Effective child welfare practice with immigrant and refugee children and their families

This article presents a multistage migration framework to broaden the lens through which child welfare personnel can view immigrant and refugee families and their children. By better understanding the family's experiences in both emigration and immigration, including reasons for leaving their home country, experiences in transit, and reception and resettlement experiences in the United States, child welfare personnel are better equipped to assess their needs and provide effective prevention, protection, permanency, and family preservation services. Case examples illustrating the application of the framework and guidelines for program and practice are included.     

An analysis of the impact of education on family size

The impact of education on family size is divided into a direct effect (holding labor force participation and age at marriage constant) and an indirect effect (varying labor force participation and age at marriage). The results suggest that (1) the indirect effect of education is greater at higher levels of the wife's education, (2) the direct effect is greater at lower levels of education in most cases, (3) the indirect effects do not vary systematically with husband's education, (4) but the direct effect does vary systematically with husband's education if the education of the wife is low but not if wife's education is high.     

Childbirth As Negotiated Reality*

This paper will describe birth as a social as well as a physiological event, a process which is socially constructed and socially defined. The ways in which the medical establishment controls the birth experience, creating it as a medical event, will be presented. The role of childbirth education is presented here as supporting the medical model and preparing the pregnant woman and her mate for their roles in the institutional birth. We will briefly consider an alternative, non-medical approach to birth.     

Normative,Preferential, and Belief Modes in Adolescent Prejudice*

The concept of attitude often subsumes normative, preferential, and belief components; some attitude scales are composed of items exhibiting two or more of these modalities. Beliefs may, in turn, be classified as reports, stereotypes, consequences, and intentions. This article shows that attitude questions in different modes have differing origins and implications, and that it is an error to continue to use an attitude concept and attitude scales that are modally ambiguous. As well, it is an error to use factor analyses and lack of co-scalability as the only criteria for assessing modality differences within attitude scales. In support of this argument we show that adolescents respond differently to attitude questions concerning school integration that are phrased in the normative, preferential, and belief modes, although these same questions are also found to co-scale. A distinction is made between two ways of learning attitudes: through personal experience and through information from others. On the basis of this distinction, parallel results were predicted and found for preferences and intentions. These differed from results that we predicted and found for norms and stereotypes.     

Race,Region, and Earnings: Blacks and Whites in the South

Abstract Using data from the 1980 Public-Use Micro Sample (PUMS) A-file, we examine the effect of region on black and white earnings within the Black Belt and the rest of the South. We find that Black Belt residence depresses earnings for both blacks and whites, more or less equally. There was no support for the hypothesis that there would be a greater penalty to being black in the Black Belt, compared to being black in the non-Black Belt South. It is the additive effects of race and region that lead to lower earnings for Black Belt blacks. We conclude that region is a useful theoretical concept which needs to be more adequately theorized and incorporated into sociological analyses.     

Focusing on followers: The role of regulatory focus and possible selves in visionary leadership

Vision communication is considered to be essential for leaders to mobilize followers, but knowledge of how and why vision communication may influence followers is scarce. We argue that visions may invite followers to create an ideal self (a desired image of the self). Subsequent consideration of this ideal self may motivate followers to make the ideal self (and thus the vision) reality. Furthermore, we propose that visions that focus on followers (by addressing followers personally and involving them in the vision) are more likely to lead to the creation of an ideal self and hence to higher follower performance than visions that do not focus on followers. Moreover, we argue that this effect is particularly strong for followers with a promotion self-regulatory focus, a focus on reaching ideals and ideal selves, because promotion focus causes sensitivity to the presence or absence of ideals (Higgins, 1987, 1996, 1997). The results of two experiments support our predictions.     

Evaluation of curricula in higher education: challenges for evaluators

Evaluation of teaching at universities is traditionally realized in terms of student ratings. Curriculum evaluation is rarely done in a systematic manner. More often, the emphasis is placed on a particular aspect, which is only of little help in terms of modifying education. A very prominent example is that of medical education. Here, evaluations of curricula primarily focus on new curricula by contrasting them to traditional ones. The article at hand deals with a different evaluation approach, in which five phases have to be considered and contrasting results to other teaching formats are not the main focus. In this article, the authors concentrate on the first phase (baseline evaluation) of the systematic evaluation of a medical curriculum. They describe several challenges of such an evaluation approach and illustrate the strategies used to overcome them. In addition, associated relevant empirical findings from this evaluation study are presented.     

The "quality " of early care and education settings: definitional and measurement issues

There is a widespread belief that high-quality early care and education can improve children's school readiness. However, debate continues about the essential elements of a high-quality experience, about whether quality means the same things across different types of care settings, about how to measure quality, and about the level of quality that might make a meaningful difference in outcomes for children. Are the aspects of the child care environment that researchers measure the ones that are most strongly related to children's development? This article argues that the ways in which researchers currently measure early care environments are flawed and that the conclusions drawn about the relationship between these measures and outcomes for children are frequently incorrect or overstated. The article addresses four questions: How is the quality of the child care environment commonly defined and measured? Do the most commonly used measures capture the child's experience? Do they work well across all settings? Are researchers drawing the correct conclusions from studies that relate the child care environment to child outcomes? Finally, the article discusses some possible directions for future research.