School performance in primary school and psychosocial problems in young adulthood among care leavers from long term foster care

We used data from Swedish national registers for ten entire birth year cohorts (1972-1981) to examine psychosocial outcomes in young adulthood for youth that left long term foster care after age 17, comparing them with majority population peers, national adoptees and peers who had received in-home interventions before age 13. The population was followed in the registers from age 16 to 2005. Data were analyzed in Cox regression models.Youth who left long term foster care had six-to eleven fold sex and birth year adjusted excess risks for suicide attempts, substance abuse and serious criminality from age 20, and for public welfare dependency at age 25. Overrisks were considerably lower for the in-home intervention group and the national adoptees. Adjusting results for poor school performance in the final year in primary school (ages 15-16) reduced overrisks by 38-52% for care leavers from long term foster care.Irrespective of issues of causality, poor school performance seems to be a major risk factor for future psychosocial problems among youth who age out of long term foster care. The results suggest that promoting foster children's school performance should be given high priority by agencies.     

Postethnic Experience in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Multiculturalism has meant something of a crisis for many Jews in the United States in that it has placed them in the paradoxical position of being part of the dominant white majority while they continue to maintain their particularity as an ethnic minority. Some scholars who subscribe to the ideal of a postethnic society as a means of resolving the divisiveness and fragmentation in multicultural America have, however, argued that this very dualism experienced by American Jews today may well point toward what they hope will come about in American society as a whole when it moves beyond multiculturalism. This essay explores some of the ways in which the contradictions experienced by Jewish Americans as members of an ethnic minority with majority status figure in recent Jewish American fiction. It concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications of the anomalous position of American Jews for the place of contemporary Jewish writing within the rapidly changing canon of American literature.     

RISK SOCIETY,MEDIA, AND POWER: THE CASE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

Risk society theory posits that the transformation of industrial to postindustrial society corresponded with a transformation of societal power structured by capital, to one structured by the ability to define risk. Perceptions of risk are, in part, socially constructed and created through the framing efforts of various institutional actors. The resulting struggle over meaning is particularly acute when the issues contain many unknown elements—as is the case with emerging technologies. Applying insights from media studies, frame analysis, and organizational theory, we analyze coverage of nanotechnology (NT) in popular press, trade, and general science publications. The findings document the extent to which the risks of this emerging technology are presented or ignored across, between, and within organizational subfields. The analysis empirically assesses a key proposition of risk society theory and reveals how institutional processes reflect and reproduce power differentials. We discuss the implications of the empirical findings for sociological theories of risk and society, power, and collective action.     

Activism and the Limits of Symmetry: The Public Relations Battle Between Colorado GASP and Philip Morris

Litigation has forced tobacco companies like Philip Morris to disclose more than 7 million internal documents, including previously confidential public relations plans. We draw from this archive, as well as from activist materials, to demonstrate that, despite vigorous industry efforts to thwart them, activists in this case employed strategies of values advocacy and inoculation and capitalized on economic benefits to persuade publics. This watershed case poses continued challenges for the 2-way symmetrical or mixed-motive theoretical model of public relations. Accounting for public relations activism and understanding its voice in influencing contemporary public debate requires that scholars move beyond this widely accepted model that stresses compromise between activists and organizations. An alternative rhetorical theory of activist public relations is posited to account for groups that refuse to accommodate opponents.     

HOME-TO-JOB AND JOB-TO-HOME SPILLOVER: The Impact of Company Policies and Workplace Culture

We draw on gender theory and neo-institutional theory to examine the impact of workplace characteristics and family demands on negative job-to-home and home-to-job spillover. Our multivariate analyses of the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce data indicate that family-supportive workplace cultures reduce negative spillover in both directions, whereas the availability of company policies, such as dependent care benefits and flextime, do not. Our results also show that family demands increase spillover more for women than for men. Our findings suggest that the atmosphere of the workplace is more important than the availability of company policies in reducing negative spillover.     

Ten years later: Locating and interviewing children of drug abusers

Longitudinal studies require high follow-up rates in order to maintain statistical power, reduce bias, and enhance the generalizability of results. This study reports on locating and survey completion for a 10-year follow-up of the Focus on Families project, an investigation of 130 families headed by parents who were enrolled in methadone treatment for opiate addiction. Despite having no contact with participants in the study for at least 10 years, the project successfully located nearly 99% of parent participants and 98% of their children. Twenty-four percent of the parents and one child had died before the follow-up. Of the surviving sample, 91% of parents and 86% of the children completed the follow-up interview. Multiple techniques were used to locate study participants, including internet searches, researching court and public records, collaborating with government and service agencies, and contacting family and social networks. For more than half of the sample, costly efforts were required to locate individual participants.     

The value of fees in child guidance work 1

Abstract

Diagnoses are labels that have a powerful effect. Linguistic anthropology provides the tools necessary to study how diagnosis projects meaning based on underlying linguistic assumptions and culture of usage. I will employ anthropologically-based linguistic theories to analyze the diagnostic system utilized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV), and to examine the impact of the diagnosis of schizophrenia on the minds of the diagnostician and the labeled client.     

So bad,so good: Slavery in the Southern United States

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia. BETTY WOOD. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995. x. 247 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). ISBN 1–878822–37–3; ISBN 0–8203–1667–9.

Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South. Edited by LARRY E. HUDSON, Jr. Rochester, NY, University of Rochester Press, 1994. xiii, 241pp. $19.95. ISBN 1–878822–38–1.