The unknown soldiers of foster care: Foster care as loss for the foster parents’ own children

Abstract

This paper explores the effects of the foster care experience on foster parents’ biological children. In spite of having been accepted for over 40 years as the best form of residential care for most children and adolescents requiring alternative living arrangements, very little research has been done into the foster care experience. Almost nothing is known about the effects of foster care on either the foster family as a unit or its individual members, yet one of the major concerns foster parents present is the effect of the foster care experience on their own children. This concern leads many experienced foster families to leave foster care and many potential foster families to decide not to foster. This paper discusses the losses experienced by the children of foster parents.     

On the instability of majority decision-making: testing the implications of the ‘chaos theorems’ in a laboratory experiment

In light of the so-called ‘chaos theorems’ from social choice theory, William Riker (W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1982) argues that the indeterminacy of majority rule leads to voting cycles making democratic decisions arbitrary and meaningless. Moreover, when the core is empty, majority instability correlates with the level of conflict among actors. This study uses laboratory committee decision-making experiments to provide an empirical test of both aspects of Riker’s argument. Committees make repeated majority decisions over 20 periods picking points from a two-dimensional policy space. The experiment manipulates committee members’ preferences and thus varies the existence of a core and the level of conflict between group members. The experimental results contradict Riker’s interpretation of the chaos theorems’ implications. Thus, the core exhibits less attraction than generally assumed. Moreover, an empty core is not associated with increased majority rule instability. Instead, conflicting preferences lead to more instability irrespective of the existence of an equilibrium.

     

‘We the People’ versus ‘We the Heads of States’: the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union

The Eurozone crisis has rekindled the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union (EU). In this paper, the debate is reconsidered by contrasting the modus vivendi of ‘We the People’ in the USA with the modus vivendi of ‘We the Heads of States’ in the EU. It is demonstrated that many of the solutions to the alleged democratic deficit focus on how more voice can be given to ‘We the People’ on the input side, but that this goes against the functional logic of the EU system, thereby undermining its ability to govern. Instead, we argue that more attention should be given to how to increase output legitimacy, and a number of proposals are put forward. Such a reshuffling of the analytical focus is the best way forward to escape the current impasse in the debate on how to ‘fix’ democracy in the EU.     

Sunk ‘Decision Points’: a theory of the endowment effect and present bias

Theory and Decision - This paper presents a very simple model in which situational cues associated with a particular consumption good compel an agent—who may have otherwise been...     

‘Work for others but none for us’: the economic and environmental inequalities of New Deal relief

This article calls for increased dialogue between social and environmental historians through an examination of the unintended inequalities caused by New Deal relief efforts in the United States during the Great Depression era. It does so not by exploring those directly involved in New Deal relief programmes, but rather by analysing the impact of such programmes on residents of local communities situated near New Deal work project sites. In particular, it traces how a dozen Civilian Conservation Corps camps in a state park thirty miles from New York City transformed the local environment, and in turn influenced the economies and political relationships of nearby local communities. The article argues that while working-class residents were unable to benefit financially from nearby New Deal relief work, middle- and upper-class business owners proved more successful. As a result of such economic inequalities, while working-class locals became increasingly critical of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, middle- and upper-class residents became grudgingly supportive. The article concludes by urging both social and environmental historians to undertake ‘histories from the ground up’ that pay as much attention to nature as they do to race, class, ethnicity and gender.     

Managing the flow of private information on children and parents in poverty situations: Creating a panoptic eye in interorganizational networks?

In this article, we discuss how the flow of private information about children and families in poverty situations is managed in interorganizational networks that aim to combat child poverty. Although practices for sharing information and documentation between child and family social work services are highly encouraged and recommended to create supportive features for parents and children, this development often results in undesirable forms of governmentality. Interorganizational networking also creates controlling side effects because the exchange of information in networks of child and family services may wield a holistic power over families. We theorize this issue by using the Foucauldian concepts of the panopticon and pastoral power, which allows us to grapple with the major tension between support and control in the information‐ and documentation‐sharing practices of social workers. A critical analysis of our empirical data reveals four central fields of tension in which social workers and their organizations must position themselves: (a) craving control and handling uncertainty, (b) using and misusing private information and trust, (c) constructing families as subjects and objects of intervention, and (d) including and excluding families.     

A note on Rescher's ‘Semantic Foundations for the Logic of Preference’

In ‘Semantic Foundations for the Logic of Preference’ (Rescher, ed.,The Logic of Decision and Action, University Press, Pittsburgh, 1967), Nicholas Rescher claims that, on the semantics developed in that paper, a certain principle - call it ‘Q’ turns out to be ‘unacceptable’. I argue, however, that, given certain assumptions that Rescher invokes in that same paper,Q can in fact be shown to be a ‘preference-tautology’, and henceQ should be classified as ‘acceptable’ on Rescher's theory.     

Threads across the world: sewing resilience into the fabric of children’s lives

Strengthening the ecological resilience factors in the lives of children that have been abused can help them to navigate the healing process. It is through group work that children can share their “resilience wisdom” with one another as a healing community. There is a dearth of research on cross-cultural resilience programs for children who have been abused. This article explores a group work program that was conducted for one year in Bolivia and Australia. The results from each group reveal the similarities and the differences in outcomes between children from different cultural backgrounds that participated in a resilience group work program.     

‘Growing Old’ in Shelters and ‘On the Street’: Experiences of Older Homeless People

Homelessness among older people in Canada is both a growing concern, and an emerging field of study. This article reports thematic results of qualitative interviews with 40 people aged 46 to 75, carried out as part of a mixed-methods study of older people who are homeless in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Our participants included people with histories of homelessness (n = 14) and persons new to homelessness in later life (n = 26). Interviews focused on experiences at the intersections of aging and homelessness including social relationships, the challenges of living on the streets and in shelters in later life, and the future. This article outlines the 5 main themes that capture the experience of homelessness for our participants: age exacerbates worries; exclusion and isolation; managing significant challenges; shifting needs and realities; and resilience, strength, and hope. Together, these findings underscore the need for specific programs geared to the unique needs of older people who are homeless.     

Searching for ‘analysis’ in the southwest: AM vs. PM newspapers in four ‘fire zones’

Never in the history of newspapering has our Fourth Estate been so unsure of what its premiere medium should be doing as we approach the 21st century. Because daily newspaper circulation and readership have been declining since 1987, every newspaper consultant in America has an opinion about what papers must do. This exploratory study focuses on what Southwest media managers think newspapers must do—provide analysis and context in local news coverage. Context is defined and eight competing southwestern newspapers in Alburquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, and Tucson are content analyzed for “analysis” by investigating 200 seperate 1994 editions in this non-probability, purposive benchmark sample.     

‘Civic’ police and the condition of liberty: the rationality of governance in eighteenth-century England

In this article it is argued that previous attempts to understand the organization of eighteenthcentury systems of police have failed to take into account the political implications of governmental organization. Examining the office of constable in terms of the contemporary governmental imagination reveals that concerns with the independence of the officers and the need to ward against ‘corruption’ are not simply practical requirements. The unpaid, sequential nature of eighteenth-century police service was defined in terms of the classical model of civic duty, which saw active participation in government and the rotation of public office as key conditions of the free state, and as such the liberty of the citizens. This vision of freedom as a condition of freedom from dependence or domination, not an absence of interference, was instrumental in defining the way the system of police was debated and reformed over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Given that ‘police’ in this period represents a much wider programme of administration than the simple control of law and order, this has implications for our understanding of the structure of eighteenth-century government in general.     

Probability weighting and the ‘level’ and ‘spacing’ of outcomes: An experimental study over losses

The main goal of the experimental study described in this paper is to investigate the sensitivity of probability weighting to the payoff structure of the gambling situation—namely the level of consequences at stake and the spacing between them—in the loss domain. For that purpose, three kinds of gambles are introduced: two kinds of homogeneous gambles (involving either small or large losses), and heterogeneous gambles involving both large and small losses. The findings suggest that at least for moderate/high probability of loss do both ‘level’ and ‘spacing’ effects reach significance, with the impact of ‘spacing’ being both opposite to and stronger than the impact of ‘level’. As compared to small-loss gambles, large-loss gambles appear to enhance probabilistic optimism, while heterogeneous gambles tend to increase pessimism.