Fostering Solutions: Bringing Brief-Therapy Principles and Practices to the Child Welfare System

This article describes a 15-month university-community collaboration that was designed to fast-track children out of foster care. The developers of the project initiated resource-oriented systems facilitations, allowing wraparound professionals and families to come together in large meetings to solve problems and find solutions. Families also participated in strength-based brief-therapy sessions. The authors describe the history, structure, and process of the project, and they provide a case study to illustrate the approach and exemplify the kinds of changes that occurred throughout the system. In the final section of the article, the authors reflect on what they learned about their university-community partnership, what they would do differently the next time, and the implications of such larger-system involvements for American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy's Core Competencies.     

Sexual Intimacy Constructions of Heterosexual Couples Living in a Low-Income, “Colored,” Farmworker Community in South Africa

This study has been motivated by the scarcity of research that adopts an unproblematic focus on sexuality in South African Black and Colored low-income communities. We explored the sexual intimacy constructions of 15 Colored married/cohabiting couples who live in a low-income, historical South African farmworker community. Using a social constructionist thematic analysis method, we identified four themes: (a) metaphoric and indirect sexual language; (b) the use of a romantic discourse to talk about sexual experiences; (c) male-centered sexual relationships; and (d) lack of privacy brings both restriction and pleasure. We consider how these themes may be linked to the participants’ community context and colonial and apartheid history. Finally, we emphasize the need for research that also explores positive sex functions and experiences rather than focuses narrowly on problematic sexual behavior.     

Accountability and Risk Assessment: Members’ and Leaders’ Perspectives about Psychoeducational Batterers’ Group

This study reports group leaders’ assessment of group members’ risk for reassault and level of accountability during a psychoeducational group intervention with male domestic violence perpetrators. It also examines members’ assessment of their own risk for reassault and level of accountability over the 18-week program. Group leaders and group members completed surveys every 2 weeks. Bivariate analyses examining differences in accountability rating and risk assessment between group leaders and group members show little agreement between leaders and members and few changes over time. Group leaders assessed group members as showing some increases in level of accountability near the end of the group. These findings suggest group leaders perceived increased accountability among group members, but they were rarely able to fulfill their goal of educating members about the connection between accountability and risk of reassault.     

Investing in Leaving: The Greek Case of International Migration of Professionals

In the last twenty years, the ‘international migration of professionals’ from Greece has increased. This paper is based on an extensive survey of Greek professionals who work or have worked in another country. It is the first ever research on the topic in Greece and the first one in the international literature to include participants who are currently abroad or have repatriated. The aim of the paper is threefold. First, it presents the main characteristics of this phenomenon. Second, to explain why Greece, alongside other peripheral countries, suffers from migration of its professionals: in contrast to a dominant view insisting on an allegedly abundant supply of highly skilled labour, it is argued that the phenomenon is primarily due to their low demand in the Greek labour market. Third, to argue that such migration can have positive implications for a country, not only when these people return but also when they stay abroad.     

Calibrated imputation in surveys under a quasi-model-assisted approach

Summary.  We propose to use calibrated imputation to compensate for missing values. This technique consists of finding final imputed values that are as close as possible to preliminary imputed values and are calibrated to satisfy constraints. Preliminary imputed values, potentially justified by an imputation model, are obtained through deterministic single imputation. Using appropriate constraints, the resulting imputed estimator is asymptotically unbiased for estimation of linear population parameters such as domain totals. A quasi-model-assisted approach is considered in the sense that inferences do not depend on the validity of an imputation model and are made with respect to the sampling design and a non-response model. An imputation model may still be used to generate imputed values and thus to improve the efficiency of the imputed estimator. This approach has the characteristic of handling naturally the situation where more than one imputation method is used owing to missing values in the variables that are used to obtain imputed values. We use the Taylor linearization technique to obtain a variance estimator under a general non-response model. For the logistic non-response model, we show that ignoring the effect of estimating the non-response model parameters leads to overestimating the variance of the imputed estimator. In practice, the overestimation is expected to be moderate or even negligible, as shown in a simulation study.     

The Micropolitics of Victim–Offender Mediation

Victim–offender mediation is one of the most widely used practices of restorative justice encounter in the United States. We report findings from research on a victim–offender mediation program sponsored by an American juvenile court. Our specific concern is with power relations at the micro level of the mediation session. Restorative justice has been alternately criticized for controlling its participants too much and for controlling them too little. Some critics point to the silencing of participants, especially those of low social status like youth. Others point to the failure of restorative justice participants to effectively challenge attitudes conducive to crime. We consider the extent to which lay participants were silenced and/or challenged during mediation sessions. Our data suggest that power is diffuse in restorative justice encounters with juvenile offenders and that it is creatively deployed to achieve a variety of purposes. Consistent with restorative justice theories, which consider crime causation broadly, attitudes conducive to crime were not systematically addressed. The analysis underscores the complexity of both restorative justice and its evaluation.