Pathological gambling in Montreal's Chinese community: an anthropological perspective

Pathological gambling has been identified as a major issue in Montreals Chinese community. A variety of sources attest to the fact that, though we live in an increasingly heterogeneous society, the services provided to minority communities for preventing and treating pathological gambling are inadequate. An anthropological approach that takes into account cultural characteristics of ones community could lead to better strategies for acknowledgement, definition, diagnosis and treatment of pathological gambling among culturally different communities. Research paths that could help to provide effective treatment and services to specific populations are suggested. An overview of the way the Chinese view gambling, pathological gambling and treatment is presented. The concepts of fate, destiny and luck in Chinese thought, as well as Montreals Chinese community social norms related to gambling are then described. The incorporation of those cultural understandings in future studies and treatment attempts is suggested.     

Examining the role of sense of community: Linking local government public relationships and community-building

This study examines the relationship between factors central to community building, including local government-public relationships, sense of community, positive Word-of-Mouth (WOM) toward community, and community participation. A national survey of U.S. respondents (n?=?447) was conducted through MTurk. The results indicate that the effects of local government-public relationships on positive WOM and community participation are mediated by individuals’ sense of community. This study advances the relationship-management scholarship by demonstrating that managing government-public relationships is ineffective in community-building when a sense of community is absent. In addition, the results of this study may benefit government public relations practitioners who are interested in public engagement.     

Town–gown relationships: Exploring university–community engagement from the perspective of community members

An increasing number of colleges and universities have developed strategies for community engagement. The engagement, however, has been one-sided in that colleges and universities send students, faculty, and staff members out into the community. The current investigation sought to further broaden the definition of community engagement by exploring the benefits that can be accrued by a university when community members are encouraged to explore the cultural, intellectual, athletic, and artistic benefits that are provided in college and university campuses.     

In defence of disability studies: a response to Forshaw (2007) 'In defence of psychology: a reply to Goodley and Lawthom (2005)'

We welcome Forshaw's reply to our paper because it opens up debate about psychology and its relationship with the development of an emancipatory disability studies. In our paper we aimed to: (1) raise possibilities for disability studies researchers' engagement with psychology (rather than psychology colonizing disability studies); (2) trace some of the epistemological journeys we underwent in carrying out disability research and community psychology research; (3) consider these possibilities and journeys in relation to previous literature on emancipatory disability research. Forshaw's reply appears to ignore aims (2) and (3) and instead focuses on the ways in which we (mis)represent psychology. He suggests that we: present an inaccurate account of qualitative research in contemporary psychology; make a divisive argument for a 'breakaway group' of community psychologists; epistemologically contradict ourselves because of our concern with 'reality' and social constructionism; argue for only adopting participatory action research; not least, adopt 'simplistic' and 'outdated' views of psychology. We will respond to these criticisms.     

Sense of community through supportive housing among formerly homeless individuals with serious mental illness

Much research documents the correlation between homelessness and mental illness. Often, existing research focuses on deficits that live at the intersection of these phenomena. The present study utilizes a sense of community (SOC) framework to interrogate the ways in which formerly homeless individuals with serious mental illness perceive and experience community in supportive housing. Through focus groups with 18 consumers, this study contextualizes dimensions of SOC (membership, emotional connection, needs fulfillment, and influence) for the aforementioned population. Analysis of focus group data produced 16 themes and subthemes that support and extend our understanding of SOC for a population often conceptualized as isolated and alone. Implications for policy and practice emphasize: (1) the importance of supportive housing communities and the call for policymakers to increase funding for such programing; and, (2) that practitioners facilitate housing members’ voices to effectuate change in supportive housing and increase SOC.     

Preventing child abuse: a review of community-based projects II: Issues arising from reviews and future directions

Detailed examination of evaluated community programmes for the prevention of physical child abuse and neglect shows that success depends on matching the skills of the staff to the needs of the families. The relative inefficiency of risk screening and attrition from prevention programmes argues for comprehensive as well as focused aspects of programmes and variation in which is available. Sexual abuse prevention programmes have usually been implemented in schools but are more successful when the focus includes bullying and when children and parents are also actively involved. This is also true of bullying programmes. In establishing risk for abuse, more effective methods are required to assess aspects of family life that are not readily observable, including involved but non-resident adult males. It is important not only to approach abuse prevention by intervening in different ways and at different points in the network of processes within and around the family, but also to find cost-effective ways of sustaining preventative efforts. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Marketing higher education across borders: a cross-cultural analysis of university websites in the US and China

This cross-cultural analysis compares the visual elements of university websites in the US and China to determine whether culture might play a role in a university's marketing strategies. Results indicate that buildings, campus views, and university gates were the predominant visual elements on university websites in China, while single people and small groups of people were the most frequently used visuals on US sites. Overall, universities tend to sell from a perspective of “what we have” in China, whereas recruiting in the US comes from a position of “who we have”. Findings suggest that institutions need to tailor their marketing campaigns to a particular culture. For university websites that are designed to build and maintain relationships with multicultural audiences, how messages are delivered is as crucial as the information that is provided.     

Gambling motivations and superstitious beliefs: a cross-cultural study with casino customers

The expansion of legalized commercial gaming in Macau has motivated stakeholders to explore opportunities in other Asian countries. However, there is a lack of research focusing on casino customers in these markets. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore gambling superstitious beliefs and motivations of those visiting a casino in South Korea, and how these factors are different across four ethnic groups. The researchers surveyed 323 casino customers in the lounge area on the casino floor, including Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans living abroad. This study found American gamblers could be characterized as more superstitious than Japanese gamblers, while the Chinese and American gamblers exhibited many similarities regarding the pattern of superstitious beliefs that they were most likely to endorse. The findings also suggest the culture and the area around the casino might be more important to Chinese, while novelty to Japanese and winning money to Korean gamblers are seen as most important. This study contributes to gambling literature by examining gamblers’ beliefs and motives in a different setting with more diverse populations than those in previous studies. The findings of this study will help casino operators properly develop and adjust strategies to thrive in the Asian marketplace.     

First Nations and community economic development: a case study

A training project in a northern Canadian community providedan opportunity to examine participatory planning approachesand the meaning of work in First Nations communities. Focusgroups conducted three years after the unsuccessful interventionof a community economic development (CED) project suggest thatcomplex factors such as lack of support from community leadersand rate of pay for workers determine whether CED is alwaysappropriate in northern, First Nations contexts.     

Neighbourhood Committee Roles and the Sense of Community

In this study of 93 members of neighbourhood committees, from 31 urban, mainly lower-class neighbourhoods in the greater Tel-Aviv area, the roles played by neighbourhood representative organizations, as seen by organization activists, are examined. These roles are divided into expressive and instrumental, and, following Wandersman (1981), their correlations are examined with environmental factors and personal and participational variables of the respondents, and their sense of belonging to the community. Generally theWandersman model fits the data, but the use of the expressiveinstrumental division allows for some refinement and extension, and sheds light on the way community activists see themselves as residents and as parents.     

Sense of School Membership and Associated Academic and Psychological Outcomes in Post-Institutionalized Adopted High School Students

Research highlights lasting cognitive and academic challenges in youth internationally adopted from institutional care. However, there is a lack of research examining internationally adopted students' sense of membership at school and associated academic and psychological outcomes. The current study measured sense of school membership and academic and psychological outcomes in post-institutionalized internationally adopted high school students (n = 29) compared to adolescents internationally adopted from foster care (n = 28) and non-adopted adolescents (n = 32). Post-institutionalized males had a lower sense of school membership than males adopted from foster care or non-adopted males. Group differences in school membership were mediated by academic achievement and psychological well-being.     

Evaluating Dancing With Parkinson's: Reflections from the perspective of a community organization

In 2015, Dancing With Parkinson's (DWP), a Toronto-based community organization, participated in the Ontario Brain Institute's (OBI) newly launched Evaluation Support Program. This paper reflects on that experience. In particular, we identify the key lessons derived from the OBI initiative, discuss how these lessons have informed DWP practice going forward, and highlight what we consider to be the most valuable aspects of the Evaluation Support Program. While we now recognize the need to establish an evaluation culture within DWP, we find that there are significant challenges associated with both building and sustaining evaluation capacity in the context of a small community-based organization. Whereas DWP has built considerable strengths in terms of informal evaluation capacity, on its own, such capacity is insufficient to, for example, demonstrate DWP's impact to outside audiences or successfully scale up the program.     

Care and community revalued during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A feminist couple perspective

The COVID‐19 pandemic led us to understand and revalue care ethics within our daily lives and communities based on the feminist theory of care ethics. This article is a personal reflection of an academic couple living in Japan as we reflect on our experiences and the challenges encountered in caring for ourselves and our community. We discuss the ideas of care theory mainly: caring‐about and caring‐for, interchangeably in our discussion across the three‐stage categories: Home — A Commonplace; Care Ethics in Community; and Care Ethics for Self. Through these personal narratives, we strive to recognize the struggles of living through the pandemic in a virtually connected world that often disconnects us from self. We foster the idea of embracing care ethics as a starting point at an individual level.     

Built community: architecture,community, and participation in a permanent supportive housing project

Housing and the social processes that create it are an important part of a better world. The permanent supportive housing movement holds that housing, in addition to a variety of human services, is the most dignified and effective way to help people without homes. But the design of such initiatives matters. This community-based, qualitative research project investigates the connection between space, participation, and community. It draws on the experiences of residents of an innovative housing organization on Skid Row in Los Angeles, California. Residents of the program find community space to be both promising and contested. Their experiences also reveal the way that institutional space can be trauma-informed and impact their overall wellbeing and opportunities for interacting with others. However, their feelings of being a part of the community and their involvement in activities are not always connected, as identity and social context can cause residents to identify or dis-identify with their community despite how involved or uninvolved they are. Intentionally designed community spaces in permanent supportive housing units can respond to trauma and set the stage for interaction, but they cannot solve all problems.     

On Masking and Revealing the Culture of the Cross-Culturalist

There is a gulf between the analytic and experiential aspects of cross-culturalists' functioning that is reflected in the split between explicit scientific rules for studying the culture of others, while following an informal oral tradition for considering our own cultural makeup. This article discusses both a possible strategy for correcting this situation and the barriers that are likely to prevent such a correction. Structured cultural self-study procedures are presented as a possible resource in the continuing development of graduate students and professionals, and these have already proven highly effective in teaching cross-cultural psychology to undergraduates. Fostering commitments to standardized self-study and to applications of experiential learning is currently not likely to flourish due to complex academic and epistemic traditions, discussed as six cultural self-masking factors. A specific self-study protocol is offered to provide a beginning point for generating improved reflexive methods and for individual trial use. Through disciplined reflexivity, benefits might emerge in the form of better bias control in research, enhanced external validity, and a new theory about the interplay of investigators' self-knowledge and the conduct of cross-cultural research.     

Through community eyes: the transition of international organizations from community aid to development in postconflict Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone experienced an 11-year civil war, brutalizing its people and destroying its communities. With the cessation of violence, international organizations helped to secure peace, deliver aid and supplies, and, after, assist with development projects. This grounded theory study, which aims to understand the role these organizations played from the viewpoint of community members in 2 communities, posits that community members’ regard of international organizations lessened as their efforts transitioned from securing the peace and relief efforts to aid for development. Highlighted are the successes and challenges of this work and a broad discussion of implications and recommendations.     

Stigma,AIDS, and HIV Prevention in Africa: Reports from Community Organizations Providing Prevention Services

ABSTRACT

The AIDS epidemic in Africa remains a serious health crisis. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa play a critical role in the delivery of HIV prevention services. An important barrier to their HIV prevention efforts is stigma directed at persons living with HIV/AIDS. In order to understand how stigma affects HIV prevention programming, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with NGO directors in 29 African countries. Qualitative analytic approaches were used to identify key themes. Substantial discrimination and stigmatization of HIV-positive persons was reported. HIV-positive women were particularly likely to suffer negative social and economic consequences. The stigma associated with HIV interfered with disclosure of HIV status, risk-reduction behaviors, and HIV testing, creating significant barriers to HIV prevention efforts.

Interventions to reduce AIDS-related stigma in Africa are urgently needed. Reducing the burden of stigma is critical to fighting the epidemic in Africa and could play an important role in global HIV reduction.     

Using the community of inquiry for interviewing children: theory and practice

Involvement of children in research processes requires various ethical considerations. In particular, while interviewing children, a researcher needs to take into consideration the power imbalance between a researcher and children as well as among children. This article suggests a possible way of mitigating potential risks, drawing on the idea and practice of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) as an interview method. CoI is the practice of group dialog for knowledge-making, where participants talk about a common topic by sharing their lived experiences in a cooperative manner. This article shows that CoI allows children to act as both interviewers and interviewees, which helps children in reflective knowledge-making while at the same time mitigating the ethical concerns of interviewing. To illustrate how CoI can help achieve these goals, this article draws on the empirical research conducted with a group of junior high school students in Japan.     

Building community: a conceptual framework for child protection

This paper proposes a community-building framework as an innovative strategy to begin to re-claim children and families at risk. It is a strategy that identifies a purpose, a value base, knowledge and theoretical dimensions, and methods of practice that present as an approach for child welfare systems to consider shifts in thinking in order to meet what is considered the most important challenge of the next century: that of rediscovering community. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.