Outcomes of the ON FIRE peer support programme for children and adolescents in families with mental health problems

Children in families with mental health problems may encounter multiple risks to their well‐being. General aims of peer support programmes for these children include fostering resilience and effective coping strategies, and enhancing self‐esteem and social skills. This study aimed to evaluate outcomes from a pilot multi‐site implementation of the ON FIRE peer support programme. The purpose of ON FIRE is to cultivate hope, resilience and well‐being in children and adolescents aged 8–17 years living in families affected by sibling or parental mental health problems. We employed a pre‐post test (baseline and 4 months) evaluation using a suite of outcome measures. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), Children's Hope Scale, Kids Connections Scale and Positive and Negative Affect Scale for Children (PANAS‐C) were completed for 64 child/adolescent participants. At baseline, participants had significantly greater difficulties compared with Australian norms. At 4 months, there were significant differences in children's hope and in connections outside the family. There were no significant differences in the SDQ or the PANAS‐C.     

Exploring the robustness of set theoretic findings from a large n fsQCA: an illustration from the sociology of education

Ragin’s Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is often used with small to medium samples where the researcher has good case knowledge. Employing it to analyse large survey datasets, without in-depth case knowledge, raises new challenges. We present ways of addressing these challenges. We first report a single QCA result from a configurational analysis of the British National Child Development Study dataset (highest educational qualification as a set theoretic function of social class, sex and ability). We then address the robustness of our analysis by employing Du?a and Thiem’s R QCA package to explore the consequences of (i) changing fuzzy set theoretic calibrations of ability, (ii) simulating errors in measuring ability and (iii) changing thresholds for assessing the quasi-sufficiency of causal configurations for educational achievement. We also consider how the analysis behaves under simulated re-sampling, using bootstrapping. The paper offers suggested methods to others wishing to use QCA with large n data.     

The Emergence of Career Development Facilitators

This article describes the collaborative efforts of the National Career Development Association, National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee, and Career Development Training Institute at Oakland University, which resulted in the emergence and recognition of the important role of career development facilitators (CDFs). The development of the CDF competencies, curriculum, and certification is summarized, and examples of counselor‐facilitator collaboration are provided.     

Horizontal Hostility; Relations Between Similar Minority Groups

Two studies were conducted to examine the relations between similar minority groups. We predicted that minority group members would show horizontal hostility, a form of prejudice, against members of a similar, but more mainstream, minority group. The results of both studies confirmed this hypothesis. In Study 1, members of 3 Jewish congregations (reform, conservative, orthodox) showed prejudice against a member of a similar but slightly more secular congregation. In Study 2, members of a college varsity soccer team showed prejudice against junior varsity players. We conclude by suggesting that horizontal hostility is the result of social changes since Allport (1954) wrote The Nature of Prejudice. Members of minority groups value their minority social identity, even when the group is stigmatized. The positive value of minority social identity causes group members to look down on members of similar, more mainstream groups.     

The Duchenne Smile and Persuasion

We investigated persuasiveness as a social outcome of the ability to produce a deliberate Duchenne smile in a role-play task and of a participant’s use of a Duchenne smile while persuading someone in a live interaction. Participants were tasked with persuading an experimenter to drink a pleasant and unpleasant tasting juice as well as not drink a pleasant and unpleasant juice while being videotaped. Participants’ deliberate Duchenne smiling ability was measured by asking participants to smile while acting out “genuine happiness” and also to mask imagined negative affect with a smile. Smiles in the deliberate Duchenne smiling task and the persuasion task were coded for presence of the Duchenne marker, and naïve viewers of the persuasion task made ratings of how pleasant they thought the juice was. Results showed further evidence that a sizeable minority of people can deliberately produce a Duchenne smile and showed that those with this ability are more persuasive. When persuading to drink the pleasant tasting juice, the correlation between the ability to produce a deliberate Duchenne smile and persuasion was partially due to the use of the Duchenne smile while persuading, but this was not the case with the unpleasant tasting juice. When persuading to drink the unpleasant juice, participants who could deliberately put on the Duchenne smile were more persuasive but their persuasiveness was not the result of using a Duchenne smile during the persuasion task.     

The Quality of Data on “Race” and “Ethnicity”: Implications for Health Researchers,Policy Makers,and Practitioners

Implicit assumptions about the quality of data on “race” and “ethnicity” underlie the design of much of today’s research on health disparities. Health researchers, policy makers, and practitioners tend to take it for granted that racial/ethnic categories are clearly and consistently defined; that individual race/ethnicity can be easily, validly, and reliably determined; and that categories capture population groups that are so inherently different from each other that any reported racial/ethnic difference can automatically be generalized to the US population as a whole. This article outlines a series of issues that challenge these assumptions about the quality of race/ethnicity data. While race/ethnicity classifications can approximate socially constructed identities for some groups of people under some circumstances, these classifications are inherently too imprecise to allow meaningful statements to be made about underlying biological or genetic differences between groups. Findings of racial/ethnic differences should be reported with appropriate caveats and interpreted with caution. Particular caution should be exercised in hypothesizing genetic differences between groups in the absence of convincing genetic evidence.     

Democracy denied,youth participation and criminalizing digital dissent

Attention is given in this article to recent action by many liberal states to regulate and criminalize certain forms of political dissent reliant on new media. I ask how those working in the fields of youth studies and social science more generally might understand such processes of criminalizing political dissent involving young people digital media. I do this mindful of the prevailing concern about a ‘crisis in democracy’ said to be evident in the withdrawal by many young people from traditional forms of political engagement, and the need to encourage greater youth participation in democratic practices. A heuristic or guiding frame is developed to analyse how new laws, amendments to existing laws and other regulatory practices are being implemented to contain certain forms of political participation, performed in large part by young people. A case study of ‘Distributed Denial of Service action’ is offered to examine government responses to political practices which I argue constitute legitimate forms of protest and civil disobedience.     

Educational Gradients in Parents' Child‐Care Time Across Countries, 1965–2012

Parental time with children leads to posive child outcomes. Some studies have reported a posive educational gradient: More educated parents devote more time to children than other parents. Furthermore, some research finds that parental child care increased over time. Less certain is whether more educated parents increased their time more than less educated ones did, whether parenting trends for mothers and fathers are the same, and whether observed patterns characterize all Western countries or only some. Hypotheses inspired by theories of social diffusion, class differentiation, and ideologies of child rearing are tested with time‐use data for 11 Western countries between 1965 and 2012. For both mothers and fathers, results indicated a widespread educational gradient and an increase in child‐care time. In a number of countries, the posive educational gradient increased; nowhere was it dished. Thus, the advantages of intensive parenting continued to accrue to the well‐educated elite.