Freedom and struggling openly in psychotherapy: A qualitative inquiry with LGBQ young adults from religious families

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) young people from religious families are at increased risk of family rejection, poor mental health outcomes, and are overrepresented in mental health services. This article describes a two‐part qualitative study aimed at exploring the experiences of LGBQ young adults from religious families in psychotherapy, identifying positive and negative psychotherapy experiences, and understanding the influence of family and religion on the psychotherapy experience. Data were collected through a web‐based survey (n = 77) and interviews (n = 7) with LGBQ young adults (ages 18–25) from religious families. The study followed an interpretative phenomenological approach. Integrated results found often invisible, relational therapy processes, and religious discourses as significant to LGBQ young people who seek psychotherapy. Implications for future research, effective systemic family therapy practices with LGBQ young people from religious families, and a critique on ethical and legal limits of confidentiality with policy implications are outlined.     

Mental disease postpartum and parent‐infant interaction—evaluation of videotaped sessions

In order to investigate the influence of maternal mental illness postpartum on mother‐infant and father‐infant interaction, infants of 14 mentally ill women admitted to hospital within 6 months after delivery were compared to infants of 22 women who had been somatically ill. Videotaped sessions when the infant was 10 months old revealed that mothers in the psychiatric sample showed less sensitivity in comparison to mothers in the somatic sample. When the infant was 2 years old, mothers in the psychiatric sample showed less positive affect and less link‐infant follow (stimulation dimension) as compared to the somatic mothers. However, there were no differences between fathers in the psychiatric sample and fathers in the somatic sample in any of the interaction variables. In the psychiatric sample, fathers showed more warmth as compared to mothers. In the somatic sample, fathers scored higher than mothers on autonomy but lower than mothers on link‐infant follow (stimulation dimension). A possible interpretation of our data was that the mental illness of the mothers may lead to a more active parenting role of the father in order to buffer the deficit in the mother‐infant relation. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Advanced Networked Technologies in the U.K. Voluntary Sector

Advanced networked technologies have the potential to support deep strategic and operational transformation within voluntary organizations as they seek to respond to shifts in the social, economic, and political spheres in which they operate. Evidence form our study of U.K. voluntary organizations demonstrates relatively low uptake of the core networking technologies and applications essential to support such transformation. Friends of the Earth and The Samaritans are exceptions to this trend. Case studies of these organizations demonstrate that they are using advanced networked technologies to reconfigure key information flows and relationships, in support of enhanced campaigning and more effective user services. The extent to which these organizations are able to exploit the transformational potential that the technologies present is tempered by historically institutionalized relationships and values by which they are characterized.     

Attitude Differences Between Paid Workers and Volunteers

This study addresses the extension of research on paid employees to volunteer workers. Pearce (1978, 1993b) has postulated that job attitudes are substantially different between volunteers and paid employees, based on her work studying fourteen organizations employing either entirely volunteer workgroups or entirely paid workgroups. Another interpretation of her data would be that the organizational culture of such workgroups is different, not the individual job attitudes.     

Adolescent Transitions to Young Adulthood: Antecedents,Correlates, and Consequences of Adolescent Employment

The antecedents, correlates, and consequences of adolescent employment were investigated in a sample of 251 low‐income, African American youth that were followed since birth. The youth (age: M at preschool = 4.89, SD= .70; M at adolescence = 16.44, SD= .66; M at transition to adulthood = 19.36, SD= .76; and M at early adulthood = 27.67, SD= .75) were the firstborn children of African American teenage mothers who gave birth in Baltimore in the 1960s. Analyses examined the antecedents and correlates of age of entry into employment and stability of employment during adolescence. The associations of adolescent work experiences with subsequent adult education and employment outcomes also were considered. Findings indicate that among this sample of low‐income, African American youth, those who repeated a grade in school during middle childhood were more likely to enter the workforce at later ages than their peers who did not repeat a grade. The small subset of adolescents who never worked (n= 12) appear to be markedly more disadvantaged than their peers who worked. At the transition to adulthood, adolescents who entered the workforce earlier were more likely to complete high school than their peers. In addition, stable employment during the adolescent years had more beneficial effects on young men's chances of attending college than young women's postsecondary education. This pattern of findings is consistent with ethnographic accounts of adolescent employment among poor, minority, urban youth.     

No Compelling Evidence That Newborns Imitate Oral Gestures

Newborns (N = 83) were presented with 3 conditions, each for 160 sec: tongue protrusion (TP), mouth opening (MO), and control (CO). In TP and MO, a female model alternated between demonstrating the gesture for 20 sec and presenting a passive, motionless face for 20 sec. In CO, she presented a passive face in both the “demonstration” and “passive” intervals. The participants' eyes were more widely open in the demonstration intervals of TP and MO than in the passive intervals, indicating that they were attending to the gestures. In TP, the participants produced more TP responses than MO responses, but in MO there was no effect, undermining the neonatal imitation hypothesis.     

Welfare and Work: Complementary Strategies forLow‐Income Women?

We examine the effects of mothers' strategies of combining employment and welfare receipt during the first 3 years of their child's life on the child's cognitive development, behavior problems, and home learning environment at ages 5 to 6. We compare the child outcomes of those mothers who were continuously employed and received no welfare with (a) those who worked some or all of the 3 years and also received public assistance and (b) those who were totally dependent on public assistance. We studied children in single‐parent families (N= 1271 ) living below 200% of the poverty threshold using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—Child Supplement. No negative association was found on most child outcomes with a mother's employment whether or not it was combined with public assistance. However, mothers' not working at all and receiving financial support solely from AFDC was associated with negative child outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the possible effects of the new welfare laws on families and young children.     

Perceived Fairness and Compliance With Child Support Obligations

This paper examines whether perceptions of fairness motivate fathers to pay child support and whether perceptions of fairness interact with routine income withholding in collecting payments. Using a study of 392 nonresident fathers who filed for divorce between 1986 and 1988 in the state of Wisconsin, I found that both perceived fairness and income withholding increase fathers' compliance with child support obligations. The effects of these two strategies on compliance are not additive, however. If fathers think their child support orders are fair, the use of routine income withholding does not add to compliance.     

Projection‐Based Statistical Inference in Linear Structural Models with Possibly Weak Instruments

It is well known that standard asymptotic theory is not applicable or is very unreliable in models with identification problems or weak instruments. One possible way out consists of using a variant of the Anderson–Rubin ((1949), AR) procedure. The latter allows one to build exact tests and confidence sets only for the full vector of the coefficients of the endogenous explanatory variables in a structural equation, but not for individual coefficients. This problem may in principle be overcome by using projection methods (Dufour (1997), Dufour and Jasiak (2001)). At first sight, however, this technique requires the application of costly numerical algorithms. In this paper, we give a general necessary and sufficient condition that allows one to check whether an AR‐type confidence set is bounded. Furthermore, we provide an analytic solution to the problem of building projection‐based confidence sets from AR‐type confidence sets. The latter involves the geometric properties of “quadrics” and can be viewed as an extension of usual confidence intervals and ellipsoids. Only least squares techniques are needed to build the confidence intervals.