Happily Ever After? The Journey From Foster Care to Adoption

Providing the foster child with a forever family through adoption is often seen as a happy ending to the long and painful journey through foster care. This qualitative study explores this complex journey from foster care to adoption from the perspective of 30 young adults aged 18 to 25 who were adopted from the foster care system after the age of 8. The results indicate that the foster and adoption experience for these youth cannot be compartmentalized when trying to understand the impact adoption has had on their overall sense of self. Implications for future research to explore the emerging concept of foster/adoptive identity for older youth adopted through the foster care system are provided.     

TOURING A SUPPLY CHAIN WITH STUDENTS: PEDAGOGICAL AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS

This paper describes the supply chain tour, an expansion of the widely used facility tour pedagogy. A supply chain tour is a tour of facilities sequentially related in the creation of value that is designed to expose critical linkages and illustrate Supply Chain Management concepts and theories. Effectively using the supply chain tour pedagogy requires the instructor to create a standardized approach to managing the facility tour; a checklist is provided for this purpose. An example supply chain tour, used in the author's classes, is described.     

Regional Labour Market Matching Functions and Efficiency Analysis

Abstract. Stochastic production frontiers are used for estimating regional matching functions where unemployment outflow is ‘produced’ by the unemployed and vacancies. The frontier is estimated using regional panel data from Finland from 1988 to 1997 and the Battese and Coelli frontier model, where the explanatory factors are included in the inefficiency term. The stochastic frontier matching function has constant returns, whereas in OLS estimation with fixed effects the returns are slightly increasing. Unemployment and vacancies in neighbouring regions have a spillover effect on efficiency. Excess job reallocation in a region deteriorates matching efficiency. The decomposition of total factor productivity change in matching to efficiency change and change in matching technology is also investigated by interpreting the matching frontier as a distance function and using Malmquist indexes. There is a downward trend in the technology, but short‐term variations are dominated by cyclical changes in efficiency.     

Three categories of urban green areas and the effect of their different management on the communities of ants,spiders and harvestmen

Urban green areas have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation in cities. However, land use and the different management practices applied to these areas determine their effectiveness as biodiversity refuges within cities. In our study, we compare the biodiversity of three bioindicator groups of arthropods (ants, spiders and harvestmen) found in eleven urban green sites in Warsaw (Poland). The studied sites represent three categories of management: botanical gardens, public parks and urban woodlands. Our aim was to determine the effect of the type of management (as urban green categories) on arthropod communities in urban areas.

     

Relations Among Intimate Partner Violence,Maternal Depressive Symptoms,and Maternal Parenting Behaviors

The authors examined the relations among intimate partner violence (IPV), maternal depressive symptoms, and maternal harsh intrusive parenting. Using a cross‐lagged, autoregressive path model, they sought to clarify the directionality of the relations among these 3 variables over the first 2 years of the child's life. The results indicated that, in this diverse sample of families living in predominantly low‐income rural communities (N = 705), higher levels of early IPV were associated with increases in maternal depressive symptoms, which in turn were associated with increases in maternal harsh intrusive parenting behaviors. These findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving the parenting of women exposed to domestic violence may want to simultaneously target IPV and depressive symptomatology.     

Polish complementary schools in Iceland and England

Since 2004, the opening of labour markets has spurred a considerable number of Poles to emigrate e.g. to Iceland and England. Families with school age children have had the challenge of adapting to foreign environments and school systems. Polish complementary schools have played an important, albeit ambivalent, role in this process. Through focus group interviews with students in Polish complementary schools in one city in Iceland and one city in England, we gathered information showing common threads between both schools as well as differences in their structure, role, origin and the student motivation to participate. Saturday schools abroad are considered to be less demanding by students than regular schools back in Poland, but more so than regular Icelandic/English schools, which many rate as unsatisfactory in terms of their academic development. The tension between the need for freedom and high expectations for the academic outcome of education influences student opinions, not only about schooling, but also about the host society.     

Intimate Partner Violence and Children's Attachment Representations During Middle Childhood

Despite long‐standing hypotheses that intimate partner violence (IPV) may undermine children's ability to form secure attachment representations, few studies have empirically investigated this association. Particularly lacking is research that examines IPV and attachment during middle childhood, a time when the way that children understand, represent, and process the behavior of others becomes particularly important. Using data from a sample of African American children living in rural, low‐income communities (N = 98), the current study sought to address this gap by examining the association between physical IPV occurring early in children's lives and their attachment security during the first grade. Results indicate that, even after controlling for child‐ and family‐level covariates, physical IPV was associated with a greater likelihood of being rated insecurely attached. This effect was above and beyond the influence of maternal parenting behaviors, demonstrating a unique effect of physical IPV on children's attachment representations during middle childhood.     

Acting age in the context of health: Middle-aged working-class men talking about bodies and aging

This article focuses on the intersections of age, gender and class in interpretations of the aging and situational identity work of middle-aged working-class men. Empirically the article is based on interview data (4 focus groups and 9 personal interviews with 40+ men) in which Finnish paper-mill workers are interviewed about health. Based on the theoretical implications of intersectionality, the article provides an empirical analysis of how age-based cultural hierarchies and distinctions are used flexibly in the process of self-identification and how categorizations of age and conceptualizations of aging are tightly interwoven with gender and class. The analyses show that the middle-aged interviewees base their interpretations of the aging self on negotiating their position between the age categories of the ‘young’ and ‘old’. Both these groups are labeled with rather negative characteristics regarding the irresponsibility for health among the young and impaired functional ability of the old, which conflicts with the working-class expectations regarding masculine identity. The findings suggest that studying how people ‘do age’ requires consideration of the respects in which aging is an age-specific and gendered process shaped by class-based values, ideals and practices.