Exploring spirituality among youth in foster care: findings from the Casey Field Office Mental Health Study

This study examined spiritual coping mechanisms, beliefs about spirituality and participation in spiritual activities and in other positive activities among adolescents in foster care. A multidimensional measure of spirituality was developed for face-to-face interviews with 188 youth (ages 14–17) from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds in the United States. Findings revealed 95% of youth believe in God, over 70% believe God is 'creator' and God is 'love', and 79% considered prayer a spiritual practice. Most youth said love and forgiveness help them heal. Two-thirds (67%) reported responding to 'bad or tragic things happening' by spending time alone, and over half responded by praying (59%) or sharing the problem with someone else (56%). Youth's top three spiritual goals were to follow God's plan for them, become a better person, and know their purpose in life. Based on the value youth ascribed to spiritual coping mechanisms, recommendations for policy and practice focus on the integration of spirituality into practice and caregiving for youth in foster care.     

Transmitting Ideals: Constructing Self and Moral Discourse on Loveline

Loveline is a late‐night radio advice show currently airing on progressive rock stations in the United States. Callers present their most intimate troubles to the show's DJ–doctor advice‐giving team, revealing themselves to an audience of faceless millions. I analyze three distinct interactional phases through which Loveline callers and hosts symbolically transform troubled selves: with each problem revealed, each embarrassing joke made, each specific recommendation given, a moral discourse is constructed. Loveline incrementally builds a distinctive way of conceptualizing right and wrong, closely tied to standards of a whole, happy, healthy selfhood. And while the notions of a moral discourse and an ideal self are fundamentally modern, Loveline's distinctive combination of mass‐mediated anonymity, intimate subject matter, satiric tone, and fragmented interaction patterns conveys these modern concepts over the radio waves and into a postmodern world.     

The Beta-Poisson Distribution in Wadley’s Problem

In dose-response studies, Wadley’s problem occurs when the number of organisms that survive exposure to varying doses of a treatment is observed but the number initially present is unknown. The unknown number of organisms initially treated has traditionally been modelled by a Poisson distribution, resulting in a Poisson distribution for the number of survivors with parameter proportional to the probability of survival. Data in this setting are often overdispersed. This study revisits the beta-Poisson distribution and considers its effectiveness in modelling overdispersed data from a Wadley’s problem setting.