Silent witness : detection,femininity, and the post-mortem body

The interactive personality quiz regularly featured in teenage girls' magazines is a unique feature of the monthly publications. Using Hall's model of communication, I examine the ways in which the magazines encode information within the texts of the quizzes, paying special attention to the connotations that emerge from the structure of the quiz text, and the ways the quizzes operate to ensure the same disciplinary messages are presented to all readers.     

Grief and Trauma Group Therapy for Children After Hurricane Katrina

Theoretical and evidence-based group therapy models that address the interplay of grief and trauma are needed for children postdisaster. This article describes a theoretically informed 10-week grief and trauma group model that was evaluated with children in schools after Hurricane Katrina. The foundation of the grief and trauma intervention includes utilizing developmentally specific methods, an ecological perspective, and culturally relevant approaches. The theoretical ordering of themes addressed occurs within three overlapping phases: (1) resilience and safety, (2) restorative retelling, (3) and reconnecting (Herman, 1997 Herman, J. L. 1997. Trauma and recovery, New York: Basic Books.  [Google Scholar]; Rynearson, 2001 Rynearson, R. 2001. Retelling violent death, Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge.  [Google Scholar]). Techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy and narrative therapy are combined to address loss and trauma.     

Development of the India Patriarchy Index: Validation and Testing of Temporal and Spatial Patterning

Social Indicators Research - While existing indices of gender equality measure the role of women’s status and position, they inadequately contextualize the broader construct of patriarchy, a...     

From Soviet to Europe: Returns to Education Puzzle in Bulgaria

This article makes a systematic presentation of returns to education in Bulgaria, a country that has witnessed a number of dramatic structural changes over the last two decades. It examines the headway of returns to education for Bulgaria in two observed economic regimes — from communism to EU membership. The findings show a steady increase in returns to education for both men and women until 2003. The average returns to one additional year of education rose from 1.1 per cent in 1986 to 5.1 per cent in 2003 for men and from 2.1 to 5.9 per cent for women. Quantile regression estimations between 1986 and 2003 evince that the most prominent increase in the wage premium occurred at the top end of the distribution, where the rate of returns to education increased in particular for women — from a negative and insignificant sign in 1986 to 7 per cent in 2003. However, this increasing trend in returns to education seems to take an inverted U‐shape in 2007, the year when the country joined the EU, which poses a new puzzle to be resolved. To this end, the current article introduces possible explanations for such a puzzle and sheds lights on a number of insightful policy implications.     

THE LONDON BOMBINGS AND RACIAL PREJUDICE: EVIDENCE FROM THE HOUSING AND LABOR MARKET

This paper investigates the impact of the London bombings on attitudes toward ethnic minorities, examining outcomes in housing and labor markets across London boroughs. We use a difference‐in‐differences approach, specifying “treated” boroughs as those with the highest concentration of Asian residents. Our results indicate that house prices in treated boroughs fell by approximately 2% in the 2 years after the bombings relative to other boroughs, with sales declining by almost 6%. Furthermore, we present evidence of a rise in the unemployment rate in treated compared to control boroughs, as well as a rise in racial segregation. (JEL J15, J71, R21)     

A Contextual Approach to the Development of Self-regulatory Competencies: The Role of Maternal Unresponsivity and Toddlers' Negative Affect in Stressful Situations

A prospective study examined the effects of maternal unresponsivity and of toddlers’ own negative affect on the child's subsequent ability to use effective attentional control strategies in preschool. Maternal and child behaviors were measured in situations that varied in the level of stress to test the hypothesis that behaviors in high stress situations would be more diagnostic of children's subsequent self‐regulatory behavior. As predicted, both maternal unresponsivity and toddlers’ negative affect, particularly in a high stress as opposed to a low stress situation, predicted children's later use of ineffective attentional control strategies. Similarly, maternal disengagement that occurred contingent to toddlers’ distress predicted ineffective attentional control strategies whereas maternal disengagement in response to toddlers’ non‐distress behaviors did not. The findings supported the utility of a contextual approach to understanding the impact of maternal and child characteristics on the development of self‐regulatory skills.     

Community Treatment Orders for People with Serious Mental Illness: A New Zealand Study

New Zealand legislation allows for the involuntary outpatienttreatment of people with serious mental illness. This studyexamines the views of service users, family members and mentalhealth professionals (MHPs) about the impact of this regime.Semi-structured interviews were completed with forty-two serviceusers, twenty-seven family members and ninety MHPs, with recentexperience of the regime. Participants were asked to commenton the functions of community treatment (or non-resident) orders,their benefits and restrictions, decisions about their terminationand any impact on relationships. Most service users believedthe main purpose of the order was to ensure they took medication.They also believed the order provided better access to othertreatments, supported accommodation and care from MHPs. Familiesconsidered the orders provided relief for them and a supportivestructure for their relative’s care. MHPs found the ordersuseful for engaging service users in a continuing therapeuticrelationship, and for promoting treatment adherence. In eachgroup, a majority of those interviewed viewed involuntary communitytreatment in a generally positive light, while acknowledgingthe restrictions imposed on service users’ freedom.     

Cattle for Wives and Extramarital Trysts for Husbands? Lobola, Men, and HIV/STD Risk Behavior in Southern Africa

Lobola is in many Southern African countries a tradition, which is expected to be adhered by anyone who is part or want to be part of the community. It is about paying respect to the elders, the family and the community. It is a significant element of marriage among many tribes and there are strict rules to adhere. In order to determine how much the actual fact of payment of lobola would influence the behavior of husbands and wives, we conducted several focus group discussion with men, women, mixed groups and couples. We analyzed the data collected during these sessions and compared these with the literature. Many participants see lobola as part of their African culture, although they wished that they would not actually have to pay lobola. We could not determine a difference in the husband's behavior, whether they had paid lobola or not and having extramarital affairs.     

Cost effectiveness of an integrated service delivery model as measured by worker retention

This study sought to examine the impact of housing child welfare ongoing teams in the community, near client neighborhoods, and in a setting that also co-locates other service providers that serve the same clients. The focus was the impact of location and service integration on perceptions of worker stress and actual worker turnover. Thirty four workers from this type of setting and from a more traditional setting in two urban cities in a Southern state were interviewed. In addition turnover rates were calculated and compared. It was found that those located near clients and with staff from other agencies had better morale, lower stress levels, more positive attitudes toward clients and client contexts, knew more about the communities the clients lived in and had more chances to collaborate to solve client problems than those in a more traditional setting with co-location only with family support staff. The turnover rate was lower in the integrated service delivery setting than in either the traditional setting or the state overall. Thus, integration of service delivery benefits not only the child welfare workforce participants, but also the clients who have greater access to other service providers and to the bottom line of the agency through the retention of workers. Implications are described.     

Using Alternate Forms of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale: Caveat Emptor

This study examined whether Forms A and B ofthe Multidimensional Health Locus of ControlScale (MHLCS) are parallel by comparing (a)mean performance on the internal, powerfulothers, and chance subscales, (b) the internalconsistency and one-week test-retestreliability estimates for each of thesubscales, (c) the intercorrelations among thesubscales, (d) the relationship betweenself-rated health status and each of thesubscales, and (e) the fit of the three-factorstructure for the MHLCS proposed by Wallston etal. (1978) using confirmatory factor analysis(CFA). A non-clinical sample (N = 245) wasused. Overall, the results of the study do notsupport treating Forms A and B of the MHLCS asparallel or exchangeable forms. Directions forfurther revisions to the MHLCS are proposedbased on both the present study as well asfindings from the literature.