Family Therapy and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Therapeutic Use of Songs in Apartheid South Africa

A central issue for family therapy is the critical question of how to define its role in influencing social change. Family therapy has tended to focus on how to liberate and empower individual clients, not communities, from the travails of tradition. This article highlights social change mechanisms implemented by the oppressed majority in South Africa during the apartheid period. It draws inspiration from the pedagogy of the oppressed articulated by Steve Biko and other members of his generation. This enabled the Black majority in South Africa ‘to name their world by reflecting on their conditions, imagining a better world, and then taking action to create it’ (Freire, 1968, p. 253) through the use of revolutionary songs that resulted in the collapse of the cruel apartheid system. The implications for family therapy are discussed.     

Adaptive and repeated cumulative meta‐analyses of safety data during a new drug development process

During a new drug development process, it is desirable to timely detect potential safety signals. For this purpose, repeated meta‐analyses may be performed sequentially on accumulating safety data. Moreover, if the amount of safety data from the originally planned program is not enough to ensure adequate power to test a specific hypothesis (e.g., the noninferiority hypothesis of an event of interest), the total sample size may be increased by adding new studies to the program. Without appropriate adjustment, it is well known that the type I error rate will be inflated because of repeated analyses and sample size adjustment. In this paper, we discuss potential issues associated with adaptive and repeated cumulative meta‐analyses of safety data conducted during a drug development process. We consider both frequentist and Bayesian approaches. A new drug development example is used to demonstrate the application of the methods. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temperament,Parenting, and Moral Development: Specificity of Behavior and Context

This longitudinal study highlights the role of specific parenting behaviors in specific contexts when predicting moral development in children of varying temperament types. A sample of mother–child dyads took part in a competing demands task involving differing ‘do’ and ‘don't’ contextual demands when the child was 2 years of age. Child temperament was also assessed at this time, yielding inhibited, exuberant, and low‐reactive temperament groups. Children's moral behavior was assessed at 5.5 years of age. Models examining the interaction of temperament and mother behaviors in each context indicated that mother's reasoning/explanation and ignoring in the ‘do’ context predicted later moral behavior in inhibited children whereas redirection and commands in the ‘don't’ context predicted moral behavior in exuberant children.     

Predicting Children's Prosocial and Co‐operative Behavior from Their Temperamental Profiles: A Person‐centered Approach

The goal of this study was to examine how aspects of self‐regulation and negative emotionality predicted children's co‐operative and prosocial behavior concurrently and longitudinally using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Mothers completed measures of children's temperamental proneness to negative emotionality and self‐regulation at 54 months. Teachers and parents completed measures of children's co‐operative and prosocial behavior at 54 months, first grade, and third grade. A latent profile analysis of the temperamental variables revealed four profiles of children: those high in regulation and low in negative emotionality, those moderate in regulation and moderate in negative emotionality, those low in regulation and high in negative emotionality, and finally those who were very low in regulation but high in anger emotionality. Generally, children with profiles that were high or moderate in terms of regulation and low or moderate in terms of negative emotionality were rated as the most prosocial and co‐operative. Children with profiles that were less well regulated and who were high in negative emotionality (particularly anger proneness) were rated as less co‐operative and prosocial by parents and teachers.     

Maternal Education and Investments in Children's Health

Maternal education differences in children's academic skills have been strongly linked to parental investment behaviors. This study extended this line of research to investigate whether these same maternal education patterns in parenting are observed among a set of parenting behaviors that are linked to young children's health. Drawing on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (n = 5,000) and longitudinal models incorporating random effects, the authors found that higher levels of maternal education were associated with more advantageous health investment behaviors at each phase of early development (9 months, 2 years, 4 years, 5 years). Moreover, these disparities were typically largest at the developmental stage when it was potentially most sensitive for children's long‐term health and development. These findings provide further evidence of a developmental gradient associated with mothers' education and new insight into the salience of mothers' education for the short‐ and long‐term health and well‐being of their children.     

Exploring New Life Course Patterns of Mother’s Continuing Secondary and College Education

Population Research and Policy Review - A mounting body of evidence suggests that the life course sequence that once defined contemporary US women’s lives is changing as an increasing number...     

The financial practices and perceptions behind separate systems of household financial management

Qualitative research in the UK has revealed a diversity of financial arrangements underlying separate systems of household financial management. One factor, identified in previous work, is perceived ownership of money, with financial practices differing according to whether couples have distinct, blurred or shared ownership perceptions. The present work aims to build on and extend this research, using data from an online survey study with 190 cohabitants in the UK. The findings reveal that ownership perceptions transcend separate money management categories, and can be a significant predictor of the type of contribution cohabitants make towards joint household expenses.     

On the relative accuracy of certain bootstrap procedures

We show the second-order relative accuracy, on bounded sets, of the Studentized bootstrap, exponentially tilted bootstrap and nonparametric likelihood tilted bootstrap, for means and smooth functions of means. We also consider the relative errors for larger deviations. Our method exploits certain connections between Edgeworth and saddlepoint approximations to simplify the computations.