Adult Children of Divorce: Awareness and Intervention

Parental midlife divorce impacts children who are adults at the time of the separation event. This article examines the family life cycle and stages as well as the transitions that occur when parents divorce at midlife. Specifically, the divorce impacts on the adult children are examined in relation to their unique life stage. Therapeutic practice implications and theories will also be explored in relation to assisting adult children of divorce reconcile the divorce experience of their parents.     

Why the hyphen? Individual and collective memories of Italianness in the United States at the intersection of class and generation

This three-generation oral history study offers insight into why descendants of Italian migrants to the United States still choose hyphenated identities today. The research project shows how the meaning of Italianness shifts among the interviewees depending on class affiliation: among the middle-class offspring the use of the hyphen can be understood mainly as a reaction to the experienced pressure to give in to Anglo conformity. Among the blue-collar, urban progeny, Italianness expresses itself as a combination of an experienced ethnic environment on the one hand and a symbolic ethnicity on the other.     

What Habituates in Infant Visual Habituation? A Psychophysiological Analysis

Despite the use of visual habituation over the past half century, relatively little is known about its underlying processes. We analyzed heart rate (HR) taken simultaneous with looking during infant‐controlled habituation sessions collected longitudinally at 4, 6, and 8 months of age with the goal of examining how HR and HR‐defined phases of attention change across habituation. There were four major findings. First, the depth and topography of decelerations and proportion of sustained attention (SA) did not vary across habituation at any age, which suggested (in contrast to the tenets of comparator theory) the persistence of substantial cognitive activity at the end of visual habituation. Second, attention termination (AT) robustly declined across trials, suggesting that, contrary to prior thinking, AT might be a sensitive indicant of visual learning. Third, infants at all ages showed an HR increase (startle) to stimulus onset on the first trial, the magnitude of which was associated with subsequent delayed HR deceleration and less SA; thus, stimulus events affect processing during trials. Finally, mean overall HR reliably increased across trials for all ages. This last finding implies the need to distinguish between “phasic” HR changes (e.g., decelerations during looks) and longer term “tonic” HR changes (mean increases across trials) during habituation, and raises the question of what processes the tonic increases might reflect within the habituation paradigm.     

The Effects of Simultaneous Developmental Processes: Factors Relating to the Career Development of Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Youth

C. Hetherington (1991) hypothesized that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adolescents may experience a “bottleneck effect” in career development because of internal psychological energy focusing on issues surrounding sexual identity. This assertion has not yet been tested, however, in the career development literature. The authors examined the relationship between variables indicative of psychological resources being devoted to managing an LGB identity, social support, and career development. Survey data from 102 LGB youth demonstrated that inner sexual identity conflict and social support predicted unique and shared variance in career maturity and vocational indecision, lending empirical support to the bottleneck hypothesis.     

Online programs as tools to improve parenting: A meta-analytic review

Background

A number of parenting programs, aimed at improving parenting competencies, have recently been adapted or designed with the use of online technologies. Although web-based services have been claimed to hold promise for parent support, a meta-analytic review of online parenting interventions is lacking.

Method

A systematic review was undertaken of studies (n = 19), published between 2000 and 2010, that describe parenting programs of which the primary components were delivered online. Seven programs were adaptations of traditional, mostly evidence-based, parenting interventions, using the unique opportunities of internet technology. Twelve studies (with in total 54 outcomes, N_tot parents = 1615 and N_tot children = 740) were included in a meta-analysis.

Results

The meta-analysis showed a statistically significant medium effect across parents outcomes (ES = 0.67; se = 0.25) and child outcomes (ES = 0.42; se = 0.15).

Conclusions

The results of this review show that web-based parenting programs with new technologies offer opportunities for sharing social support, consulting professionals and training parental competencies. The meta-analytic results show that guided and self-guided online interventions can make a significant positive contribution for parents and children. The relation with other meta-analyses in the domains of parent education and web-based interventions is discussed.     

Getting your partner to use condoms: Interviews with men and women at risk of HIV/STDs

Data from individual semistructured interviews with 90 young heterosexual couples were analyzed to identify strategies that men and women at risk of HIV/STDs would use to influence their partners to use condoms for the purpose of disease prevention. In addition, we explored whether participants thought influencing strategies would differ for pregnancy prevention. Content analysis of the interview data indicated that participants would use the following verbal strategies: persuading/suggesting, commanding/asserting, and threatening to withhold sex. Several participants, particularly those who had recently used condoms with their partners, reported that they would also use non‐verbal strategies involving condoms themselves (e.g., putting a condom on, buying or getting condoms, or presenting a condom to their partner). Many participants believed that they would use a different strategy for pregnancy prevention because it would be easier to convince a partner to use condoms for that purpose.     

Using Groups to Advance Social Work Practice–Based Research

A discussion about the importance of research for social work practitioners and the nature of academic–practitioner partnerships set the scene in this article for a discussion about an innovative academic–practitioner partnership. This partnership, aimed at strengthening research mindedness and research activity in social service settings, has been fuelled by a belief in the power of groups to achieve what individuals cannot. The authors reflect on the range of inputs and synergistic group processes that allowed for a series of outcomes that would not have been possible within an individualized initiative. In conclusion, lessons learned from the use of groups to advance practice-based research are outlined.