Parents Forever: Evaluation of an Online Divorce Education Program

Divorce education programs are conducting increasingly rigorous impact evaluations to assess if their curriculum improves parenting practices, reduces conflict in the coparenting relationship, and improves outcomes for children. This article presents a 6-month follow-up evaluation of the online version of Parents Forever, an 8-hour divorce education course developed by the University of Minnesota Extension. At follow-up, parents (N = 232) reported significant improvements on several questions about postdivorce parenting and well-being, indicating that the online version of Parents Forever is effective in promoting positive behavioral change for parents.     

Interpreting Child Sexual Abuse: Empathy and Offense-Supportive Cognitions among Child Sex Offenders

Researchers have suggested that child sex offenders hold distorted views on social interactions with children. Misinterpreting children’s behavior and intentions could lead to sexually abusive behavior toward children. It is further suggested that the interpretation process is influenced by offenders’ offense-supportive cognitions and levels of empathy. To examine the relationships between these three concepts, 47 contact offenders completed self-reports on offense-supportive cognitions and empathy. Vignettes were developed to assess the extent to which offenders attributed responsibility, benefit, and complicity to children in hypothetical child molestation incidents. This study showed that cognitions that justify sexual offending against children seem to diminish the threshold for sexual assault by assigning more cooperation and willingness of the victim in a child molestation incident.     

Is Laughing at the Expense of Victims and Offenders a Red Flag? Humor and Secondary Traumatic Stress

Those who work with human trauma often use humor to handle job stressors. Research has demonstrated that lighthearted humor is related to lower secondary traumatic stress scores, while gallows humor has the inverse relationship. This work explores how three types of humor relate to secondary traumatic stress: (a) humor at the expense of victims, (b) humor at the expense of offenders, and (c) humor containing sexual innuendo. Internet crimes against children taskforce personnel completed questionnaires about secondary traumatic stress and coping techniques. Humor at the expense of victims was rarely used, but when it was, it was indicative of higher secondary traumatic stress. There were no relationships between secondary traumatic stress and the use of humor at the expense of offenders or humor containing sexual innuendo.     

Financial Literacy: Building Economic Empowerment with Survivors of Violence

The purpose of this paper is to outline key constructs including financial literacy, economic self-efficacy, economic self-sufficiency, and economic empowerment, and then present findings from an exploratory study that sought to understand the relationship among these variables in a sample of abused women. The results revealed positive and significant relationships between financial literacy with economic empowerment, economic self-efficacy and economic-self sufficiency. Results also indicated that financial literacy, race, and economic self-sufficiency were significant predictors of economic empowerment. By focusing this research on abused women, it is our intention to raise awareness about the importance of financial literacy curricula with advocates, policy-makers and researchers, so more focus can be given to economically empowering IPV survivors.     

Sustaining and Strengthening a Macro Identity: The Association of Macro Practice Social Work

Macro practice focuses on community-level interventions, such as management, organizing, research, and policy advocacy. Despite social work's deep roots in this type of work, macro practice and macro practitioners often practice without support or connections with other macro practitioners, and are underrepresented in the profession. In 2006, a group of social workers, including academics and practitioners, formed the Association of Macro Practice Social Work (AMPSW). AMPSW works to strengthen the professional identity of macro practitioners, elevate the status of macro social workers, and address common concerns within the social work profession.     

The Educational Soundscape: Participation and Perception in Japanese High School English Lessons

In this article I discuss the emergence of practices of hearing in the midst of English language learning activities. I focus on listening activities during oral English lessons at two public high schools in Tokyo, Japan. One setting is a liberal arts high school. The other is a technical high school where students are trained in specializations such as industrial chemistry and electrical engineering. The different organization of listening activities in each of the schools has consequences for the different shape, texture, and categorization of what is heard. I show how hearing, therefore, is an act not solely located the moment sound meets the ear of an individual. Rather, it is socially rationed, controlled, and imagined through the joint actions of participants before, during, and after such physiological hearing takes place. This constitutes hearing as a social act, cognitively distributed among participants and over space and time in the classroom.     

Why Adoption? Gay,Lesbian, and Heterosexual Adoptive Parents’ Reproductive Experiences and Reasons for Adoption

This study aimed to explore the experiences of gay, lesbian, and heterosexual adoptive parents from 130 families. Parents’ reproductive experiences prior to adoption and their reasons for choosing to adopt were compared. Heterosexual couples were more likely to have experienced infertility than same-sex couples. Same-sex couples were more likely to prefer adoption over other routes to parenthood. Parents in all three family types selected their route to parenthood according to normative expectations, attitudes to biogenetic parenthood, ease of access, and moral reasoning. Same-sex couples’ decisions were enabled by the non-discriminatory sociolegal context of the United Kingdom.     

Reflections on Two Studies of Emotionally Sensitive Topics: Bereavement from Murder and Abortion

This article provides a candid account of the challenges two researchers faced while collecting qualitative in‐depth interview data on two different studies of emotionally sensitive topics. These studies involved asking participants to describe their feelings about a difficult experience—the loss of a loved one to murder and the termination of a pregnancy. We build on the literature on feminist methodology by offering a backstage look at qualitative research on an emotional topic and with an emotionally vulnerable population. Using illustrations from our respective studies, we share some of the insights we gained on recruitment problems, interview question development and participant compensation (e.g., financial, interpersonal and follow‐up contacts). We also discuss the need for monitoring and attending to the participants’ emotions as well as our own throughout the data collection process.