Family Versus Individual Therapy: Impact On Discrepancies Between Parents’ And Adolescents’ Perceptions Over Time

This study examined the degree of disagreement between runaway adolescents and their primary caretakers, defined as informant discrepancies, on their view of their family. How these discrepancies changed over time and whether family therapy or individual therapy could impact that change were also explored. The current sample (N = 179 dyads) included adolescent substance abusers residing in a runaway shelter and their primary caretakers. Adolescent gender was examined as a correlate of change, and treatment attendance was controlled. The intraclass correlation coefficient was used to measure discrepancies between the individuals within a dyad. Results showed that among those receiving family therapy, but not individual therapy, informant discrepancies decreased significantly over time. Additionally, dyads with a male adolescent showed a significantly slower rate of improvement in discrepancy scores across time compared with dyads with a female adolescent. Previous research indicates that lower levels of discrepant perceptions are associated with better individual and relationship functioning. Therefore, this study’s findings support family therapy as superior to individual therapy for addressing parent–child discrepancies––possibly through its focus on improving family communication, perspective taking, and understanding.     

Begging the questions: producing Shakespeare for post‐apartheid South African schools

This paper examines some of the ways ‘Shakespeare’ is functioning in the post‐apartheid education system. It is not based on education or textbook theory. Rather, it seeks to test some of the assertions of new historicist and cultural materialist theories by analysing the ideological work performed by editions of Macbeth produced for post‐apartheid schools. It asks questions about Shakespeare in the South African school classroom, and about the relationship of work produced in universities to the broader educational, and cultural, context.     

Examining the Antecedents of U.S. Nonmarital Fatherhood

Despite the dramatic rise in U.S. nonmarital childbearing in recent decades, limited attention has been paid to factors affecting nonmarital fatherhood (beyond studies of young fathers). In this article, we use data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort to examine the antecedents of nonmarital fatherhood, as compared to marital fatherhood. Overall, we find the strongest support across both data sets for education and race/ethnicity as key predictors of having a nonmarital first birth, consistent with prior literature about women’s nonmarital childbearing and about men’s early/teenage fatherhood. Education is inversely related to the risk of nonmarital fatherhood, and minority (especially black) men are much more likely to have a child outside of marriage than white men. We find little evidence that employment predicts nonmarital fertility, although it does strongly (and positively) predict marital fertility. High predicted earnings are also associated with a greater likelihood of marital childbearing but with a lower likelihood of nonmarital childbearing. Given the socioeconomic disadvantage associated with nonmarital fatherhood, this research suggests that nonmarital fatherhood may be an important aspect of growing U.S. inequality and stratification both within and across generations.     

Change agents or defending the status quo? How senior leaders frame workplace gender equality

Senior leaders are usually understood to be ideally positioned to drive the organizational changes needed to promote workplace gender equality. Yet seniority also influences leaders' values and attitudes, and how they interpret evidence of inequalities, determine organizational priorities, and design and implement remedies. This article examines leaders' perceptions of workplace gender equality using system justification theory to explain survey data from Australia's public sector (n = 2292). Multivariate analysis indicates that male and female leaders more positively rate the gender equality climate in their agencies, compared with lower-level staff, and that male leaders show most propensity to defend the status quo. Findings call into question the effectiveness of change strategies that rely on leadership and buy-in of those whose privilege is embedded in existing arrangements, and problematize dominant organizational approaches casting senior leaders as effective change agents for gender equality. The article helps to explain gendered power dynamics, which produce and sustain organizational inequalities and make workplace equality so hard to achieve, and points to ways to strengthen practical approaches to promote equality in organizations.     

Child-Report Data and Assessment of the Social Environment in Schools

OBJECTIVES: This study tested the quality of data collected with the online ESSP for Children from a diverse sample of 1,172 third through fifth graders. METHODS: Mplus confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) procedures for ordinal and clustered data were used. RESULTS: Of 80 original items, 61 loaded on 13 dimensions in a first-order model that had good fit in three random subsamples. Children in grades 3 through 5 may not be reliable reporters about neighborhood adults' caring. However, 12 statistically sound and independent dimensions related to school, peers, family, and well-being were obtained. CONCLUSIONS: The ESSP for Children provides school staff with quality data to use in conjunction with family and teacher ESSP data to guide intervention choices in schools.     

Disrupting the status quo: exploring culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies for young diverse learners

This article highlights four qualitative studies that examine young diverse populations (i.e. middle-class African-American learners, Latinx immigrant children, emergent bilingual writers, and teachers of low-socioeconomic African-American learners) using culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies as our theoretical lens. The research questions are (1) What are the features of classrooms that support culturally sustaining learning for young children? (2) What social, cultural, and linguistic resources do learners draw upon when engaging in culturally sustaining spaces? Findings in this paper indicate that (a) children need critical safe spaces to foster CSP (b) children draw knowledge from varied resources and (c) teachers’ must be able to navigate policies to implement practices that utilize students’ cultural referents.     

The Effects of a Family Systems Intervention on Co‐Occurring Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors of Children with Substance Abusing Mothers: A Latent Transition Analysis

Children of substance abusing parents are at heightened risk to develop problem behaviors, yet little is known about the co‐occurring patterns of internalizing and externalizing behaviors among this population. With 183 children (M age = 11.54 years, SD = 2.55, range 8–16) whose mothers were diagnosed with a substance use disorder, the current study identified subgroups/classes of children that were clinically distinct in their co‐occurring patterns of internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and examined how children in different clinical subgroups responded to a family systems intervention. Latent class analyses identified four classes of internalizing and externalizing behaviors: internalizing only, externalizing only, comorbid, and normative. Latent transition analyses showed that participation in family systems therapy resulted in an increased likelihood of transitioning from the externalizing class at baseline to the normative class at 18 months post‐baseline, and from the comorbid class at baseline to the internalizing class at 18 months post‐baseline as well. The findings support the effectiveness of family systems therapy in interrupting the stability of children's problem behaviors and improving children's behavioral outcomes.     

The Roles of Love and Happiness in Divorce Decision Making

Little is known about divorce decision making, the process of deciding whether to divorce when a marriage is distressed. The focus of this qualitative study was to explore the roles of love and happiness—two Western ideals that govern contemporary marital processes—in divorce decision making. Married participants (N = 30) with recent thoughts about divorce were interviewed about their conceptions of love and happiness in their decision-making processes. The resulting categories for love included: (a) importance of love, (b) change over time, and (c) marital love. The categories for happiness included: (a) fluidity of happiness and (b) balancing happiness. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Comprehensive assessment of youth violence in five Caribbean countries: Gender and age differences

Differences in gender and age have been established in the context of crime, violence, and prevalence of risk and protective factors. These studies are often notable only in the Western Hemisphere. Despite growth in crime and violence in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), relatively little understanding of violence in CARICOM member states exists. In light of these concerns, the major purposes of this study include: (1) comprehensively assessing the scope of the four behaviors (i.e., engagement, victimization, witness, and report) in relation to violence and youth’s perceptions of risk and protective factors in family and school domains, and (2) examining how they differ by youth’s gender and age. This study draws on assessment data on youth violence in five CARICOM Member States: Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago using a completed 51-item quantitative questionnaire from approximately 512 students. The results suggest that violence engagement, victimization, witness, and report significantly differed by gender and age. Male students were more likely to engage in violence, but less likely to report such violence to adults. Similarly, older students reported that they were more likely to engage in and witness violence. For risk and protective factors, female students reported significantly higher scores on domestic violence, whereas male students had higher scores on the access to drugs/weapons. Older students also tended to report higher levels of some school risk factors and lower levels of some protective factors in both family and school.