Grandparents as Caregivers: Emerging Issues for the Profession

Over the last two decades, the number of grandparents caring for their grandchildren has grown exponentially. The 2010 census revealed that 7.5 million children lived with a grandparent. This article is based on a study to find out from grandparents in the southwest region of the United States the circumstances that led to caring for their grandchild, needs and challenges in their role, and finally, to examine the level of stress they experience as a result of the parenting role. Based on the findings, recommendations related to social work practice and policy are provided. Additionally, the need to educate social workers in competency-based education is highlighted.     

Professional Socialization and Social Work Values: Who Are We Teaching?

Despite the centrality of values to professional socialization, the social work literature lacks an extensive exploration of the readiness of students to be socialized into the profession and taught the theoretical framework and skills for ethical decision making. This study explored the relationship between age, academic class standing, and identity development. Results indicated that the Identity Achievement status occurs later than traditional university years and correlates with age but not with academic class standing. Important implications for teaching social work values, ethical decision making, and the significance of a liberal arts foundation are discussed.     

Effectiveness of Interactive Computer-Based Instruction: A Review of Studies Published Between 1995 and 2007

Computer-based instruction (CBI) has been growing rapidly as a training tool in organizational settings, but close attention to behavioral factors has often been neglected. CBI represents a promising instructional advancement over current training methods. This review article summarizes 12 years of comparative research in interactive computer-based instruction relevant to employee training techniques. The results demonstrate that CBI is an effective and viable training technique, and several areas in need of further examination are detailed.     

Dealing with noncompliance and missing outcomes in a randomized trial using Bayesian technology: Prevention of perinatal sepsis clinical trial,Soweto, South Africa

The success of interventions designed to address important issues in social and medical science is best addressed by randomized experiments. With human beings there are often complications, however, such as noncompliance and missing data. Such complications are often addressed by statistically invalid methods of analysis, in particular, intention-to-treat and per-protocol analyses. Here we address these two complications using a statistically valid approach based on principal stratification with a fully Bayesian analysis. This analysis is applied to a randomized trial of a potentially important intervention designed to reduce the transmission of bacterial colonization between mothers and their infants through vaginal delivery in South Africa: the Prevention of Perinatal Sepsis (PoPs).     

The Role of Maternal Behavior in the Relation between Shyness and Social Reticence in Early Childhood and Social Withdrawal in Middle Childhood

The moderating effect of maternal behavior in the relations between social reticence and shyness in preschool and subsequent social withdrawal was investigated. Eighty children (47 females) were judged for degree of social reticence during play with unfamiliar peers at the age of four and mothers completed the Colorado child temperament inventory (CCTI). At the age of seven, the children were coded for degree of social withdrawal during peer play and mothers and children were observed during structured and unstructured activities. Two significant interaction effects indicated that maternal report of shyness was a positive predictor of age‐seven social withdrawal when mothers lacked positivity; whereas observed social reticence was associated with higher degrees of social withdrawal when mothers were highly negative. Maternal positivity and negativity differentially influenced the development of social withdrawal in childhood, such that maternal negativity is associated with poor social functioning in children who have an established history of social withdrawal; whereas maternal positivity is associated with better social outcome for preschoolers who are viewed as temperamentally shy.     

Correlation in a Bayesian framework

The authors consider the correlation between two arbitrary functions of the data and a parameter when the parameter is regarded as a random variable with given prior distribution. They show how to compute such a correlation and use closed form expressions to assess the dependence between parameters and various classical or robust estimators thereof, as well as between p‐values and posterior probabilities of the null hypothesis in the one‐sided testing problem. Other applications involve the Dirichlet process and stationary Gaussian processes. Using this approach, the authors also derive a general nonparametric upper bound on Bayes risks.     

Conceptual, computational and inferential benefits of the missing data perspective in applied and theoretical statistical problems

This article advocates the following perspective: When confronting a scientific problem, the field of statistics enters by viewing the problem as one where the scientific answer could be calculated if some missing data, hypothetical or real, were available. Thus, statistical effort should be devoted to three steps:

1. formulate the missing data that would allow this calculation,
2. stochastically fill in these missing data, and
3. do the calculations as if the filled-in data were available.

This presentation discusses: conceptual benefits, such as for causal inference using potential outcomes; computational benefits, such as afforded by using the EM algorithm and related data augmentation methods based on MCMC; and inferential benefits, such as valid interval estimation and assessment of assumptions based on multiple imputation.