Organizations advocating for youth: the local advantage

Youth occupy a unique place in our democratic society. They must primarily rely on others to speak on their behalf as decisions are made about the allocation of resources within and across various youth-serving institutions. Advocacy organizations comprise crucial representational assets for all youth, but America's poorest children and youth especially need an effective voice to speak for and about them. Yet advocates for youth in urban areas face tough challenges since urban voters typically have few positive connections to youth. This article draws on three years of research focused on three organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area that have successfully advocated for better policies for youth. The authors explore the strategies that these organizations have employed to overcome the challenges they face, with particular attention to the advantages that follow from advocating at the local rather than at the state or federal level.     

Review of Deep listeners: Music,emotion, and trancing by Judith Becker: Bloomington and Indianapolis,IN: Indiana University Press, 2004

The paper reports the results of Phase 2 of a study that investigates the listening comprehension strategies used by adult learners of Japanese. Phase 1 of the study identified the learners' listening strategies and categorised these strategies into a classification scheme and Phase 2 evaluated the efficacy of the listening-strategy intervention program. The listening-strategy classification scheme from Phase 1 provided the empirical basis for the Phase 2 instructional package of task-effective strategies for the intervention program. This paper reports the results of Phase 2 study.

Members of the intervention group were taught to use three strategies ndash; ‘identifying key terms’, ‘elaborating’, and ‘inferencing’ ndash; to comprehend satellite Japanese news texts. The intervention program was administered during the course of teaching the intermediate-level Japanese course offered at a metropolitan university in Australia, where the data for the Phase 1 study were collected. Assessment of the intervention program's results indicated that the intervention group who received instruction on listening strategies achieved a higher level of comprehension than the non-intervention group. The implications of the study are discussed.     

A brief telephone interview to identify lesbian and bisexual women in random digit dialing sampling

Lesbian health research has most often relied on nonprobability samples that are biased and restrict generalizability. Random sampling could reduce bias, but requires development of a method for fast and reliable screening of a large number of women. We tested the feasibility of using a brief telephone interview to assess sexual attraction, behavior, and identity. Using Random Digit Dialing in a neighborhood of Boston with a high density of lesbian residents, we interviewed 202 women aged 18 to 59. Of the respondents, 33% reported some sexual attraction to other women, 20% reported sex with women since age 18, and 14% identified as a lesbian. The high level of cooperation with the study among eligible women (94%) and the high proportion of women who disclosed homosexual attraction, behavior, or identity show that it is feasible to use a brief screening questionnaire about sexuality of women over the telephone even without building special rapport with the respondents.     

A Study of Social Workers' Job Satisfaction as Based on an Optimal Model of Care for the Terminally Ill

ABSTRACT

To address the need for empirical evidence on how culture is and should be addressed in child protection work in Australia to ensure equity in service delivery, this study reviewed 120 case files of children from ethnic-minority, Aboriginal, and Anglo backgrounds and conducted 46 qualitative interviews with ethnic-minority client families and the caseworkers who service them. Overall, the results indicated that the issue of culture for ethnic-minority families receives less consideration than it does for Aboriginal families and more than it does for Anglo families, indicating that cross-cultural parity is yet to be achieved. To ensure equity in service delivery, it is important that culture is neither overlooked nor used to essentialize the needs and experiences of ethnic-minority families; balancing the amount of attention that culture receives in child protection work may help “normalize the novel”—that is, reduce the use of cultural stereotypes without reducing the significance of cultural factors in child protection work with culturally nonmainstream families. Mandatory consultation with “multicultural” caseworkers may help get the balance right and warrants future research.     

Workers and helpers: perspectives on children's labour 1899-1999

Summary Children's work has become, over the last century, proscribedby law and custom. Both in domestic and external settings, labouris held to damage the physical, emotional and spiritual well-beingof children. Adults who collude in or tolerate children's labourare subject to judicial penalties and moral condemnation. Thesocial history of childhood proposes an upwards temporal inclinefrom barbarity to humanity. Children's exclusion from the labourmarket is a key factor in this trajectory. Work by children,including care for siblings and parents, has become part ofthe same moral universe as child abuse. It is proposed herethat this proposition may be applied too indiscriminately and,furthermore, that condemnation of children's labour is associatedwith wider social needs and has not arisen solely as a resultof philanthropy. The past, it is suggested, has been disproportionatelydemonized, partly in order to promote certain political goals.While this does not imply that child labour, external or domestic,is unproblematic, it is argued that the same historic mechanismswhich have resulted in the distortion of children's labour experiencehave the capacity to bias our understanding of contemporarywork undertaken by children.