Mothers' Emotions and Behavioral Support During Interactions with Toddlers: The Role of Child Temperament

This article examines mothers' support for children's interests and, specifically, emotional processes in mothers that may explain why they display different levels of support with children of different temperaments. We observed 114 mothers and their 14–27 month-old children during a laboratory interaction. Mothers rated children on three dimensions of temperament: activity, anger proneness, and social fearfulness. As expected, activity predicted mothers' anger, disappointment, and low support for children's interests. Social fearfulness predicted mothers' worry, low anger, low disappointment, and high support for children's interests. Mediational tests verified that (1) mothers' emotions often mediated the relation of child temperament to mothers' supportive behavior, and (2) children's compliance often mediated the relation of child temperament to mothers' emotions. Mothers tended to report negative emotion and to display relatively unsupportive behavior with children whose temperaments corresponded to attributes considered relatively undesirable for their sex.     

Risk Perception in Context: The Savannah River Site Stakeholder Study

Environmental managers are increasingly charged with involving the public in the development and modification of policies regarding risks to human health and the environment. Involving the public in environmental decision making first requires a broad understanding of how and why the public perceives various risks. The Savannah River Stakeholder Study was conducted with the purpose of investigating individual, economic, and social characteristics of risk perceptions among those living near the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Site. A number of factors were found to impact risk perceptions among those living near the site. One's estimated proximity to the site and relative river location surfaced as strong determinants of risk perceptions among SRS residents. Additionally, living in a quality neighborhood and demonstrating a willingness to accept health risks for economic gain strongly abated heightened risk perceptions.The Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP)The Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP)The Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP)     

Developing Prospective Measures of Adversity Among Australian Families with Young Children

Most studies of children’s development and parents’ wellbeing have not dealt effectively with the complexity of multiple disadvantage. Traditional approaches have typically used a limited set of outcomes and predictors. Even studies utilizing multiple risk factors have often treated these as confounders, adjusting for their influence, while concentrating on a primary association of interest. Such strategies do not illuminate the real world essence of disadvantage, i.e. that adversities co-occur more than expected by chance and that multiple disadvantage is common. The main aim of the present paper is to address this neglected topic and develop summary measures of adversity using the 2004–2005 data from Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Information was obtained from families of 5,107 babies (0–1 years) and families of 4,983 children (4–5 years). The prevalence of multiple disadvantage among families with young children and the degree to which summary adversity measures are associated with each other and with family and child outcomes is then estimated. Using factor analysis, 12 lower-order constructs and two higher-order components of adversity were developed, labelled (1) material and (2) psychosocial adversity. Findings show that the two component scores were more strongly associated with outcomes than were the more specific construct scores and that psychosocial adversity was somewhat more relevant to family wellbeing and child development than material adversity.     

Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant

Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the?$40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of?$30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100%?of qualified applicants for the same money. We anticipate that the net result would be more and better research since more research would be conducted at the critical idea or discovery stage. Control of quality is assured through university hiring, promotion and tenure proceedings, journal reviews of submitted work, and the patent process, whose collective scrutiny far exceeds that of grant peer review. The greater efficiency in use of grant funds and increased innovation with baseline funding would provide a means of achieving the goals of the recent Canadian Value for Money and Accountability Review. We suggest that developing countries could leapfrog ahead by adopting from the start science grant systems that encourage innovation.     

Rural High School Youth's Access to and Use of School‐to‐Work Programs

Rural youth face numerous barriers that may limit career exposure. School‐to‐work (STW) programs are one tool used to increase exposure and facilitate connections between school and work. Using a nationally representative data set, the authors investigated whether rurality relates to the availability of STW programs and rural youth's program use. Results indicate that most schools provide school‐based services (e.g., career plans/career majors), but few schools offer work‐based services (e.g., internships). Rural schools were more likely to offer vocational–technical prep programs and job shadowing but were less likely to offer school‐based enterprise. After controlling for program availability, the authors found that rural students were less likely to take part in job shadowing and community service. Conclusions are offered for career development research, policy, and practice.     

Movement Building and the United States Social Forum

Despite the growing academic literature on the World Social Forum process, few scholars have attempted to systematically analyze the social, cultural, and political impact of the forums. This has to do in part with the inherent difficulties of assessing movement consequences, which is particularly complicated for an activity geared toward creating ‘open spaces.’ This article presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of the social forums through an analysis of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from the perspective of a local Boston-based delegation called the Boston Freedom Rides. We then use that framework to consider the impact of the 2010 USSF, bridging the academic literature on movement outcomes with activist perspectives. We make two related claims. First, the social forums, and the USSF in particular, should be viewed and their impact assessed in light of their generativity as ‘movement-building machines’: infrastructures designed for the production of social capital, networks, solidarities, meanings, frames, identities, knowledges, strategies, skills, and repertoires. Second, with respect to the Freedom Rides, the 2010 USSF contributed to movement building on multiple levels, but more so within rather than across movement sectors. Our goal is less to make a definitive argument about the impact of the 2010 USSF than to provide a helpful way of thinking about movement building as a social movement outcome, which can be applied and refined through further comparative and longitudinal research. We thus favor breadth over depth in outlining a broad framework for future inquiry.     

Browsing the culture: membership and intertextuality at a mormon bookstore

This paper argues that organizational and local host cultures are related through the intertextual performance of membership. It proceeds by claiming that organizations may be usefully read as intertexts, and that the relationship between organizations and their environments is enacted by speakers as they negotiate their multiple identities in talk. These claims are then used to analyze the intertextual performance of membership at a Salt Lake City, Utah bookstore owned by the Mormon church. The analysis demonstrates how: (1) organizational routines surrounding the interpretation of product serve as performances of host-cultural membership; (2) communication among and between store employees and customers clarifies types of host-cultural identity; and (3) the management of controversial texts enacts the organizational environment. The analysis is intended to mark an intersection between organizational and cultural studies by demonstrating how organizations potentially function as sites for the reproduction of interpretive communities, conducted through the use of cultural texts.     

An Econometric Investigation of Easterlin's ‘Synthesis Framework’: The Philippines and the United States

In this paper we estimate a fertility model based on Easterlin's synthesis framework. The model assumes that not all couples are able to achieve their desired number of living children because of supply constraints and that, for other couples, the number of living children may exceed desired fertility, depending upon child mortality, the level of fertility in the absence of control, and the degree of contraceptive regulation practised. Estimates of the model for samples of women with completed fertility taken from the Philippines (1973) and the United States (1965) indicated that a higher proportion of Filipino women than women in the U.S. were unable to achieve desired fertility because of supply constraints, that levels of fertility control of Filipino women not supply-constrained were lower, and that excess fertility of Filipino women was much higher. Demand-for-children equations based on the constraints model were quite different from those not taking into account the possibility that some women were supply-constrained, or that some women may have had more children than desired.     

Bipolar Illness,God, and Object Relations: The Treatment of M

This article explores the concomitant change in one client's object relations and his image of God that occurred in the context of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. The case demonstrates the benefit of long-term psychoanalytically oriented treatment to help an individual with major mental illness to heal emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The client, who suffers from bipolar I disorder, experienced significant developmental mastery as he moved from the paranoid/schizoid position to the depressive position (developmental stages conceptualized by theorists Melanie Klein and Douglas Fairbairn). In addition, the psychotherapy mitigated the effects of homonegativity on M's self-image and his experience of his homosexuality. Through our work, the client began to see and interact with this clinical social worker, others, and the God of his understanding, in a more realistic and healthy manner. M's participation in a 12-Step group and his adherence to its beliefs augmented changes he made through psychotherapy. Through a long-term psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy and involvement in Al-Anon meetings, the client's belief in a punishing God shifted toward a more benevolent one—a God who had a plan for his life that was revealed through the transformation of his suffering. In summary, M's object relations changed toward a greater balance of emotions and development of more textured relationships, including his relationship toward himself and God.