Assessment of issues facing immigrant and refugee families

This article identifies the different problems immigrants and refugees face in the United States, especially socioeconomic and psychosocial concerns that often relate to the experience of migration. Traditional familial roles and responsibilities are frequently challenged, exacerbated by sociocultural differences and inadequate understandings between the new arrivals and the host country. Essential in assessments of immigrant and refugee families is evaluating resources for social, economic, and cultural integration; discriminating between realistic and unrealistic expectations; evaluating families' problem-solving abilities; exploring family functioning within the context of heritage; identifying the transferability of work skills; and gauging families' learning capabilities and motivation for adaptation.     

Infant Preferences for Structural and Prosodic Properties of Infant‐Directed Speech in the Second Year of Life

While a large literature discusses young infants' preference for an infant‐directed speaking style, few studies have explored preferences after the first year. The present work compares infants' preference for two different properties of IDS speech: prosodic changes (primarily pitch and pitch variability) and structural properties (utterance length; lexical repetition). We found that both 12‐ and 16‐month‐old infants continued to prefer listening to speech with the prosodic properties of IDS, but neither age showed any preference for speech with the lexical repetition and short utterances typical of IDS.     

Work Opportunities in a Non-Traditional Setting for Women Exiting Welfare: A Case Study

The purpose of this research is to explore key issues regarding the need to provide jobs for women who are making the transition from welfare to wage work. A traditionally male-dominated industry, the secondary wood products industry, in a ten-parish rural region in northern Louisiana is used as a case study. One goal of the project is to explore barriers to expanding job opportunities for women in this industry, which is located in an economically disadvantaged region of the state. In-depth personal interviews were conducted with employers and business owners in this industry, and focus group discussions were conducted among employees at selected sites. Potential barriers to employing women in this industry are discussed, and recommendations for reducing barriers are made.     

The Relationship Between Perceived Interparental Conflict and Malaysian Young Adults' Attitudes Toward Divorce

In the context of an upward trend in divorce rates in Malaysia, this article explores the relationship between Malaysian young adults' perceptions of interparental conflict and their own attitudes toward divorce. Two questionnaires were administered to 160 young adults between 18 and 30 years old: the Attitude Towards Divorce Scale and the Perceptions of Interparental Conflict?Intensity/Frequency Scale. A positive relationship was found between perceived intensity and frequency of interparent conflict and attitudes toward divorce in males and females, respectively; however, the associations were weak. Future investigations of divorce need to take into consideration both the cultural factors that are influential within a society and how they shape gender norms within that population to gain a greater understanding of this relationship. Such investigations will increase the understanding of non-Western culture's unique interaction between attitudes and divorce, thus potentially aiding future efforts to strengthen marriages and families.     

Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado

Following is an interview with Erin Segal, group worker and coauthor of Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado (Memories of our Past), a multivocal memoir about growing up in El Salvador and growing old in Washington DC, which emerged from a storytelling group at Mary’s Center’s Bernice Fonteneau Senior Wellness Center. The group members and coauthors are Angela Celaya, Sergio Guzmán, Jose Lovos, and Gloria Revelo. Using alternating English-language stanzas, the book expresses the life stories of four senior citizens and includes the images of their photographs and objects as well as illustrations by the book designer Julie Cho. Segal and Cho are cofounders of Thick Press. All profit from this book will go to St. Jude Children’s Hospital.     

A Model for Implementing an Evidence-Based Practice in Student Fieldwork Placements: Barriers and Facilitators to the Use of “SBIRT”

ABSTRACT

This article reports on focus group data analysis that was used to understand initial, largely positive outcomes from a university-based initiative to disseminate and implement an evidence-based practice (EBP)—Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment for Substance Use (SBIRT)—into student fieldwork placements, which are usual care social work settings. Focus groups were conducted with three groups of stakeholders involved in the ongoing project: social work department faculty (n = 10), bachelor- and master-level social work students (n = 8), and social work fieldwork instructors (n = 6). Dimensional analysis of the focus group data yielded results indicating that dissemination and implementation of SBIRT was influenced by agency- and school-level factors and perceived fit between the EBP and individual professional identity, intrapersonal characteristics, and timing. The resulting model, developed through the focus group analysis, is offered and shows how these factors interacted and affected training, supervision, and use of the EBP. The model provides social work educational programs and agencies a working tool for diagnosing and proactively addressing barriers and breakdowns in the EBP implementation process. Future research that tests the model as a diagnostic tool and generates knowledge about its influence in developing competent evidence-based practitioners is indicated. Future focus groups in relation to this initiative are needed to better understand these barriers and facilitators in the EBP implementation process and their critical roles in the process of translating SBIRT into standard social work practice.     

Dynamic Mechanism Design: A Myersonian Approach

We study mechanism design in dynamic quasilinear environments where private information arrives over time and decisions are made over multiple periods. We make three contributions. First, we provide a necessary condition for incentive compatibility that takes the form of an envelope formula for the derivative of an agent's equilibrium expected payoff with respect to his current type. It combines the familiar marginal effect of types on payoffs with novel marginal effects of the current type on future ones that are captured by “impulse response functions.” The formula yields an expression for dynamic virtual surplus that is instrumental to the design of optimal mechanisms and to the study of distortions under such mechanisms. Second, we characterize the transfers that satisfy the envelope formula and establish a sense in which they are pinned down by the allocation rule (“revenue equivalence”). Third, we characterize perfect Bayesian equilibrium‐implementable allocation rules in Markov environments, which yields tractable sufficient conditions that facilitate novel applications. We illustrate the results by applying them to the design of optimal mechanisms for the sale of experience goods (“bandit auctions”).     

Investing to Protect Our Children: Using Economics to Derive an Evidence‐based Strategy

Child abuse and neglect are global problems that affect over 25 per cent of children and have serious health, social and economic consequences. Government and other agencies are heavily committed to the provision of services to address the consequences of abuse and neglect. In a climate of scarce resources, there is increasing interest in developing cost‐effective strategies to prevent child maltreatment. Economic evaluation in the context of formal ‘priority setting’ can contribute to the development of an efficient child protection strategy and at the same time develop the arguments to support an increased investment in the prevention of child maltreatment. Key challenges arise from incompleteness of the evidence base of effective interventions and the considerable complexity of the cross‐portfolio effects. The latter has resulted in the widespread failure to capture the full range of impacts, most notably intergenerational effects, quality of life and mortality. This means the benefits of investing in effective preventive strategies to address child maltreatment will be underestimated and too few resources allocated to this important task. Adoption of the proposed priority‐setting framework and translation into action are likely to reduce child maltreatment and associated harms for children at risk now and in the future. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Citing Literature

Number of times cited: 7

• Inga Wagenknecht, Uta Meier-Gräwe and Ute Ziegenhain , Kosten und Nutzen Früher Hilfen - aktuelle Erkenntnisse und zukünftiger Forschungsbedarf/ Economic efficiency of early intervention – current findings and future need for research , Kindesmisshandlung und -vernachlässigung , 18 , 1 , (10) , (2015) . Crossref
• Nicole RS Boyer, Kathleen A Boyd, Fiona Turner-Halliday, Nicholas Watson and Helen Minnis , Examining the feasibility of an economic analysis of dyadic developmental psychotherapy for children with maltreatment associated psychiatric problems in the United Kingdom , BMC Psychiatry , 14 , 1 , (2014) . Crossref
• Madeleine Stevens, Lucy Harris, Megan Ellis, Crispin Day and Jennifer Beecham , Investigating changes in use of services by high‐need families following the Helping Families Programme, an innovative parenting intervention for children with severe and persistent conduct problems , Child and Adolescent Mental Health , 19 , 3 , (185-191) , (2013) . Wiley Online Library
• Madeleine Stevens , The cost-effectiveness of UK parenting programmes for preventing children's behaviour problems - a review of the evidence , Child & Family Social Work , 19 , 1 , (109) , (2014) . Crossref
• Sarah Skeen and Mark Tomlinson , A public health approach to preventing child abuse in low- and middle-income countries: A call for action , International Journal of Psychology , 48 , 2 , (108) , (2013) . Crossref
• Peter Sidebotham , Safeguarding in an Age of Austerity , Child Abuse Review , 21 , 5 , (313-317) , (2012) . Wiley Online Library
• , Public Health Approaches to Safeguarding Children , Child Abuse Review , 20 , 4 , (231-237) , (2011) . Wiley Online Library

Volume 20 , Issue 4 July/August 2011

Pages 274-289     

Conceptualizing social-ecological drivers of change in urban forest patches

Urban Ecosystems - We introduce a conceptual model of the urban forest patch as a complex social-ecological system, incorporating cross-scale interactions. We developed this model through an...