The Legacy of War: An Intergenerational Perspective

Children of combat veterans are affected to varying extents by the physical and psychological aftermath of war as experienced by the parent. Traumatic experiences exist on a continuum; trauma related messages can be communicated by a parent who does not have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. An intergenerational perspective explores the complex family processes by which those who did not experience the actual events come to exhibit varying degress of emotional, psychological and behavioral manifestations of their parents' traumatic experiences.     

Sandy and Sandy in Seven Weeks: A Group Worker Reflects

The editor-in-chief of this journal was immersed in the recovery effort post-Hurricane Sandy, as a provider and survivor. Just weeks later, in his role as executive director of a children's mental health agency, his focus shifted as parents and children across the United States were destabilized by the news of the slaughter of innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This essay traces those seven weeks and offers a reflection on reverberating disasters, emphasizing the important role that group work can play in the aftermath of traumatic events.     

Recognizing complex trauma in child welfare‐affected mothers of colour

Child welfare‐affected mothers of colour live with the deleterious effects of complex trauma unrecognized by the child welfare system. Child welfare system instead focuses on mothers' more overt functional difficulties, facilitating a misalignment between mothers' felt needs and mandated services. Qualitative data from a mixed‐methods study were used to explore the phenomenon of complex trauma in 20 urban‐dwelling mothers using a combined interpretive phenomenological and directed content analysis. Mothers experienced chronic and compound exposure to traumatic events. Themes of interpersonal violations of trust and pervasive mistrust of others, revictimization, absence of appropriate mental health treatment, and maternal growth emerged. Implications for utilizing a trauma‐informed approach for policy and practice are discussed.     

The impact of kin support on urban American Indian families

Scholars believe that family ties extending out to previous generations, called kin support, may have allowed American Indians to withstand traumatic events. Although a series of traumatic and historical events disrupted the social structures of family life, kin support was found to be a major factor in the survival of American Indians. This study utilized the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to compare American Indians and whites (n = 1227) in factors that impact kin support. While urban American Indian mothers were similar to whites in a number of elements, American Indian mothers that were not married, fell below the poverty threshold, were younger in age and co‐resided with kin were more likely than their white counterparts to receive kin support. Implications for urban American Indian mothers suggest that maintaining their role as kin keeper may serve as an intrinsic reward and motivation for caring for kin. The role of a kin keeper may also promote the unique contribution in their families and the preservation of their culture. Given the minimal research in this area, results of this study can be used to guide future research and the development of intervention strategies for practitioners working with American Indian families.     

Understanding PTSD: Forgetting "Trauma"

The concept of "psychological trauma" conflates emotional responses to traumatic events such as motor vehicle accidents, muggings, and house fires, responses to natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and responses to war, chronic physical abuse, prolonged torture, and repeated gang-rape as an act of "ethnic cleansing." It is argued that, from a psychological, human, and moral perspective, use of a single construct to describe responses to such a range of horrific happenings makes no sense. The benefits and limits of conceptualizing PTSD as a unifying concept for describing psychological responses to calamitous events are discussed. The consequences (with respect to clinical work, research, and social policy) of failing to distinguish between responses to relatively circumscribed traumatic events, more extreme, prolonged, or repeated individual traumatization, and collectively experienced mass violence against entire communities are examined.     

The occurrence of happy and traumatic events in the life of common people

Until recent times, psychology and the social sciences have paid only limited attention to the positive aspects of human life. The present article aims to review psychological and epidemiological studies about the occurrence of happy and traumatic events in the life of common people, critically discussing their findings and suggesting new research directions. Overall, it has emerged that most people report having experienced at least one traumatic event in their lives; on the other hand, moderate happy experiences may occur with a daily frequency. Unfortunately, the studies conducted thus far suffer from methodological limitations as they did not consider extremely happy events and collected data about happy and traumatic events separately. The author emphasizes the necessity to jointly investigate the prevalence of both happy and traumatic events. Hopefully, this will permit to achieve more reliable indicators of quality of life, thus contributing to increase researchers’ understanding of what makes human existence joyful and sorrowful.     

Therapeutic Intimacy

Abstract

This essay describes therapeutic intimacy as a deeply personal and evolving definition of what each therapist finds uniquely curative. The author arrived at her definition following the events of September 11, 2001, and notes that constructs such as vicarious traumatization do not adequately convey the profound impact that such a catastrophic event can have on the clinician's personal and professional life. She introduces the term “shared trauma” to describe the lasting, transformative changes in one's self-concept taking place when the clinician and client are exposed to a collective trauma. The arbitrariness of professional boundaries is captured through discussion of client narratives.     

Parents Beyond Borders: A Social Group Work Curriculum for Supporting Immigrant Parents and Building Solidarity

Parents Beyond Borders, a curriculum first implemented in 2008 as part of The Center for Family Life's ParentShip Program, encourages group members to create a shared narrative about their traumatic immigration experiences. The result is twofold. First, immigrant parents gain a more assertive and poignant voice to communicate with family and others in their lives when sharing their family's acculturation experience. Second, because social group work promotes recognition of collective trauma due to the community's experience of marginalization, it improves members' group self-concept and empowers them to take action and advocate for themselves.     

Maternal disclosure and adolescent prosocial behavior: The mediating roles of adolescent disclosure and coping

In this study, we considered the impact of mothers' willingness to disclose about distressing events and rule transgressions on their adolescent children's willingness to disclose about similar events, as well as adolescents' ability to cope and to show concern for others. Mothers and their 12‐ to 14‐year‐old children (N = 125) were asked to say how likely they would be to talk about moderately distressing concerns as well as minor rule transgressions. Adolescent positive coping skills were also assessed. Teachers (N = 92) rated the adolescents' prosocial behaviors in the classroom. Adolescents' disclosure about distressing events and positive coping mediated the relation between maternal disclosure about distressing events and adolescent prosocial behavior. Further, maternal disclosure alone about both distressing events and rule transgressions was related to adolescent prosocial behavior through positive coping. These results suggest that mothers' willingness to talk about their own negative experiences can help children cope better and, ultimately, to show greater empathy and concern for others.     

When Does the Public's Issue Agenda Affect the Media's Issue Agenda (and Vice-Versa)? Developing a Framework for Media-Public Influence*

Objective. The agenda-setting literature has demonstrated the media's ability to set the issue agenda for the public. One byproduct of this work is that researchers have produced some evidence suggesting that the audience will, on occasion, set the issue agenda for the media. Given disparate sets of findings, researchers do not have a framework to better understand on which issues the media will set the agenda for the public and on which issues the public will set the agenda for the media. It is the goal of this article to provide empirical support for a framework suggesting that the events comprising issue areas predetermine the direction of influence between the media's and the public's issue agendas. Methods. I construct a historical data set comprised of 35,000 stories from the nightly network news and responses to Gallup's Most Important Problem question. I look for evidence of causal influence between news issue content and public issue concerns using Granger analysis and vector autoregression. Results. Issue areas comprised of spectacular events, such as defense, will be reported by the media and subsequently affect the salience the audience assigns to those issues. In issues not normally comprised of spectacular and singular events, such as energy and environment, public issue concerns appear to drive issue coverage in the news. Issues such as transportation and education, which comprise few spectacular events and little public concern, will receive sparse coverage in the media. Conclusion. The findings provide support for a framework based on events; the types of events that typically comprise issue areas will affect the likelihood of those issues coming on the news agenda. This then affects the direction of influence between the public and the media. The framework supported here allows for the integration of the media effects and media content literatures. This has implications for understanding how the news agenda is constructed and how the commercial media meets democratic ideals.     

Perspectives of Taiwanese practitioners on therapeutic reactions to disclosure of childhood sexual abuse

Disclosure of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a difficult decision, because CSA is a traumatic experience. Because of the sensitive nature of CSA in Taiwan, reactions to disclosure of CSA in treatment contexts can be challenging for practitioners. Little is known about Taiwanese practitioners' reactions to disclosure that occurs while they are working with CSA survivors. In-depth, phenomenological interviews were used to fully explore three practitioners' clinical reactions to disclosure of CSA. The significant categories and themes that emerged from the study are discussed. Limitations and implications of the present study and recommendations for future research are addressed.     

Ethnic Phobias in the Structure of National Identification

The most recent (July 1996) monitoring studies conducted by VTsIOM [the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research], which included measures of the ethnic attitudes and national orientations of the Russian population, indicate that mass ethnic phobias or frustrations, as well as traumatic experiences associated with the loss of the country's former great-power status, the disintegration of the USSR, and the Soviet way of life in general have already peaked' (Table 1). Indices of ethnic hostility have dropped in comparison with the preceding year (1995), in some respects reaching the level of 1993, or even the still earlier and lower threshold values determined in 1989-90.     

Toward a Typology of Russian Political Consciousness

The most diverse methods of investigation can be used in analyzing the political preferences of the Russian population. For example, one can regularly measure the approval ratings of various politicians and trace shifting trends through variations in these ratings. This method is quite simple and reliable if one exercises the necessary caution in interpreting the results. However, the effectiveness of such methods is ultimately limited: they are useful in comparing short-term forecasts of voting behavior and can provide indirect indicators of people's reactions to certain events, but they do not reveal what lies behind people's stated preferences—that is, the content that determines the choice.     

Increasing claims for soft tissue injuries in workers' compensation: Cost shifting and moral hazard

During the last decade, the distribution of workers' compensation claims has exhibited a marked shift towards soft tissue injuries such as sprains, strains, and low back claims. There are three possible explanations for this trend; (1) safety incentives induced by workers compensation or OSHA may have reduced other, traumatic claims; (2) the movement away from heavy manufacturing and the 1980 construction recession may have changed the underlying risk of a workplace injury; and (3) there has been moral hazard behavior on the part of workers and health care providers. Using a new data source and estimation framework, we find evidence that moral hazard response explains most of the 30% increase in the proportion of soft tissue injuries during the 1980s.     

Strategies for the Study of Individual Development within Naturally-Existing Peer Groups*

The investigation of peer influences on children's development in natural settings rests squarely on appropriate methods to identify those individuals who are influential for a given child. Traditional methods of sociometric ratings or assessments of friendship choices are not intended to identify reciprocal influences in children's peer groups of social interrelationships. In the study of networks within sociology, researchers have focused on the structural properties of children's networks, instead of the psychologically meaningful characteristics of the children who comprise a target child's network. To complement these strategies, a method is presented that can reliably identify those individuals who constitute children's natural peer groups in a setting. This information is used to form composite maps that represent the psychological peer context of a given child. Strategies are outlined for analyzing processes of group selection and socialization among developing individuals and their changing peer contexts.     

Storytelling as a Way to Work Through Intractable Conflicts: The German-Jewish Experience and Its Relevance to the Palestinian-Israeli Context

The storytelling method can be used to work through intractable conflicts. Working-through enables people who have suffered traumatic social experiences to learn to live with these painful events while developing an ability to listen to the pain of the "other." The storytelling approach focuses on the way personal storytelling facilitates the working-through processes in intractable conflicts. The storytelling approach was used in To Reflect and Trust (TRT), a dialogue group that began in 1992 and involved descendants of Nazi perpetrators and Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors. The storytelling method was applied to a year-long Jewish-Palestinian student workshop held at Ben Gurion University in 2000–2001.     

Intergenerational pathways leading to foster care placement of foster care alumni's children

This study examined a path model that postulated intergenerational relationships between biological parent psychosocial functioning and foster care alumni mental health, economic status and social support; and from these to the likelihood of children of foster care alumni being placed in foster care. The sample included 742 adults who spent time in foster care as children with a private foster care agency and who reported having at least one biological child. A full pathway was found between poorer father's functioning to greater alumni depression, which was in turn associated with negative social support, and then a greater likelihood of child out‐of‐home placement. Other parent to alumni paths were that poorer father functioning was associated with alumni anxiety and post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and poorer mother's mental health was associated with PTSD; however, anxiety and PTSD were not implicated as precursors of foster care placement of the child. Findings support the need for increased practice and policy support to address the mental health needs of parents of children in or at risk of foster care, as well as the children themselves, as family history may have a lasting influence on quality of life, even when children are raised apart from biological parents.     

Hardiness,Successful Aging,and HIV: Implications for Social Work

ABSTRACT

With dramatic developments in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, life expectancy is increasing, resulting in more middle-aged and older adults living with this disease. Little is known about the problems, and especially the strengths, of those living and aging with HIV. Hardiness is used in the gerontological literature to describe and explain how people age successfully, despite traumatic life events and chronic diseases. Similarly, the concept of hardiness may be used to guide clinicians, researchers, and clients on how to age successfully with HIV. This article provides a review of hardiness in aging and HIV, and emphasizes its importance in facilitating successful aging with this disease. Conceptual and methodological concerns in studying hardiness and successful aging are addressed. Potential interventions and clinical implications for social work are posited for augmenting qualities of hardiness in people aging with HIV.     

Discounting climate change

In this paper I offer a fairly complete account of the idea of social discount rates as applied to public policy analysis. I show that those rates are neither ethical primitives nor observables as market rates of return on investment, but that they ought instead to be derived from economic forecasts and society's conception of distributive justice concerning the allocation of goods and services across personal identities, time, and events. However, I also show that if future uncertainties are large, the formulation of intergenerational well-being we economists have grown used to could lead to ethical paradoxes even if the uncertainties are thin-tailed. Various modelling avenues that offer a way out of the dilemma are discussed. None is entirely satisfactory.