiracism has existed as long as there has been racism, social scientists' attention to antiracism has increased in the past decade. In this essay, I argue that the body of scholarship on antiracism is characterized by three main strands: (1) a macro focus on the ideology and structure of antiracist social movement organizations, often attempting to distil 'the real' antiracism from others deemed not critical or radical enough to qualify; (2) a micro focus on what motivates individuals to become antiracist, usually concentrating more on whites and using an a priori assumption that people of colour are automatic antiracists; and (3) a more promising interest in the antiracisms of the racial middle (Latinos, Asians, multiracials). This latter focus is emerging with a handful of scholars largely outside the United States, questioning the assumptions of the previous two strands, and offering interesting potential for the future of the field.     

Interrupting Trauma and Advancing Development: Considering Parent Education in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Treatment

This paper centers on the exploration and utilization of a contemporary, psychoanalytically-based parent education perspective aimed at interrupting intergenerational trauma. It highlights The Parenting Process, an integrative model of parent education that is at once educational and therapeutic. This model is explored in light of a third listening stance based on James Fosshage’s listening perspectives concept. This paper underscores and illustrates through clinical material the benefits of playing with implicit and explicit communication across various sensory modalities.     

Implementing a Multidimensional Poverty Measure Using Mixed Methods and a Participatory Framework

Recently, there have been advances in the development of multidimensional poverty measures. Work is needed however on how to implement such measures. This paper deals with the process of selecting dimensions and setting weights in multidimensional poverty measurement using qualitative and quantitative methods in a participatory framework. We estimate the multidimensional poverty measures developed by Alkire and Foster for a particular group: persons with psychiatric diagnoses in the United States. To select relevant dimensions and their relative ordering, two discussion groups are convened: one consisting of persons with lived-experience expertise and the other consisting of people with mental health service provision or research expertise. Several methods are used to convert dimension rankings into weights. The selection and ordering of dimensions differed between the two discussion groups, as did the resulting poverty measures. For instance, the poverty headcount using the dimensions and weights of the ‘lived experience’ group ranged from 20.61 to 26.96% as compared to a range of 18.62–33.19% using those of the ‘provider/researcher’ group. One of the main results of this study is that the Alkire Foster method is sensitive to the selection of dimensions and the methods used to derive rankings and weights. It points toward the limitation of relying exclusively on small scale qualitative methods for the selection and ranking of dimensions. In addition, the participatory framework used in this study was found to be essential in interpreting results, in particular with respect to the limitations of the data set in measuring relevant dimensions.