From Assistance to Prevention: Categorizing Young Carer Support Services in Australia,and International Implications

Young people who provide unpaid care for a relative with chronic illness or disability are a growing focus of public policy and research in Australia and internationally. Support services for these young carers have emerged, but not enough is known about their effectiveness. This article develops an analytical framework that categorizes young carer support services according to their goals and the types of intervention provided. The analytical framework is based on Australian data. It is applied to young carer support services available in Australia but may be applicable to other countries. The aim of the framework is to provide a structure for assessing the effectiveness of current services in supporting young carers by clarifying service goals and identifying gaps in existing service provision. The framework contributes to conceptual discussions about young carer supports, and it can be used to guide future policy development. The article draws on Australian and international literature as well as findings from a recent Australian study on young carers. The proposed framework groups young carer support services according to three overarching goals: assisting young people who provide care; mitigating the care‐giving responsibility; and preventing the entrenchment of a young person's caring role. The framework is applied to an audit of Australian support services for young carers, illustrating how it can be used to assess existing supports for young carers and inform future policy development. The findings suggest that most services in Australia fall into the categories of assistance and mitigation, while few contain preventative elements.     

Does partnership funding improve coordination and collaboration among early childhood services? – Experiences from the Communities for Children programme

Partnerships among service providers are an important aspect of human service delivery, including in the early childhood and family service sector. There is extensive international literature on factors contributing to partnerships – also termed service coordination, collaboration or integration – but little evidence of partnership outcomes exists where partnerships are a funded and mandatory component of large‐scale programmes. This paper reports findings from an evaluation of the Australian Government's Communities for Children (CfC) programme. Under CfC, partnerships were mandated and funded, and the evaluation findings show that the programme resulted in an increased number of agencies working together to support families with young children (0–5 years) and that working relationships between agencies improved. The effectiveness of these partnerships depended on funding for partnership activities and on organisational and practical factors.     

Effective personalised housing support for people with disabilities – case study analysis

International policy trends favour personalised approaches to housing support for people with disabilities. Previous research is inconclusive about whether these approaches are effective compared to group home support in the way they use government resources and benefit clients, partly because it does not usually consider the experiences of people who use the support. In this research we compared six new, innovative case studies of personalised housing support to previous research about group home support. We included qualitative data about client experiences, in particular regarding social networks, decision making, community service use and participation in domestic tasks. We found that client outcomes were positive in all four categories, while the financial costs to clients and government were similar to group home support. The results offer evidence that current, personalised approaches to housing support can be an effective policy option that allows people with disabilities to make choices about how to live and participate in their communities, without increasing the cost to government.     

Nicht nur Gesundheit! Zusammenhänge zwischen psychischen Belastungen und Mitarbeiterbindung

Aim: Psychological risk assessments at work serve to identify psychological risk factors and their relation to health and well-being outcomes. Objective of the present study is to investigate which work characteristics predict commitment and turnover intentions of employees.Design: Based on the guidelines of the GDA (Joint German Occupational Safety and Health Strategy), a questionnaire was developed that captures psychological risk factors at work. Additionally, people were asked to indicate their commitment and their turnover intentions. Based on the guidelines of the Joint German Occupational Safety and Health Strategy we assessed four domains of psychological job demands (job content, work organization, social relationships and environmental demands) as well as affective commitment and turnover intention in a sample of 453 full-time employees. Using hierarchical regression analyses, we tested the predictive power of the psychological demands for the different indicators of employee retention.Results: Work content and social relationships were found to be significant predictors for commitment and turnover intentions, whereas work organisation and work context did not predict the outcomes. A detailed analysis of the single risk factors identified autonomy as the strongest predictor for both commitment and turnover intentions.Limitations: The single predictors are not independent and the cross sectional design does not allow for causality interpretations.Practical implications: Based on the assessment of critical psychological risk factors, it is possible to take individual and structural measures to promote commitment and to reduce turnover intentions.     

Dads Tuning in to Kids: A randomized controlled trial of an emotion socialization parenting program for fathers

Fathers play an important role in shaping their children’s emotional competence although most literature has focused on the influence of mothers. Dads Tuning in to Kids (Dads TIK) is a parenting program that teaches fathers to coach their children in learning about emotions, while also helping fathers increase awareness and regulation of their own emotions. A randomized controlled efficacy trial of Dads TIK was conducted with a community sample of 162 fathers of a 4‐year‐old child attending preschool in Melbourne, Australia. Those allocated to the intervention attended a seven‐session manualized group program. Questionnaires were completed by fathers, the fathers’ partners and the children’s teachers at baseline and 6‐month follow‐up. Results were that fathers in the intervention condition but not control condition reported significant increases in emotion socialization, parenting satisfaction and efficacy, and reductions in their children’s difficult behaviors. Partners of fathers in the intervention condition reported reductions in their own emotion dismissing parenting and improvements in psychological well‐being. Partners and teachers reported significant improvements in children’s behavior across both intervention and control conditions. These findings suggest a father‐focused program appears to lead to changes in fathers’ emotion socialization skills that may have benefits for partners’ functioning and children’s behavior.     

Alien aquatic plants in wetlands of a large European city (Geneva,Switzerland): from diagnosis to risk assessment

Urban Ecosystems - Wetlands often form an important component in the urban matrix, where they are largely disseminated. Despite the abundance of these urban waterbodies, little is known about the...     

Look Who's Talking: Compositional Effects of Gender and Status on Verbal Contributions at Sociology Conferences

Making a verbal contribution is an efficient means to increase one's visibility in the academic job market. Therefore, we examine the duration and word density of spoken contributions made in debates at sociology conferences held in Germany, thus enriching the discussion on the gender gap in scientific careers. We differentiate between the contributors' age and gender, and the social context of the conferences. Hidden observation of 392 verbal contributions on 64 topics at five different conferences using hierarchical linear models shows that with increasing age, women speak more slowly and for longer, while the duration of verbal contributions of men rises up to the age of 53 and then decreases again. Contrary to our hypothesis, the duration of spoken contributions of men is not longer than that of women; in fact if there is a majority of female associate or full professors in the audience, contributions by women become significantly longer. This finding underlines the importance of social context for gender‐related features of communication. In addition, we find that word density depends on the age and gender of the speaker.     

Bindung und Impression-Management: Beeinflusst der individuelle Bindungsstil das Selbstdarstellungsverhalten in sozialen Situationen?

A central tenet of John Bowlby’s attachment theory is that people’s attachment experiences are integrated into so-called ‘internal working models’. These working models are supposed to contain representations about ‘the world’ as well as certain attitudes towards one’s self or one’s self-concept. In the present study, it is assumed that this self-concept, which reflects the individual’s attachment experience, exerts substantial influence on one’s self-portrayal in social situations, which is viewed as the process during which the self-concept is communicated to an audience. In the present study the attachment type was determined by the ‘Skala zur Erfassung von Bindungsrepräsentationen’ (Scale for the determination of attachment representations) which was developed by Grau (1999). Additionally, the tendency to exhibit ‘positive’ impression management strategies was measured by the ‘Fragebogen zur Erfassung positiver Selbstdarstellung’ (Questionnaire for recoding positive self-portrayals) by Mummendey and Eifler (1994). Subsequently, people’s positive self-portrayal score was compared to their attachment type. Analysis indicated that the attachment type merely had an influence on the tendency to exhibit positive self-portrayal strategies when participants had a negative representation of their-self, as well as a negative representation of others, a pattern which characterises the ‘fearfulavoidant’ type. Results also demonstrated that elder participants scored lower on the positive self-portrayal scale, irrespective of their attachment type.     

Minimum covering with travel cost

Given a polygon and a visibility range, the Myopic Watchman Problem with Discrete Vision (MWPDV) asks for a closed path P and a set of scan points $\mathcal{S}$ , such that (i) every point of the polygon is within visibility range of a scan point; and (ii) path length plus weighted sum of scan number along the tour is minimized. Alternatively, the bicriteria problem (ii??) aims at minimizing both scan number and tour length. We consider both lawn mowing (in which tour and scan points may leave?P) and milling (in which tour, scan points and visibility must stay within P) variants for the MWPDV; even for simple special cases, these problems are NP-hard. We show that this problem is NP-hard, even for the special cases of rectilinear polygons and L _?? scan range 1, and negligible small travel cost or negligible travel cost. For rectilinear MWPDV milling in grid polygons we present a 2.5-approximation with unit scan range; this holds for the bicriteria version, thus for any linear combination of travel cost and scan cost. For grid polygons and circular unit scan range, we describe a bicriteria 4-approximation. These results serve as stepping stones for the general case of circular scans with scan radius r and arbitrary polygons of feature size a, for which we extend the underlying ideas to a $\pi(\frac{r}{a}+\frac{r+1}{2})$ bicriteria approximation algorithm. Finally, we describe approximation schemes for MWPDV lawn mowing and milling of grid polygons, for fixed ratio between scan cost and travel cost.