Working‐Class Jobs and New Parents' Mental Health

Little research has explored linkages between work conditions and mental health in working‐class employed parents. The current study aims to address this gap, employing hierarchical linear modeling techniques to examine how levels of and changes in job autonomy, job urgency, supervisor support, and coworker support predicted parents' depressive symptoms in a sample of 113 dual‐earner couples interviewed five times across the transition to parenthood. Increases in job autonomy and decreases in job urgency predicted fewer depressive symptoms in fathers at 1 year postpartum. For mothers, coworker support predicted fewer depressive symptoms, and supervisor support mitigated the negative effects of job urgency on depressive symptoms. Higher work hours coupled with low job urgency predicted declines in mothers' depressive symptoms across the first year of parenthood. Our findings suggest that interventions that lead to greater autonomy, less job urgency, and more supportive work relations may enhance employee well‐being among working‐class families.     

Elder abuse: factors related to perceptions of severity and likelihood of reporting

This study examined factors that affect assessments of abuse as depicted in scenarios in which a caregiving daughter abuses her elderly mother through over-medication. College students (N = 239) read scenarios that varied in terms of the past quality of the caregiver/elder relationship and whether or not the elder adult was depicted as suffering from dementia. The role of the participants' own family caregiving experiences also was explored. Results from a factorial ANOVA showed that individuals who perceived the relationship as difficult and whose parents had served as caregivers rated the behavior in the scenario as more abusive and were more willing to notify authorities than participants in other conditions. Results are discussed with a focus on educating families and those working with elderly populations.     

A Risk Management Dilemma: how day centre staff understand challenging behaviour

This paper describes a qualitative study which explored the views about challenging behaviour of staff in day centres for people with learning difficulties. Respondents' abstract definitions stressed the relativity of the concept. However, they readily cited concrete illustrate incidents of challenging behaviour which involved physical, sexual and verbal assault, noise, non-compliance, non-communication and exposure to danger. Staff explained specific incidents variously, but mono-causally, in terms of service users' dispositions, circumstances and interaction strategies. Respondents' own actions were included in explanatory schema only rarely. Despite its nebulous definition, challenging behaviour became organisationally fixed through staff allocation methods, and through a regulatory system designed to prevent abuse. Staff, caring for large numbers of service users en masse, faced a risk management dilemma. Labelling an individual as challenging could forewarn colleagues about possible dangers. However, such strategies could damage the quality of services which a labelled person received, exacerbating the initial problem.     

POVERTY,IDEOLOGY AND EMPLOYABILITY: CANADIAN AND AUSTRALIAN POLICIES FOR LOW-INCOME MOTHERS

A similar trend is apparent in Australian and Canadian programs to enhance work incentives and program effectiveness, but the Canadian provinces are increasingly insisting that low-income mothers with school-age children enter the workforce rather than accept social benefits to care for their children at home. There is no Canadian counterpart to the Sole Parent Pension or Parenting Allowance, although the provinces pay higher rates of social assistance to needy families than to individuals. Furthermore, there is little public support for the idea that low-income mothers should care for school-aged children at home at the taxpayer's expense. This paper discusses the similarities and differences in rhetoric and policies for low-income mothers, and seeks reasons for the stronger social support for mothering at home in Australia. Although the current discourse of economic rationalism suggests that enhancing work incentives and ‘employability’ will bring prosperity, this paper illustrates that neither paying mothers to care for their children at home nor pushing them into the workforce has reduced family poverty. To make employability programs more effective, governments need to deal with low female wages, the shortage and high cost of child care, and the lack of full-time permanent jobs.     

Empirical influence functions for misclassification rates in discriminant analysis

The empirical influence function for Mahalanobis distance and for misclassification rates are presented for discriminant analysis with two multivariate normal populations, following Campbell (1978). Conclusions about the effects of outliers from the empirical influence function are contrasted with exact calculations for four simple cases. These cases demonstrate that the higher-order terms discarded in deriving the empirical influence function can be important in practical problems.