Confronting Cruelty

Abstract

The present article reports on a study of the attitudes and behaviour of young people towards help-seeking during times of emotional distress and, in particular, when contemplating suicide. Twent- one young people aged between 16 and 24 years, as well as six parents and 14 youth service providers who lived in ‘Subcity’, a metropolitan community, were interviewed about their understandings of youth suicide and effective interventions. Nearly all the young people, service providers and parents identified a range of barriers that impede or prevent young people from asking for help when they need it most, including issues related to trust and confidentiality, parental support and fear, stigma and perceived loss of esteem. Implications for social work practice include an emphasis on developing parenting skills and community development related to education about suicide and the provision of appropriate support services.     

Complexities of discretion in social services in the third sector

Policy analysts have devoted considerable time to examining the problem of the policy implementation gap, with one important strand in the literature following Michael Lipsky's work on street-level bureaucracy and discretion. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature concerning shifts in government/third sector organisation contractual arrangements and whether they constitute a significant (post-neoliberal) development in policy implementation. Using a case study of contracted government services in Australia, we revisit the conception of discretion to reflect on the impact of these changes and document their implications for the use of discretion in management and front-line worker practices.     

Civil Society Partnerships: Power Imbalance and Mutual Dependence in NGO Partnerships

This study examines the distinction between power imbalance and mutual dependence to better understand how NGOs manage resource dependencies in their relationships with civil society partners. The NGO leaders we interviewed emphasized mutual dependence in the relationships they developed with other NGOs regarding access to financial and information resources. In contrast, discourse about their relationships with IGOs focused on the acquisition of legitimacy and access, and was dominated by power imbalance. NGOs were largely accepting of both forms of dependence in pursuit of the community’s shared goals and for the greater good of constituents. Our finding that NGOs refrain from terminating suboptimal relationships also reflects the extent to which mutual dependence governs NGOs partnering strategies.     

Robust estimation of location in samples of size three

Youden (1953) discussed the practice of averaging the two most concordant observations in sets of three measurements as a method of estimating location. Distributional results for this estimator can be found in Seth (1950) and Lieblein (1952). It follows from their work that the sample median has smaller variance for normal and uniform populations. In this paper it is shown that themedian stochastically dominates the average of the two closest observations for uniform, normal, double–exponential and Cauchy populations and thus is the superior resistant estimator in these cases for a broad class of loss functions. However, an example is given in which, for a particular contaminaion model and loss function, the mean of the closest two observations has smaller risk than the median.     

The Components of Young Children's Emotion Knowledge: Which Are Enhanced by Adult Emotion Talk?

This research adopted observational and experimental paradigms to investigate the relationships between components of emotion knowledge in three‐ to four‐year‐old children. In Study 1, 88 children were assessed on the Emotion Matching Task (Morgan, Izard, & King), and two tasks requiring the generation of emotion labels and causes. Most tasks were significantly associated with age and language ability, and similar tasks were significantly but moderately correlated. In Study 2, 58 of these children were allocated to one of three conditions: emotion cause talk, in which they received four sessions of training focusing on emotion labels and causes; non‐emotion cause talk, focusing on causal relationships in general; or were allocated to a no‐training control. Children in the emotion causes condition showed improvement in their use of emotion labels but not other components of emotion knowledge. The findings suggest that, in three‐ to four‐year‐old children, emotion knowledge is constituted by related but separable components and that training in emotion language targets separate rather than all aspects of emotion knowledge.     

Financial strain over the life course and health among older adults

This paper focuses on financial strain across the life course as a condition underlying health inequalities observed in later life. The analysis is based on data from 1167 adults 65 years and older collected as part of the 'Aging, Stress and Health Study". Relying on retrospective data about hardship experienced over the life course, we find that long-term financial hardship is reflected in a range of health outcomes at late life, even after controlling for the effects of current financial circumstances. Moreover, the sheer persistence of hardship matters more than its episodic occurrence or timing, so that the health effects of early hardship may be obviated if followed by no further hardship. This pattern offindings is consistent with the notion of allostatic load, the cumulative damage done to health and well-being under the burden of an unrelenting stressor in a critically important life domain.     

eDiary and Female Sexual Distress Scale© in Evaluating Distress in Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD)

Sex-related distress is integral to the diagnosis of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). This article describes the results of three prospective, non-treatment validation studies (two North American and one European), each testing over 200 participants with HSDD, other types of female sexual dysfunction (FSD), or no FSD in which the 12-item Female Sexual Distress Scale^© (FSDS^©), the 13-item FSDS–Revised^©(FSDS–R^©), and a single question asked using a daily electronic diary (the eDiary For HSDD Trials^©; eDiary) were used to measure sex-related distress. FSDS results with 30- and seven-day recall were equivalent. The results observed with FSDS–R Item 13 (a single question assessing concern due to low sexual desire) were comparable to the FSDS. Mean eDiary monthly distress scores were closer to the minimum possible score (equivalent to “a little bit” of distress) and were about twice as variable as FSDS or FSDS–R Item 13 scores in participants with HSDD. All three measures confirmed that there is more distress in women with HSDD compared to women with no sexual dysfunction at all time points, demonstrating discriminant validity.