Advocacy for parents and carers involved with children's services: making a difference to working in partnership?

This paper explores findings from the evaluation of a scheme providing direct advocacy to parents where there were concerns about their ability to provide safe care for their children. The evaluation explored the views of service users, social workers and conference chairpersons and found general agreement that the advocacy scheme contributed positively to the process of working in partnership. This is of interest given research findings which suggest that working in partnership is particularly difficult in cases involving child protection issues. However, it is noted that there appears to be little political will to develop advocacy schemes for parents in the UK, and this is of concern given the lack of supports available to them to navigate a complex and often intimidating system.     

Assessing habitat requirements of pond-breeding amphibians in a highly urbanized landscape: implications for management

Urban Ecosystems - Management of urban aquatic habitats for native wildlife, such as amphibians, is an important contemporary goal for many municipalities. However, our understanding of how local...     

Risk Factors for Problem Gambling Among Indigenous Australians: An Empirical Study

Despite a long history of gambling amongst many Indigenous peoples, knowledge about contemporary Indigenous gambling is sparse. In Australia, previous studies of Indigenous gambling have been severely limited in number, scope and rigour. The research reported in this paper is based on the first Indigenous-specific quantitative gambling research undertaken in Australia since 1996 and draws on the largest sample to date. This study examined numerous aspects of gambling among Indigenous Australians. After appropriate consultations and permission, the study collected surveys from 1,259 self-selected Indigenous adults in 2011 at three Indigenous festivals, online and in several Indigenous communities. This paper draws on these data to identify problem gambling risk factors by comparing selected socio-demographic characteristics, early exposure to gambling, gambling motivations, gambling behaviour, gambling cognitions, and substance use while gambling, amongst non-problem, low risk, moderate risk and problem gamblers. A logistic regression investigated the difference between problem gamblers and all other PGSI groups. Risk factors associated with being a problem gambler were: being older, commencing gambling when under 10 years old, always being exposed to adults gambling as a child, using alcohol and/or drugs while gambling, having family and friends who gamble, having an addiction to gambling and not gambling to socialise, having a high expenditure on commercial gambling, and living in a state or territory other than NSW or QLD. Public health measures to address these risk factors are identified.     

Emergency departments and street-involved youth: factors influencing utilization

Homeless youth often have untreated health problems and experience barriers to care. Existing evidence suggests that homeless youth use emergency departments (EDs) more frequently than other youth. We hypothesized that street youth with access to primary care services would be less likely to utilize EDs for health care. Data were drawn from a study of housing security and changes to it over time among 150 youth (16–20 years) recruited from service agencies for street-involved youth. Our findings show that those with access to primary care were actually more likely to use the ED, suggesting that access may encourage further engagement with the health care system. Findings support the need to better understand why access to primary care increases ED use and what could be done to change this pattern.     

Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work,Gender, and Beauty

Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on the basis of their physical appearance. The concept advances research on the service economy by moving beyond a focus on emotions to emphasize worker corporeality. This article first untangles aesthetic labor from related concepts, including body work, emotional labor, and embodied cultural capital. Next is a review of three contexts in which scholars have applied aesthetic labor to the workplace: the organization, freelance labor, and the market. Because it situates the value of beauty in context, aesthetic labor foregrounds those power relations that define aesthetics, such as class, race, and gender. The concept incorporates insights from field theories of bodily capital, such that aesthetic labor denaturalizes beauty and seeks to explain the processes through which looks translate into economic and symbolic rewards.     

The proximity condition

We investigate the social choice implications of what we call “the proximity condition”. Loosely speaking, this condition says that whenever a profile moves “closer” to some individual’s point of view, then the social choice cannot move “further away” from this individual’s point of view. We apply this idea in two settings: merging functions and preference aggregation. The precise formulation of the proximity condition depends on the setting. First, restricting attention to merging functions that are interval scale invariant, we prove that the only functions that satisfy proximity are dictatorships. Second, we prove that the only social welfare functions that satisfy proximity and a version of the Pareto criterion are dictatorships. We conclude that either proximity is not an attractive normative requirement after all, or we must give up some other social choice condition. Another possibility is that our normative intuition about proximity needs to be codified using different axioms.     

The Impact of Population,Contact, and Spatial Heterogeneity on Epidemic Model Predictions

Our objective was to evaluate the effect that complexity in the form of different levels of spatial, population, and contact heterogeneity has in the predictions of a mechanistic epidemic model. A model that simulates the spatiotemporal spread of infectious diseases between animal populations was developed. Sixteen scenarios of foot‐and‐mouth disease infection in cattle were analyzed, involving combinations of the following factors: multiple production‐types (PT) with heterogeneous contact and population structure versus single PT, random versus actual spatial distribution of population units, high versus low infectivity, and no vaccination versus preemptive vaccination. The epidemic size and duration was larger for scenarios with multiple PT versus single PT. Ignoring the actual unit locations did not affect the epidemic size in scenarios with multiple PT/high infectivity, but resulted in smaller epidemic sizes in scenarios using multiple PT/low infectivity. In conclusion, when modeling fast‐spreading epidemics, knowing the actual locations of population units may not be as relevant as collecting information on population and contact heterogeneity. In contrast, both population and spatial heterogeneity might be important to model slower spreading epidemic diseases. Our findings can be used to inform data collection and modeling efforts to inform health policy and planning.     

Maternal Social Coaching Quality Interrupts the Development of Relational Aggression During Early Childhood

Previous research has shown that parents of socially competent young children provide them with elaborative, explicit, appropriate, and emotion‐laden advice about peer interactions. The current study analyzed mothers' conversations with preschoolers (N = 175; 52 percent female; M age = 52 months, SD = 7 months) about peer conflicts involving relational aggression. Conversations were coded for maternal elaboration, emotion references, and discussion of norm violations. Information about relational and physical aggression was collected from teachers at two assessments approximately 12 months apart for a subsample of 136 children. Regression analyses, controlling for physical aggression, showed that average and high levels of effective coaching operated as a protective factor against stable high levels of relational aggression. Theoretical and practical implications for our understanding of the early development of relational aggression are discussed.