Intersectional Approaches in Health‐Risk Research: A Critical Review

The overall aim of this article is to explore how the intersectional approach is used in health‐risk research. The concept has been recognized in health‐risk research since the early 2000s, but not as much as in the broader field of health‐inequality studies. However, in the past 5 years, Social Science and Medicine has published a series of review articles that argue for the necessity of bringing intersectional perspectives to the field of health‐risk studies more generally and quantitative health‐risk research in particular. Asking what it means for health‐risk researchers to practise intersectionality shows the implications of translating a theoretical approach across fields and disciplines. When applying intersectional theory in relation to health‐risks, the theoretical conceptualization of health and risk are often very limited and treated as fixed categories – something that becomes problematic when taken within an intersectional framework. This does not mean that this work is unimportant, but rather that the link between theoretically driven intersectionality and empirical‐focused health research is weak. In order to overcome the dividing lines of health‐risk research and intersectionality, we argue for a new approach that echoes the ‘doing gender’ of gender studies: doing risk.     

Facilitating Participation: Adults' Caring Support Roles within Child‐to‐Child Projects in Schools and After‐School Settings

Embedded hierarchical relationships between children and adults constrain children's voice. For adults to support children's participation in decisions they need to learn new ways of working; to enable children to communicate their views, develop their ideas, make group decisions and take joint action. This article explores the different roles that caring professionals adopt when facilitating children's participation within Child‐to‐Child community health projects. It shows how even committed adults can struggle with shifting their practice and highlights the importance of facilitators adopting a reflective approach rooted in genuine dialogue with children in order to determine the most appropriate level of adult support.     

“Armed Now with Hope …”: The Construction of the Subjectivity of Students within Integration

Students who are integrated into the regular system have traditionally been constructed in a variety of ways that reflect the philosophies and the policies (both stated and implied) of the relevant educational systems. Within these systems though, students have also constructed views of their own subjectivity, yet their perspectives and perceptions students have seldom been considered. Progressive integration policies, such as that in Victoria, Australia, have attempted to change the way students integrated into the regular education system are constructed. Such constructions however, may still be largely incongruent with the ways students construct themselves. This paper explores the integration policy in Victoria over the last decade, and in order to gain greater insight into the way students are constructed, and construct themselves, by and within the policy, draws on the poetry and diaries of a teenager who has been integrated into the regular school system.     

Perceived Parental Relationships and Health‐Risk Behaviors in College‐Attending Emerging Adults

The present study investigated the association of perceived parenting with health‐risk behaviors in an ethnically diverse sample of 1,728 college‐attending emerging adults. Participants completed retrospective measures of perceived maternal and paternal nurturance, connection, psychological control, and disrespect and reported their frequency of binge drinking, illicit drug use, unsafe sexual behavior, and impaired driving. Multivariate Poisson regression analyses indicated that perceived paternal acceptance was associated inversely with 6 of the 12 health‐risk behaviors measured, whereas perceived mothering was related only to 2 of these health‐risk behaviors. These patterns were consistent across gender, ethnicity, and family structure.     

Girls’ Family Labor in Low‐Income Households: A Decade of Qualitative Research

This article analyzes a decade of qualitative research to identify and explore an overlooked survival strategy used in low‐income families: children's family labor. Defined as physical duties, caregiving, and household management responsibilities, children’s—most often girls’—family labor is posited as a critical source of support where low wages and absent adult caregivers leave children to take over essential, complex, and time‐consuming family demands. We argue that there are lost opportunities when children are detoured from childhood to do family labor and that an intergenerational transfer of poverty is associated with those losses.     

“Transnational” Socio‐Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research: Views from an Extended Field Site

This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants' attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation‐states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants' extra‐local socio‐cultural relations. Through an ethnographic study of dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, I explore the wide range of migration practices in which differing actors engage and the nature of the sociocultural systems that emerge as migrants move between places.     

The Use of the Talmudic Format for the Presentation of Qualitative Research

In this article, I propose to adapt the Talmud, a Jewish religious text, for the written representation of qualitative research. The form and the style of argumentation in and engendered by the Talmud can be adapted to present qualitative methods in a way that transcends the limitations of conventional formats. In addition, this format requires even greater participation in the act of reading. Because the Talmudic format uniquely addresses the difficulties involved in representing everyday life, I argue that adapting the format of the Talmud is ideal for giving voice, for presenting multiple and competing narratives alongside documents, and for further problematizing any simple notion of truth and authority.     

Child‐focused Parenting after Separation: Socio‐legal Developments and Challenges

In this article I utilise developing ideas in family law as a backdrop against which to discuss changing assumptions about parenting. In particular, I examine the gender‐neutral assumptions within family law in Australia and elsewhere in the light of seemingly contradictory evidence about the value of post‐separation fathering. That men were equally capable of providing effective parenting was by no means clear at the time that the principle of gender‐neutrality became common in family law—the 1960s and 70s. Only recently, has burgeoning research on fathering begun to more clearly affirm its value and to clarify the conditions under which pre and post separation fathering makes a positive difference. Paradoxically, it is at this very time that legally based challenges to the gender‐neutral, shared‐parenting philosophy of the 1995 Australian Family Law Reform Act have begun to emerge. The often‐perplexed interface between law, social science research and therapeutic intervention presents many challenges. I conclude the article by flagging a number of questions relevant to family therapists in this difficult field of work.     

Change from within: The ABC‐AME church

This article describes the dilemma of a senior pastor whose urban church lost its community focus as the congregation became more affluent. His task was to determine what role the church should play in helping its less fortunate neighbors and how to get the members to support this new vision. Where there is no vision the people perish. —Proverbs 29:18     

Elder Abuse in Europe: An Overview of Recent Developments

ABSTRACT

Elder abuse is a global phenomenon. Despite recognition and action several decades ago in a number of countries, in many others the phenomena of abuse and neglect have been much more recently identified as in need of attention. This brief will discuss the situation relating to responses to and interventions in elder abuse that have been evolving in a number of countries in the European region, which are at different stages of development. The examples provided will assist in meeting the worldwide challenge that elder abuse presents.     

Traditionalism or Low Self‐Control?: Explaining the Health‐Risk Behaviors of American Indian Youth

Using a sample of American Indian high school students, we test self-control and Native traditionalism as predictors of their health-risk behaviors. Regression analyses found self-control to be a significant influence on all seven health-risk items as well as the health-risk composite. Traditionalism by and large fails to influence these behaviors. However, the traditionalism measure serves a second purpose as a means of controlling for cultural variation while testing the influence of self-control. In doing so, self-control remains a robust predictor. By controlling for cultural variation and examining behaviors that transcend cultural definitions of deviance, we believe these results support the cultural invariance thesis of self-control. Implications for refining traditionalism, testing the cultural invariance of self-control, and considering new directions in understanding the health risks among American Indians are discussed.     

The Daily Events and Emotions of Master’s‐level Family Therapy Trainees in Off‐campus Practicum Settings

The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) was used to assess the daily events and emotions of one program’s master’s‐level family therapy trainees in off‐campus practicum settings. This study examines the DRM reports of 35 family therapy trainees in the second year of their master’s program in marriage and family therapy. Four themes emerged from the results: (i) Personal contact with peers‐in‐training engenders the most positive emotions during practicum; (ii) Trainees experience more positive emotions during therapy with families and couples in comparison with therapy with individuals; (iii) Positive affect increases over the course of a student’s practicum year; and (iv) Trainees experience less positive affect in individual supervision in comparison with most other training activities. Flow theory offers guidance for supervisors helping trainees face developmental challenges of clinical training.     

Social Work Education: Issues and Problems in Light of Recent Developments

This paper examines several aspects of the crisis in social work education, which has been aggravated by changes in American society and developments in higher education. Under “Crisis in Higher Education,” four developments are reviewed: the straining toward equality between student and teacher, the integration of subjective experience with formal content, the increased importance of continuing education, and the renewed attention needed for the place of values in teaching. The expanded definition of practice and the creation of new categories of professional personnel have triggered and exacerbated problems of quality, content, and goal. The paper concludes with suggestions for remedying the crisis.