An Interview with Heather Joseph

Heather Joseph talks about her career with SPARC and BioOne. She discusses the NIH mandate that NIH-funded research will be deposited into PubMed Central, and she shares her views on some of the controversial issues the mandate has raised about copyright, peer review, and embargo periods. She also addresses the recent decision by the Harvard faculty to make their scholarly output accessible through the university’s institutional repository, and she suggests ways that librarians can help their faculties prepare for open access.     

Attachment Themes in the Family Narratives of Preschool Children: A Qualitative Analysis

The family narratives of two preschool children (male and female) rated extremely high in social competence were compared to the narratives of two other children (also male and female) rated extremely low in social competence for differences in qualities of parent-child relationships and narrative structure. The children were participants in a larger study of parent-child relationships in post-divorce families. Three narratives of the ten-narrative Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised were analyzed qualitatively. Differences between children rated high and low in social competence were observed in areas such as the representation of problem resolutions, narrative coherence, predictable consequences for behavior, role modeling, responsiveness of parents to children's needs, emotional expression, children's ambivalence for caregivers, and family integrity. Implications for further research involving representations of attachment security in narrative play are discussed.     

Cigarette smoking, friendship factors, and social norm perceptions among central and Eastern European high school students

Studies investigating smoking behavior among adolescents living in post-communistic Central-European countries are sparse. This study focused on the relationship between cigarette smoking, certain friendship factors, and social norm perceptions among 1,886 Central-Eastern European adolescents from high schools in Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Romania. Smoking behavior was related to having friends who smoke, ease or difficulty making new friends, time spent with friends after school and during evenings, and estimations of the prevalence of smoking by schoolmates. Because these youth appear to overestimate the prevalence of smoking by schoolmates, the use of a norms-correction strategy may have potential merit in smoking prevention efforts targeting these adolescents. Smoking prevention and reduction are critical issues for Central-Eastern European youth because they appear to smoke cigarettes at a high rate.     

The Changing Face of Social Administration

This article explores the changing nature of the discipline of Social Administration in the post‐1945 era. The vigorous challenge to Traditional Social Administration in the 1970s and 1980s did not lead, as some had feared, to the demise of the subject's applied, problem‐solving, ethos. Within the broader discipline of Social Policy, the Social Administration perspective adapted and evolved. While retaining some elements of Traditional Social Administration namely, empiricism and a problem focus, the emergence of Contemporary Social Administration represents a significant and distinctive change in this sphere of academic enquiry.     

Bridging the gap: Investigating the abuse of children with multiple disabilities

This is a summary of a series of practical papers written to help bridge the ‘gap’ between the fields of child protection and childhood disability, with a view to improving practice in child protection work with severely disabled children. Particular attention is paid to the needs of children using alternative communication systems. The theme of the paper is that disabled children are in most senses just like other children, but may have particular needs in relation to the investigation of abuse, as well as being particularly vulnerable to abuse. Issues around the assessment of suspicion, preparation for interviewing and the interview process are presented. The needs of the child, the accompanying adult and the child protection worker are considered. Guidelines and recommendations for practice at different stages of the investigation are given. The need to adapt the investigation to the particular needs of the child is emphasized throughout.