Parents' knowledge,attitudes and practices about preventing child sexual abuse: a literature review

Increased concern about high rates of child sexual abuse has led to the demand for more prevention programmes, particularly those aimed at parents. Research on how parents manage and reduce the risk of child sexual abuse can help plan programmes. This literature review explores published research on the knowledge, attitudes and practices of parents on the risk and prevention of child sexual abuse and identifies gaps and needs for further research. The majority of studies reviewed originated in North America and Asia, were quantitative, surveyed mainly mothers and were more than ten years old. Recommendations are made for more current and country specific research, further research to gain a deeper understanding of how parents manage the risk of child sexual abuse, more comprehensive research covering a range of knowledge, attitude and practice variables, and greater inclusion of fathers in research. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The diagnostic accuracy of a composite index increases as the number of partitions of the components increases and when specific weights are assigned to each component

The aim of this work was to evaluate whether the number of partitions of index components and the use of specific weights for each component influence the diagnostic accuracy of a composite index. Simulation studies were conducted in order to compare the sensitivity, specificity and area under the ROC curve (AUC) of indices constructed using equal number of components but different number of partitions for all components. Moreover, the odds ratio obtained from the univariate logistic regression model for each component was proposed as potential weight. The current simulation results showed that the sensitivity, specificity and AUC of an index increase as the number of partitions of components increases. However, the rate that the diagnostic accuracy increases is reduced as the number of partitions increases. In addition, it was found that the diagnostic accuracy of the weighted index developed using the proposed weights is higher compared with that of the corresponding un-weighted index. The use of large-scale index components and the use of effect size measures (i.e. odds ratios, ORs) of index components as potential weights are proposed in order to obtain indices with high diagnostic accuracy for a particular binary outcome.     

Health Staff Responses to Domestic and Family Violence: The Case for Training to Build Confidence and Skills

ABSTRACT

Domestic and family violence (DFV) is a serious, worldwide public health concern and the literature suggests that women who have experienced violence identify health care providers as the professionals they would most trust with disclosure of abuse. Social work is well positioned to respond to women presenting in hospitals after experiencing DFV and in advocating for systems and policy initiatives to support health staff in becoming adequately trained and supported to detect and respond appropriately. This paper reports on research that surveyed health staff in two hospitals in Queensland, Australia, to identify what DFV training they had received, whether this training increased their knowledge, skills and confidence to address DFV and what services they would access to support women presenting with DFV. The results showed that the respondents were an experienced staff group who had worked in the health sector for 10–20 years but despite having access to State-based training, the majority of them had not completed any in-house training and only 12% had received face-to-face training, and when they did undertake training, it was usually only a two-hour session. Seventy-five per cent of respondents would refer to their hospital-based social worker and 40% would make referrals to other support services, primarily social work.

IMPLICATIONS

• Hospitals need to prioritise, commit to, and resource appropriate and regular training to better equip health staff to identify and respond to DFV.

• Training needs to build the knowledge and skills of staff members to address their confidence to intervene and offer support.

• Social work can provide an important role in advocating and developing training and procedures to sustain health staff members’ capacity to respond appropriately to DFV.

     

Α Markov model for longitudinal studies with incomplete dichotomous outcomes

Missing outcome data constitute a serious threat to the validity and precision of inferences from randomized controlled trials. In this paper, we propose the use of a multistate Markov model for the analysis of incomplete individual patient data for a dichotomous outcome reported over a period of time. The model accounts for patients dropping out of the study and also for patients relapsing. The time of each observation is accounted for, and the model allows the estimation of time‐dependent relative treatment effects. We apply our methods to data from a study comparing the effectiveness of 2 pharmacological treatments for schizophrenia. The model jointly estimates the relative efficacy and the dropout rate and also allows for a wide range of clinically interesting inferences to be made. Assumptions about the missingness mechanism and the unobserved outcomes of patients dropping out can be incorporated into the analysis. The presented method constitutes a viable candidate for analyzing longitudinal, incomplete binary data.     

Estimating Mortality Levels and Patterns among Natives,Immigrants, and Selected Ethnic Groups in Greece: 2010–2012

This study addresses for the first time in Greece the issue of levels and patterns of mortality among natives and immigrants, using vital statistics and census data by citizenship. Life tables are constructed for the two most numerous communities, Albanians and Bulgarians as well as for all immigrant populations combined; standardized mortality ratios are estimated for smaller migrant groups. Albanian males have a slight mortality advantage compared to natives; all other groups experience higher mortality. Some support for the “selectivity of migrants” hypothesis is provided as immigrants in several cases have significantly lower mortality compared to their countries of origin. Implications for public health policy in Greece are discussed.     

Mind the gap: the extent of violence against women with disabilities in Australia

A comprehensive national response to violence against women with disabilities is long overdue in Australia. Work to date suggests that the issue is endemic yet largely invisible. Responses at the national level are hampered by the lack of information regarding violence against women with disabilities due to under‐reporting and inadequate capture of the prevalence of this violence. This article explores approaches to collecting data regarding violence against women with disabilities in Australia and adds to the limited body of knowledge about the prevalence of violence for these women through interrogation of available data. Further analysis of the 2012 Personal Safety Survey data indicates that among women with disabilities aged under 50, 62 per cent have experienced violence since the age of 15, and women with disabilities had experienced three times the rate of sexual violence in the past 12 months compared to those without disabilities. These findings still do not represent the full extent of violence against women with disabilities, since the Personal Safety Survey samples only women who reside in private dwellings and excludes those living in disability care settings. Insight is offered as to what is needed to comprehensively capture the required data and the implications for policy.     

Number words in ‘her’ language,dialogism and identity-work: the case of little Mariah

Based on an ethnographic study, we explore the potential of experimenting with multiple languages for number words as part of young children’s mathematical activity. Data from a preschool classroom activity on ‘number words in “other” languages’ exemplify a complex process of discursive identity-work and dialogism amongst children, parents, teacher, and researchers. The focus is on the case of little Mariah, a Pakistani immigrant girl in Greece, who experiences participation by sharing number knowledge in her mother tongue Urdu, and highlights how gendered, racial, or language-related discourses weave her learner identity in a multilingual preschool classroom.     

Notes on Supervision

I am honoured that you wish to include my “Notes on Supervision” in the issue of the Journal dedicated to Miss Parker. Re-reading them calls back the pleasure and stimulation of working with her and those of you who were supervising social work students then, and of being a part of the struggle we all were making to identify problems in field instruction and to overcome them.     

Generalized weibull family: a structural analysis

A two shape parameter generalization of the well known family of the Weibull distributions is presented and its properties are studied. The properties examined include the skewness and kurtosis, density shapes and tail character, and relation of the members of the family to those of the Pear-sonian system. The members of the family are grouped in four classes in terms of these properties. Also studied are the extreme value distributions and the limiting distributions of the extreme spacings for the members of the family. It is seen that the generalized Weibull family contains distributions with a variety of density and tail shapes, and distributions which in terms of skewness and kurtosis approximate the main types of curves of the Pearson system. Furthermore, as shown by the extreme value and extreme spacings distributions the family contains short, medium and long tailed distributions. The quantile and density quantile functions are the principle tools used for the structural analysis of the family.