Collaborative Family Work in Youth Justice

ABSTRACT

A number of studies have found that working with family groups can be successful in improving outcomes for young people and their families. This article reports on a study in New South Wales in which juvenile justice staff offered collaborative family work interventions to young people as part of the routine offerings of a juvenile justice service. The primary objective of this study was to examine the extent to which young people who completed the family work had lower recidivism rates compared to three control groups. The methods included a comparison of recidivism rates between young people who completed the intervention, those who failed to complete, those who declined, and a matched sample of young people who were not offered the intervention. The results of the study indicated that many young people and their families were agreeable to be involved in the intervention and the completion rates were high, particularly if the work was undertaken in the family home. The young people who completed the intervention also had lower recidivism rates than young people in each of the control groups.

IMPLICATIONS

• Collaborative family work can be offered successfully by juvenile justice services to young offenders and their families.

• Collaborative family work can reduce recidivism rates for those who complete the intervention.

• It is preferable to conduct the work in the family home where completion rates are likely to be higher.

     

If you plant it,they will come: quantifying attractiveness of exotic plants for winter-active flower visitors in community gardens

Urban community gardens are potentially important sites for urban pollinator conservation because of their high density, diversity of flowering plants, and low pesticide use (relative to agricultural spaces). Selective planting of attractive crop plants is a simple and cost-effective strategy for attracting flower visitors to urban green spaces, however, there is limited empirical data about which plants are most attractive. Here, we identified key plant species that were important for supporting flower visitors using a network-based approach that combined metrics of flower visitor abundance and diversity on different crop species. We included a metric of ‘popularity’ which assessed how frequently a particular plant appeared within community gardens. We also determined the impact of garden characteristics such as size, flower species richness, and flower species density on the abundance and diversity of flower visitors. Two plant species, Brassica rapa and Ocimum basilicum were identified as being particularly important species for supporting flower visitor populations. Flower species richness had a strong positive effect on both the abundance and diversity of flower visitors. We suggest that gardeners can maximise the conservation value of their gardens by planting a wide variety of flowering plants including attractive plants such as B. rapa and O. basilicum.

     

Prevalence and risk factors of Leptospira infection in urban brown rats (Rattus norvegicus), Vienna,Austria

Urban Ecosystems - Leptospirosis is a worldwide bacterial zoonosis which incidence is expected to increase in conjunction with global change. In urban ecosystems, synanthropic rats are the key...     

Making a target work: Messages from a pilot of the 6‐month time limit on care proceedings in England

Since 2014, it has been a legal requirement in England and Wales for child care proceedings to be concluded, apart from “exceptional cases,” within 26 weeks. When this was first proposed, there were concerns that it might lead to poorer decision‐making or to delay being squeezed to either side of the court proceedings, before or afterwards. This paper reports on the messages from a pilot programme to hit the 26‐week target that took place in London in 2012–2013. The study compared the progress of the cases from the pilot year with those the year before, 180 cases in total, involving 256 children. The local authorities involved were able to achieve considerable improvements in timeliness, not just in the proceedings, but for the pre‐ and post‐court processes too; and the quality and fairness of decisions did not seem to be impaired, in terms of the plans for the children and subsequent outcomes over a period of 2 years. “Targets” do not generally find a warm welcome in the social work literature, but this paper shows that when collaboratively implemented, with a measure of flexibility and adequate resources, they can be an effective way of helping to achieve positive change.     

Silent Running: Tacit,Discursive and Psychological Aspects of Management in a Top UK Advertising Agency

In old American World War II movies submarine commanders called for ‘silent running’ when the enemy were near. No orders were issued but anarchy did not ensue. Everyone knew what to do. This paper describes a research study of one of the top five UK advertising agencies, in which management appeared silent in the sense that explicit, overt, bureaucratic, sanction‐backed directive corporate authority was not evident. But this agency is one of the most successful, serious, creative, effective, least showbizzy agencies in the industry. It is a good example of an organization which manages and sells knowledge: knowledge about advertising, about consumers and about creative craft. The research used critical discourse analysis to explore the ways in which power, authority and professional identity were discursively reproduced in the service of corporate instrumentality. As a real, concrete source of authority and direction, ‘management’ seemed silent, yet as a discursive construction its controlling presence was psychologically pervasive     

From ‘sustainable rural communities’ to ‘social sustainability': giving voice to diversity in Mangakahia Valley, New Zealand

Despite widespread interest in the notion of sustainability, little progress has been made towards an understanding of its social dimensions. Nonetheless, the concept of ‘sustainable rural communities’ is embedded in popular, policy and academic discourses, where the needs of ‘rural communities’ are usually equated with those of farm families. Our ethnographic research in Northland, New Zealand illustrates the diverse interests to be found within ‘rural communities'. Interviews and participant observation were undertaken between August 1995 and July 1996 in the Mangakahia Valley. The increasing divergence in the ethnic, class and occupational makeup of the population has brought with it complexities in terms of what can be said to contribute to ‘sustainable rural communities'. We suggest that ‘sustainable rural communities’ be treated as a folk category, and instead, social science discourse should resort to the broader concept of social sustainability, which will have a locally defined content, not a universal definition, but will include elements of livelihood, social participation, justice and equity.     

Analysis of Variance by Randomization when Variances are Unequal

If there are significant factor and interaction effects with analysis of variance using ran-domization inference, they can be detected by tests that compare the F -statistics for the real data with the distributions of these statistics obtained by randomly allocating either the original observations or the residuals to the various factor combinations. Such tests involve the assumption that the effect of factors or interactions is to shift the observations for a factor combination by a fixed amount, without changing the amount of variation at that combination. In reality the expected amount of variation at each factor combination, as measured by the variance, may not be constant, which may upset the properties of the tests for the effects of factors and interactions. This paper discusses several possible methods for adjusting the randomization procedure to allow for this type of problem, including generalizations of methods that have been proposed for comparing the means of several samples when there is unequal variance but no factor structure. A simulation study shows that the best of the methods examined is one for which the randomized sets of data are designed to approximate the distributions of F -statistics when unequal variance is present.