Suicide prevention and intervention with young people in foster care in Canada

Given the history of turmoil in their lives, foster children and young people coming into care are particularly at risk of suicide. Whether a crisis is successfully prevented, or treated and transcended, depends upon the ability of foster parents and agency staff members to understand the nature of the situation and to work together in dealing with it.     

'Real Jobs', 'Learning Difficulties' and Supported Employment

Supported employment is now regarded as a major vehicle for enabling people with 'learning difficulties' to enter employment. The purpose of this paper is to use the evidence provided by three case studies of people with 'learning difficulties' who have participated in supported employment to critically examine its fundamental premises. The paper argues that the influences of normalisation theory and the US model of supported employment have combined in the UK to form a variant of supported employment which, in pursuing the concept of 'real job', fails to adequately address the consequences of impairment.     

Unsettling the 'social' in social work: responses to asylum seeking children in Ireland

The ‘social’ context in which social work is located is becoming increasingly unsettled by emerging patterns of mobility. Mobility is constrained for many social work service users who are trapped within disadvantaged areas, while for others it has become a forced necessity to cross national boundaries and inhabit uncertain status in their nations of destination. This article explores the responses of the social work profession to children seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland. These children's complex needs, produced by the conditions of mobility they have encountered and by the conditions of arrival/settlement in Ireland, force social work practice to be orientated beyond the boundaries of the national welfare state. In order to explore the varied responses of the social work profession in the Republic of Ireland to asylum seeking children, three different groups of children are considered: children seeking asylum who have been separated from their parents; children who are seeking asylum with their parent(s)/family; and young Irish citizens whose asylum seeking parents are in danger of being deported. It argues that the provision of appropriate services for these children requires the development of post‐national forms of social work practice.     

Social Defenses Against Organizational Learning

It is argued that for organizational learning to occur maladaptive social defenses within the organization have to be altered. The origins of the concept of social defenses are traced through the work of Jaques and Menzies. A new concept of system domain, and related concepts of system domain fabric, and system domain defenses, are proposed in order to account for the difficulties in sustaining organizational change in organizations that share a similar primary task. Organizational learning is defined as occurring when there is co-evolution of organizational container and contained. The article distills variables from three successful consultancy/action research projects which are characteristic of organizations that are learning, and it is hypothesized that the creation of organizational awareness is necessary for organizational learning to occur.     

Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia

Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia – two countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian periphery – this paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful stylization and reconfiguration of what the local means. On the other hand, they engage in stylization and reflexive language use, often involving exaggerated linguistic variation, mixing, and other semiotic resources in order to produce and perform a range of social and cultural identities. The paper hence shows how the circulation and takeup of popular cultural flows around Asia can involve diverse processes of linguistic and cultural stylization.     

Analytical approximations for iterated bootstrap confidence intervals

Standard algorithms for the construction of iterated bootstrap confidence intervals are computationally very demanding, requiring nested levels of bootstrap resampling. We propose an alternative approach to constructing double bootstrap confidence intervals that involves replacing the inner level of resampling by an analytical approximation. This approximation is based on saddlepoint methods and a tail probability approximation of DiCiccio and Martin (1991). Our technique significantly reduces the computational expense of iterated bootstrap calculations. A formal algorithm for the construction of our approximate iterated bootstrap confidence intervals is presented, and some crucial practical issues arising in its implementation are discussed. Our procedure is illustrated in the case of constructing confidence intervals for ratios of means using both real and simulated data. We repeat an experiment of Schenker (1985) involving the construction of bootstrap confidence intervals for a variance and demonstrate that our technique makes feasible the construction of accurate bootstrap confidence intervals in that context. Finally, we investigate the use of our technique in a more complex setting, that of constructing confidence intervals for a correlation coefficient.     

Advocacy and surveillance: primary schools teachers’ relationships with asylum-seeking mothers in Ireland

The article analyses the findings of a small-scale qualitative study in Ireland that examines interactions between asylum-seeking mothers and primary school teachers, and highlights the significance of teachers’ understandings of asylum in shaping home-school communications. Mothers and children in this study were living in Direct Provision, collective accommodation for asylum seekers in Ireland. The research identifies a number of concerns including: poor communication between the school and mothers, only English being used as a medium of communication with the mothers, and mothers being directly and indirectly excluded from Parent Associations. Interactions of teachers with asylum-seeker mothers demonstrated a lack of recognition that their situation is different from other migrants/newcomers and is particularly challenging because of the because of living in Direct Provision and under the threat of deportation. The research shows that primary schools are drawn into ambiguous relationships with asylum-seeking mothers in their attempts at advocacy and surveillance, as they are expected to facilitate integration, while at the same time dealing with the uncertainty facing asylum-seeking parents and children.     

Episodic Cessation of Gambling: A Numerically Aided Phenomenological Assessment of Why Gamblers Stop Playing in a Given Session

The topic of permanent cessation of gambling behavior has received increased attention as the rates gaming (and pathology) increase with accessibility and legalization. Despite this increased attention there is a paucity of research on why people stop gambling in a given session, i.e. episodic cessation. We propose that the study of first-person experiential accounts of why gamblers stopped engaging in play within a given session will shed light on the progression and maintenance of wagering behavior. Using numerically aided phenomenology, we systematically examined accounts of episodic cessation. In doing so, we were able to identifying recurrent themes and then clustering these accounts according to similarities in theme profiles. People reported that episodic cessation occurred because they had lost all their money or because they were forced to (Cluster I), a sufficient amount of money had been won or lost (Cluster II), and a priori limits on wins or losses had been reached (Cluster III). As predicted, gamblers with maladaptive reasons for episodic cessation (Cluster I and II) reported more illusory perceptions of control and negative attitudes toward treatment seeking than those who engage in responsible gambling behavior (Cluster III). Moreover, illusions of control mediated the effect of cluster membership on attitudes toward treatment seeking. The findings of the present research help to integrate recent studies of gambling progression and maintenance.