Don't ask the question if you don't want to know the answer

Consultants can and do play many different roles for the client that hires them. In many cases, it is not as simple as it may appear in terms of laying out the problem and then letting the consultant you have contracted with either solve it for you or present you with options from which to pick the best solution. The retaining of outside expertise is usually done for one or more of the following reasons (by no means inclusive): Lack of "in-house" manpower or time to deliver a product. The need for an external expert to bring credibility to the project;. Getting someone outside your organization to deliver unpopular or bad news. Genuine interest in the independent findings and recommendations of the consultant. Whatever the motivation for seeking the advise of outside counsel, be sure you are prepared for the answer they may give to the question you have asked.     

Providing Employment Assistance to Students: The Role of Social Work Education

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a national survey of 130 graduate and undergraduate social work programs that was designed to learn what schools are doing to help students locate and secure employment after graduation. Less than half (43%) of the responding schools indicated that they have a formal program of employment assistance services. Size of student enrollment and size of faculty were the only factors that differentiated schools that offer employment assistance services from those that do not. The study's implications for social work education are discussed, and an employment assistance program model is presented.     

Refining victims’ self‐reports on bullying: Assessing frequency,intensity, power imbalance,and goal‐directedness

Bullying can be differentiated from other types of peer aggression by four key characteristics: frequency, intensity, power imbalance, and goal‐directedness. Existing instruments, however, usually assess the presence of these characteristics implicitly. Can self‐report instruments be refined using additional questions that assess each characteristic? We examined (a) what proportion of children classified as victims by the commonly used Revised Olweus’ bully/victim questionnaire (BVQ) also experienced the characteristics of bullying, and (b) the extent to which the presence of the characteristics was associated with emotional (affect, school, and classroom well‐being), relational (friendship, defending), and social status (popularity, rejection) adjustment correlates among victims. Using data from 1,738 students (M_age = 10.6; grades 5–8), including 138 victims according to the BVQ, the results showed that 43.1% of the children who were classified as victims by BVQ experienced all the four characteristics of bullying. Frequency ratings of victimization did not capture experiences that involved a power imbalance. Victims who reported all four key characteristics had greater emotional, relational, and social status problems than victims who did not report all characteristics. Thus, researchers who focus on victimization for diagnostic and prevention purposes can enrich self‐report measurements of bullying victimization by adding questions that assess the characteristics explicitly.     

Toward a Feminist Political Economy of Wartime Sexual Violence

This article examines ways in which nationalism, as a concept, is gendered and the impact that that perspective had on women in the Balkans during the wars in the 1990s. The impact on women was especially severe, given the number who were raped or displaced by the wars. In this article, the authors address the ways in which (male) nationalist leaders used citizenship and the imagery of women to alter the perception that the state and society had toward women in general, and to those in ethnically

mixed marriages in particular. Importantly, paying attention to the lives of women in ethnically mixed marriages can shed light on the dynamics of civil wars, on their consequences and on the very politics of state-defined citizenship.     

Gender attitudes,sexual violence,and HIV/AIDS risks among men and women in Cape Town,South Africa

This study examined gender attitudes and sexual violence‐supportive beliefs (rape myths) in a sample of South African men and women at risk for HIV transmission. Over 40% of women and 16% of men had been sexually assaulted, and more than one in five men openly admitted to having perpetrated sexual assault. Traditional attitudes toward women's social and gender roles, as well as rape myths, were endorsed by a significant minority of both men and women. Multivariate analyses showed that for men, sexual assault history and rape myth acceptance, along with alcohol and other drug use history, were significantly related to cumulative risks for HIV infection. In contrast, although we found that women were at substantial risk for sexually transmitted infection (STI), including HIV, women's risks were only related to lower levels of education and alcohol use history. We speculate that women's risks for STI/HIV are the product of partner characteristics and male‐dominated relationships, suggesting the critical importance of intervening with men to reduce women's risks for sexual assault and STI/HIV.     

The Best of the Brightest: Definitions of the Ideal Self Among Prize-Winning Students

This paper documents and explains characteristics of the ideal self rewarded by the American educational system as defined and projected by high school students who have been selected as Presidential Scholars in a national academic competition sponsored by the Department of Education and a White House Commission. Drawing on analysis of competition essays written by 119 Presidential Scholars and interviews conducted with 19 of them, we identify how these students implicitly and explicitly define the ideal self and what they do to demonstrate that they embody the characteristics of the self they perceive as rewarded by the American educational system. The data show that morality is the most salient dimension of the ideal self displayed by Scholars, and that they define it in terms of self-actualization, authenticity, and interpersonal morality; that Scholars present negative or ambivalent views concerning the importance of socioeconomic status; and that culture as a dimension of the ideal self is highlighted only by a subset of Scholars. In general, their displayed definitions of the ideal self are individualist in content but highly institutionalized in form. We explain our findings by the cultural repertoires that are made available to students and by their life experience and the broader structural characteristics of American society that lead them to draw on specific repertoires.