Navigating employability from the bottom up

ABSTRACT

Research focusing on young people’s career trajectories has emphasised ‘graduate employability’ with much less attention being afforded to the employability strategies used by disadvantaged youth, including the social, political and labour market contexts in which these emerge. This study explores how young people enrolled in entry-level, vocational training courses in Australia attempt to enhance their employability. Interviews explored perceptions of individual employability, the strategies utilised to improve employability, and the economic, personal and employment consequences of these strategies. Three main employability strategies were identified: gaining qualifications to meet employment expectations; securing work experience in a competitive labour market; and addressing economic and social challenges to secure and sustain employment. The study reveals how the dominant narratives of employability in education and employment policy are misaligned with the economic, social and labour market challenges faced by disadvantaged job-seekers with respect to notions of career and ‘fit’ between the individual and the labour market. Policy responses need to take account of the diverse ‘bottom up’ experiences and circumstances of different cohorts of young people.     

A Comparison of Two Data Analysis Training Methods for Paraprofessionals in an Educational Setting

Analyzing and using student educational data to guide instructional programming is a critical staff skill to ensure quality programming based on applied behavior analysis. We compared two training methods to teach staff to use rules to analyze graphed educational data to enact program changes: didactic instruction and behavioral skills training using direct practice. Participants showed improvements in verbally identifying data patterns using simulated data; however, participants in the latter group were also effective using actual student data. The lack of correspondence between rule identification and rule following challenges the assumption that an individual’s ability to identify rules predicts actual performance.     

Interorganizational network portfolios of nonprofit organizations: Implications for collaboration management

Increasingly, nonprofit organizations engage in interorganizational collaboration to address large‐scale social problems. Scholarship typically focuses on the characteristics of both within‐sector and cross‐sector partnerships of two collaborating organizations or all partnering organizations involved in a collaboration, but we know little about the patterns of interorganizational relationships that single nonprofit organizations maintain. This research draws upon surveys from 452 nonprofits and introduces nonprofit network portfolios, which we define as the number, integration, intensity, and duration of relationships that nonprofits purposefully develop with other organizations. Using 12 network measures, Ward cluster analysis revealed three distinct network portfolios: restricted within‐sector (n = 319, 70.58%), which included limited collaboration and prioritized within‐sector partnerships; robust within‐sector (n = 80, 17.70%), which included more nonprofit partnerships than restricted within‐sector portfolios; and cross‐sector (n = 53, 11.72%), which had a rich assemblage of integrative partnerships with nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies. Further, nonprofits that maintained each type of portfolio differed in their revenue and social mission, suggesting these factors are related to the types of collaboration that nonprofits maintain. This study makes contributions to existing research on interorganizational networks and cross‐sector collaboration and suggests practical and policy implications for nonprofit network management.     

Probing infants’ sensitivity to pupil size when viewing eyes

Sensitive responding to eye cues plays a key role in human social interactions. Pupil size provides subtle cues regarding a social interaction partner's arousal states. The current study assessed infants’ sensitivity to and preference for differences in pupil size. Specifically, we examined White 14-month-old infants’ pupillary responses when viewing own-race and other-race (Asian) eyes with dilating, constricting, and static medium-sized pupils. Our results show that, independent of race, infants’ pupils dilated more when viewing eyes with dynamically changing (dilating and constricting) pupils than when viewing eyes with non-changing, static, and medium-sized pupils. We also measured infants’ looking preferences, showing that, independent of race, infants preferentially attended to eyes with dilated pupils. Moreover, our results show that infants orient more quickly to pupillary changes in own-race eyes than in other-race eyes. These findings demonstrate that infants detect, but do not mimic, changes in pupil size in others and show a preference for eyes with dilated pupils.     

Are Life Insurance Holdings Related to Financial Vulnerabilities?

Using the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances and an elaborate life-cycle model, we quantify the potential financial impact of each individual's death on his or her survivors and measure the degree to which life insurance moderates these consequences. Life insurance is essentially uncorrelated with financial vulnerability at every stage of the life cycle. As a result, the impact of insurance among at-risk households is modest, and substantial uninsured vulnerabilities are widespread, particularly among younger couples. We also identify a systematic gender bias: For any given level of financial vulnerability, couples provide significantly more protection for wives than for husbands. (JEL D10 , G22 )     

Children's Coping with Marital Conflict: The Role of Conflict Expression and Gender

This study compared boys’ and girls’ coping responses to videotaped representations of marital conflict that varied in conflict content, tactic, and the gender of the parent engaging in conflict behaviour. Participants were 398 children (208 boys, 190 girls) aged 12–13 years old living in the United Kingdom. Child‐related conflict exchanges characterized by hostile behaviour (e.g., physical aggression) elicited greater mediation efforts by children. Children were more likely to mediate father‐enacted conflict. Girls, relative to boys, endorsed more mediation to fathers’ physical aggression and mothers’ pursuit of an issue and were more avoiding of mothers’ physical aggression and threats to intactness of the family. Findings underscore the importance of considering parent and child gender in determining children’s coping efforts in the context of interparental conflict.     

Why Rules for Risk Communication Are Not Enough: A Problem-Solving Approach to Risk Communication

Current work on risk communication offers practitioners helpful guidelines and rules such as "speak clearly" and "speak with compassion." While important, these guidelines have limitations. They offer practitioners and scholars little aid in determining why a communication encounter failed. Also, they do not help practitioners anticipate and overcome likely difficulties in future risk situations, nor can they help locate information about how to reduce these difficulties. To overcome the limitations of rule-based approaches to risk communication, this paper describes a diagnostic or problem-solving approach. This approach maintains that instead of rules, people need bases for anticipating likely obstacles to effective communication and selecting approaches that reduce these difficulties. Research on building trust, increasing awareness, deepening comprehension, gaining agreement, and motivating action is available in fields such as communication, educational psychology, science education, marketing, counseling, negotiation, and disaster response. This paper describes a framework that assists scholars and practitioners in: (a) identifying communication goals; (b) determining principal obstacles to those goals; and (c) selecting research-based methods for overcoming or minimizing these difficulties and achieving communication objectives.     

What Do Urban Black Mothers Tell Their Adolescents About Alcohol and Other Drugs?

This study utilized qualitative content analysis to examine messages conveyed about alcohol and other drugs by urban Black mothers (N = 130) with a personal, familial, or personal and familial history of problematic substance use to younger and older adolescents (M = 15.2 years). Data from a two‐cohort longitudinal sample revealed considerable similarity in themes across the younger and older cohorts. Results suggest Black mothers offer more messages of information and advice to younger adolescents, while communicating directives related to use to older adolescents.