Teaching Family Therapy: A Program Based on Training Objectives

This paper presents a set of specific training objectives which constitute a base for a one-year clinical training program at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago. The training objectives include three categories of skills: observational, conceptual, and therapeutic. The training objectives and the program in which they are implemented are described.     

Mothering,equality and the individual: Feminist debates and welfare policies in the USA and Sweden

This paper addresses issues raised by ‘welfare reform’ in the USA by using the example of Sweden's women activists in constructing a ‘woman friendly’ welfare state. In the USA, feminist advocates see a tension between the argument that motherhood should be valued by the provision of care allowances, and the view that work should be reformed to meet the needs of parents. This reflects debates about gender difference/equality, the possibility of commonality, and the individual.

The Swedish ‘woman friendly’ welfare state was built on the recognition, through social policy, of the interrelationship among care, material resources, and public voice. The interrelationship was embodied in what I call the ‘social individual’, and articulated in public child care and other policies and collective services. The adequacy of those universal policies and services was frequently judged by the situation of lone mothers, who ceased being ‘deviant’, and often became a model for understanding the interrelationship. Cross-class solidarity among women was a prerequisite for, and was built on, the social individual. This solidarity is now threatened by neoliberal economic and social policies that fragment care, resources, and voice, and therefore the social individual.

It is possible to challenge the downsizing of welfare states by moving the terms of discussion away from the poor as deviant other, acknowledging that all women have much in common with the targets of current policy making. This involves the creation of concrete social policies that embody the relationship among care, resources, and voice, and recognize the inseparability of community, work and family.     

Genetic Algorithm for Graph Coloring: Exploration of Galinier and Hao's Algorithm

This paper examines the best current algorithm for solving the Chromatic Number Problem, due to Galinier and Hao (Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 379–397, 1999). The algorithm combines a Genetic Algorithm with Tabu Search. We show that the algorithm remains powerful even if the Tabu Search component is eliminated, and explore the reasons for its success where other Genetic Algorithms have failed. In addition we propose a generalized algorithm for the Frequency Assignment Problem.     

A best case scenario? Non-manual part-time work and job-sharing in UK local government in the 1990s

Local authorities in the UK have been described as “model employers” of part-time and job-share employees, with the needs of employees themselves, particularly women with family responsibilities, acting as the primary driver for the use of reduced hours working patterns. To investigate how far this “exemplar” label applied in practice, and to what extent this overcame the well-known drawbacks of reduced hours working patterns, the causes and consequences of working reduced hours amongst professional, managerial and administrative staff were investigated in a London borough in the mid-1990s. It was found that the “model employer” label was applicable, but it was under threat from an emerging emphasis on a demand-led, service-driven use of reduced hours work. It is argued that there is a strong business case for making more creative use of reduced hours work synthesising “supply-side” and “demand-side” needs, and that this change in approach will therefore be counterproductive.     

Special considerations in conducting bereavement focus groups

Focus groups conducted with grieving people pose special challenges. However, this method can be successfully used in bereavement research especially when group interaction is central to the research aim. This article builds on key articles discussing ethical, methodological, logistical, and analytical issues in conducting focus groups with vulnerable populations (Owen, 2001; Seymour, Bellamy, Gott, Ahmedzai, & Clark, 2002). For bereaved people, vulnerability stems from heightened potential for harm by virtue of participation in sensitive, personal exploration of death-related experiences. We discuss reasons for selecting focus group methods and our experiences with planning and implementing focus groups with bereaved people. Issues found to be highly salient in our work include: team composition, participant recruitment, creating the environment, starting and ending the group, language and listening, managing emotional discussions and time, and analytic considerations. Recommendations are made for effectively using focus groups to generate new knowledge in bereavement research.     

Spatial variability of fish communities in a highly urbanised reef system

Urban Ecosystems - Rapid coastal development has generated interest in the ecology of human-modified marine environments. Coastal defence structures such as breakwaters and seawalls are...     

Media Representations of Sexual Abuse Risks

What are the risks associated with child sexual abuse? Who is at risk? From whom? For professionals working in the field of child abuse, the main answers to such questions are straightforward. There is a broad consensus that children are at risk from adults (and young people), often from men (and sometimes women) that they know. Fathers, step-fathers, uncles and brothers are often implicated. This is not, however, the focus of news coverage. Abductions, paedophile rings and abuse in children's homes attract intermittent but occasionally intense media attention. In contrast, sexual abuse of children within their own families is rarely front page news—except, that is, where the accusations are contested. Almost as soon as the existence of widespread abuse within ‘ordinary’ homes became public knowledge, this was over-shadowed by a series of high-profiled ‘scandals’, such as Cleveland, Rochdale and Orkney. The focus turned to questions of misdiagnosis, inappropriate intervention and the supposed coaching of children to make false accusations. More recently ‘false memory syndrome’ has hit the headlines suggesting that some adults' accounts of abuse can also be discredited. The news coverage often gives the impression that the main risks are not tochildren, but to parents, particularly fathers. How has this come to be the focus of public debate? Why is it that these risks have proved so much more ‘newsworthy’? This paper examines the media profile of the risks associated with sexual abuse and draws on interviews with journalists to seek to explain the shape of the coverage.     

“Help Yourself!” What Can Toddlers' Helping Failures Tell Us About the Development of Prosocial Behavior?

Prosocial behavior emerges in the second year of life, yet it is typical for children in this period not to share, comfort, or help. We compared toddlers (18, 30 months) who helped with those who did not help on two tasks (instrumental helping; empathic helping). More than half of children failed to help on one or both tasks. Nonhelpers engaged in more hypothesis testing on the instrumental helping task, but more security‐seeking, wariness, and playing on the empathic helping task. Across tasks, children who tended to engage in nonhelping behaviors associated with negative emotional arousal also tended to seek comfort from a parent. In contrast, children who tended to play instead of helping were less likely to exhibit negative emotional arousal or hypothesis testing, suggesting a focus on their own interests. Parents of 18‐month‐old nonhelpers on the instrumental task were less engaged in socializing prosocial behavior in their toddlers than were the parents of helpers. On the empathic helping task, 18‐month‐old nonhelpers had less mature self‐other understanding than did helpers. By examining how the predominant reasons for failing to help vary with age and task, we gain a fuller perspective on the factors involved in the early development of prosocial behavior.