Out of the wilderness and into the fold: the school nurse and child protection

This paper argues that there has been a major change since the mid‐1980s in the extent to which other workers involved in child protection recognize the value of the contribution of school nurses. Evidence for this is drawn from a longitudinal study in an English shire county using a vignette approach to explore workers' perceptions of the handling of child protection issues. While in part the greater recognition of the role of the school nurse can be attributed to the adoption of child protection procedures, this provides only a partial explanation. School nurses in the 1990s were better qualified and more experienced, while other workers such as school heads and social workers recognized the need to work with others, such as the school nurse, in order to meet their own objectives. The paper concludes that there is a case for more formal recognition of school nurses in child protection because, like health visitors, with whom they have a follow‐on colleague relationship, they are often the most significant health workers for children who may be neglected or abused. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unemployment Duration in an Unemployment Blackspot

This paper analyses the factors affecting the duration of an unemployment spell amongst a sample of exclusively long-term unemployed individuals. The results indicate that person-specific unemployment propensities have a significant effect on re-employment probabilities. These effects, however, vary significantly by gender and religion. The results also indicate statistically significant negative ‘duration dependence’ effects. The evidence suggests that employers regard long unemployment durations as a ‘negative signal’ about an applicant's potential productivity. The latter implies that, in terms of government policies aimed at reducing unemployment, the demand-side of the unemployment equation should be given greater emphasis.     

Avian population dynamics and human induced change in an urban environment

The predominantly urban boroughs of Warrington and Halton straddle the river Mersey in northwest England. Since the 1970s there has been a major change in land-use associated with both innovative town design and the decline of manufacturing and chemical industries in the boroughs. Also, co-ordinated programmes have directly addressed air and water pollution. The breeding birds of the two boroughs were surveyed in 1978–84 and 2004–06 as part of the bird atlases of Cheshire and Wirral, based on tetrads (2 × 2 km squares). We divided the breeding species into eight guilds based on broad ecological characteristics of habitat or food, omitting the generalists and colonial species, and compared the change between our two atlases in the number of occupied tetrads in Halton and Warrington and in the rest of the county. Four of our eight guilds have fared significantly better within our study area: waterbirds (24 species), those feeding on invertebrates (16 species), woodland specialists (21 species) and the two species that decorate their nests with lichens. The remaining four guilds showed no difference between Halton and Warrington and the rest of Cheshire and Wirral: raptors (5 species) have increased throughout, while breeding waders (7 species), farmland seedeaters (7 species) and aerial insectivores (5 species) have declined throughout. We interpret these results in relation to improved quality of water and air and changing patterns of land-use in the urban greenspace, especially an increase in woodland cover and connectivity.     

Disabled men and fathering: opportunities and constraints

Over the last decade in the UK and elsewhere, fathers have become a visible presence in research and social welfare policy and practice agendas. While there is an increasing awareness of the heterogeneity of fathering contexts and experiences, disability as a dimension of difference among fathers has received little attention. This is so across all relevant bodies of research, including those on fathering, masculinities, disability, and parenting. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the experiences of disabled men in relation to their fathering experiences. We draw on the findings from two qualitative research projects conducted in the UK, one on the experiences of disabled parents (mothers and fathers), the other on the experiences of disabled fathers. The findings suggest that the experience of impairment and disability positions men in relation to fathering in ways which can be both constraining of their fathering practices, as well as opportunistic in terms of re-articulating more ‘traditional’ fathering identities and practices. We suggest that while disability intersects with other important social divisions, there is a need for further research focused on the shared experiences of disabled fathers, particularly to inform family and child welfare policy and practice agendas.     

Popular culture and sporting life in the rural margins of late eighteenth-century England: the world of Robert Anderson, "The Cumberland Bard"

This study sets out to extend and challenge existing historiography on late eighteenth century British popular culture, customary sports, class and cultural identity, focusing upon the rural geo-political borderland of England. It suggests that prevailing class-based and more London-biased studies need to be balanced with more regionalist-based work, and shows the importance of northern regional leisure variants. The textual and historical analysis draws largely on the published works of a neglected working-class dialect poet, Robert Anderson, living and working in Cumberland, arguing that he represented a strain of 'bardic regionalism,' a variant of Katie Trumpener’s 'bardic nationalism.'     

Note on posterior inference for the Bingham distribution

The properties of high-dimensional Bingham distributions have been studied by Kume and Walker (2014 Kume, A., and S. G. Walker. 2014. On the Bingham distribution with large dimension. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 124:345–52.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Fallaize and Kypraios (2016 Fallaize, C. J., and T. Kypraios. 2016. Exact Bayesian inference for the Bingham distribution. Statistics and Computing 26:349–60.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) propose the Bayesian inference for the Bingham distribution and they use developments in Bayesian computation for distributions with doubly intractable normalizing constants (Møller et al. 2006 Møller, J., A. N. Pettitt, R. Reeves, and K. K. Berthelsen. 2006. An efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo method for distributions with intractable normalising constants. Biometrika 93 (2):451–458.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Murray, Ghahramani, and MacKay 2006 Murray, I., Z. Ghahramani, and D. J. C. MacKay. 2006. MCMC for doubly intractable distributions. In Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on uncertainty in artificial intelligence (UAI-06), 359–66. AUAI Press. [Google Scholar]). However, they rely heavily on two Metropolis updates that they need to tune. In this article, we propose instead a model selection with the marginal likelihood.     

Remarried Couples in Premarital Education: Does the Content Match Participant Needs?

Although premarital education has been found to reduce risk factors of divorce, the use of premarital education has primarily been examined in first marriages, or in groups combining both first and later marriages. In this qualitative study, 8 remarried couples’ perceptions of the premarital education they received were explored. The coexisting core categories of the desire to create a loving relationship yet fear of repeated marital failure emerged. The results implied that remarried couples carried an additional fear of marital dissolution, which in conjunction with the complex tasks associated with stepfamily formation, promoted attachment insecurities. Clinical applications are included.     

The Exclusiveness of the Political Field: Networks and political mobilization

This paper applies social network analysis to three case study social movement organizations based in the north of England: a local Labour Party branch, an environmental group, and a conservation group. Using a postal survey of members, we chart the extent of ties between members of these three groups, indicating how each group has its own internal social dynamics and characteristics that are related to the nature of the movement organizations themselves. We explore how the network structures interrelate with the socio-demographic structure of the membership of the three organizations, and we show there are important differences in the way that core members of the three organizations are recruited compared to those who are either peripheral or isolated. Our paper is the first to analyse the networks of whole populations of case study organizations in the UK, and can therefore be read as developing the potential of social network analysis for case study research and for understanding social movements. Analytically we argue it is important to distinguish two different types of ways that networks are important. They can be seen as offering resources for mobilization, or they can be seen as providing a means of integrating particular types of individuals into organizations. It is this latter sense that offers a more fundamental role for network analysis, and we argue that it offers an important way of developing insights from resource mobilization theory by relating them to Bourdieu's provocative arguments regarding the exclusiveness of the political field.