Language delays among foster children: implications for policy and practice

This article highlights the centrality of language in early childhood development and the potential for language delays to negatively affect long-term outcomes in educational and social domains. Given the high rate of language delays in the foster care population, an emphasis should be placed on assessing language skills among children ages 6 and younger entering foster care. The authors describe several existing approaches to assessing language skills and discuss obstacles to the widespread implementation of systematic evaluation among foster children. Finally, the authors discuss the need for research and programming to establish evidence-based practices that encourage the remediation of language delays in this highly vulnerable population.     

The ten commitments: a value base for mental health recovery

The concept of recovery is an important part of contemporary mental health services. During the past 5 years, Tidal Model projects, focused on developing the recovery attitude within nursing practice, have been established in several different countries. The Tidal model emphasizes 10 philosophical assumptions the "Ten Commitments," that are central to recovery-focused practice.     

Child Survival and Fertility of Refugees in Rwanda

In the 1960s and 1990s, internal strife in Rwanda has caused a mass flow of refugees into neighbouring countries. This article explores the cumulated fertility of Rwandan refugee women and the survival of their children. To this end, we use a national survey conducted between 1999 and 2001 and covering 6,420 former refugee and non-refugee households. The findings support old-age security theories of reproductive behaviour: refugee women had higher fertility but their children had lower survival chances. Newborn girls suffered more than boys, suggesting that the usual sex differential in child survival observed in most populations changes under extreme living conditions.     

The Congruence Between Adolescents and Their Parents’ Gender-Role Attitudes in Urban Slums of Allahabad,India

Gender role differentiation intensifies during adolescence. The current study explores gender-role attitudes among unmarried young men and women aged 15–21 residing in the slums of Allahabad, India. The survey asked a series of questions about gender role attitudes to young men and women and to their parents (relating to work and educational attainment for girls, marriage and husband–wife relations). Since either the father or mother responded to the parent questionnaire, data analyses are based on subsets of mother–daughter pairs (n = 2124), mother–son pairs (n = 2135), father–son pairs (n = 788), and father–daughter pairs (n = 452). No significant differences emerged in terms of adolescent background characteristics of the four groups and the adolescent population of the study. A fair amount of congruence in gender role attitudes was found in the mother–daughter and father–son pairs for most items. However, a similar pattern was not visible in the father–daughter or mother–son pairs. Multivariate regression analysis indicated strong influence of parental attitudes on the adolescent’s attitudes. While education led to a shift in girls’ attitudes to gender egalitarian ones, it did not impact the attitudes of adolescent boys.     

Reflections of an ordinary life

Philip Anderson (not his real name) was one of thirty people who talked to Wendy Booth and Tim Booth as part of their recently published study Growing Up with Parents who have Learning Difficulties (London: Routledge, 1998). Philip's stoy illustrates many of the themes common to the experience of this group: resilience in the face of risk; the importance of family, especially grandma; social exclusion; the effects of hardship; and the enduring nature of parent-child bonds.     

The Elementary Forms of Place and Their Transformations: A Durkheimian Model

Due to the fragmentary nature of research findings and conceptual models, the Durkheimian legacy remains undervalued in contemporary spatial theory. The paper addresses this neglect by proposing a unified Durkheimian model of place which can be applied to case history and comparative analyses. It draws together the fragmented insights of Durkheimian theory to characterize four elementary forms of place: sacred, profane, liminal and mundane. These place/space identities are maintained and transformed through rituals and narratives which depend upon contingent human actions for their sustenance. The paper concludes with an extended case study which deploys the model to explain the changing meanings of the site of the Bastille (Paris, France) over the past two centuries.     

Using Mand Training to Establish an Echoic Repertoire in Young Children with Autism

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - This research describes a method that initially establishes a mand repertoire as the first component in producing echoic and tact repertoires in young children...     

REPATRIATION OF DEBT IN THE EURO CRISIS

With the beginning of the Euro Crisis, the long‐standing trend of European financial integration reversed. Investors unwound cross‐border positions of debt obligations and increased holdings of locally issued debt. In other words, debt obligations were repatriated. We use data on bank portfolios to document three new empirical regularities of the financial disintegration: (i) repatriation affected mainly debt of crisis countries; (ii) repatriation affected mainly public debt; (iii) the public debt of crisis countries that was not repatriated was reallocated to large and politically influential countries within the Euro area. We read these results in light of standard theories of cross‐border portfolio allocation and argue that the sum of these patterns constitutes evidence for the secondary market theory of public debt.     

EMPIRICALLY ACCELERATED CONVERGENCE OF THE SPACINGS STATISTICS TO NORMALITY

If the asymptotic normality of a statistic is inadequate for approximating its distribution in practice, then the statistic may be transformed in order to improve the approximation by accelerating the convergence to normality. We treat a goodness-of-fit statistic, the sum of the logarithms of generalized uniform spacings introduced by Cressie (1976, 1978), in this spirit. Specifically, we apply the method of maximum likelihood to simulations of the statistic in order to estimate a power transformation, as in Box & Cox (1964), and hence develop a small sample normal approximation. This approximation provides a more versatile method of applying the statistic than currently available tables of percentiles.