Inclusive Governance and “Minority” Groups: The Role of the Third Sector in Wales

Following the establishment of a national legislature in Wales in 1999 the third sector has entered into a pioneering cross-sectoral partnership with the Welsh government. This paper presents the results of a research project that has studied the new structures of devolved governance through the expectations and participation of voluntary organizations representing three marginalized or minority groupings: women, disabled people, and those from an ethnic minority background. The findings reveal that despite varying levels of expectation expressed by minority voluntary groups, active engagement of minority groups in policy making has been a feature of the Assembly's first months. Nevertheless, formidable challenges face both sectoral partners in the new system of governance, not least in creating organizational structures that facilitate partnership working in the devolved polity.     

‘Who should do the caring’? Involved fatherhood and ambivalent gendered moral rationalities among cohabiting/married irish parents

Drawing on qualitative couple interviews with cohabiting/married mothers and fathers, this paper examines accounts of involved fatherhood in contemporary Ireland. It shows that while the ideal of fathers as heavily involved in day-to-day parenting is widespread, the reality is somewhat different – and this despite increased participation of Irish mothers in the labour market. Given this mismatch between fatherhood ideals and realities, it begs the question: how do we account for this inequitable division of family work? Gender-differentiated parenting experiences, I argue, are strongly influenced by ambivalent attitudes on the part of both fathers and mothers. I argue that mothers draw on ‘primarily mother’ moral rationalities that associates ‘good’ mothering with large amounts of time in direct provision of childcare, while fathers display a ‘primarily worker’ rationality associated with strong commitment to the labour market. It is the clash of these contrasting normative societal demands that gives rise to a pervasive sense of ambivalence about ‘who should do the caring’. This ambivalence, I demonstrate, is especially prominent in single-income families where the father is the sole breadwinner. In dual-income families, several parents go some distance towards reconciling these contradictory claims, these competing moral discourses.     

Evaluation of free to grow: head start partnerships to promote substance-free communities

Free to Grow: Head Start Partnerships to Promote Substance-free Communities (FTG) was a national initiative in which local Head Start (HS) agencies, in partnership with other community organizations, implemented a mix of evidence-based family-strengthening and community-strengthening strategies. The evaluation of FTG used a quasi-experimental design to compare 14 communities that participated in the FTG intervention with 14 matched comparison communities. Telephone surveys were conducted with two cohorts of the primary caregivers of children in HS at baseline and then annually for 2 years. The survey was also administered to repeated cross-sectional samples of primary caregivers of young children who were not enrolled in HS. No consistent evidence was found in changes in family functioning or neighborhood conditions when the 14 FTG sites were compared to 14 matched sites. However, caregivers of young children who were not in HS in three high-implementing FTG sites showed evidence of improvements in neighborhood organization, neighborhood norms against substance abuse, and child disciplinary practices. Results provide highly limited support for the concept that family and neighborhood conditions that are likely to affect child development and well-being can be changed through organized efforts implemented by local HS programs.     

Personal and Aggregate Unemployment and Psychological Symptoms

Four different types of individual-level unemployment experiences were studied in relation to psychological symptoms: (1) current unemployment following a recent involuntary job loss, (2) unemployment among students or homemakers, (3) reemployment after recent job loss, and (4) either voluntary or long-term (greater than 6 months) unemployment. Aggregate unemployment (the prevailing rate in the surveyed community) was also studied, both alone and in interaction with each of the four individual-level unemployment conditions. These five variables were each related positively to psychological symptoms, whether measured as a continuous variable or as a dichotomous variable simulating a case/non- case split, and controlling for the usual demographic variables and various other stressful life events. Little evidence was found for interactions of the unemployment conditions with aggregate unemployment or with potential moderators. A small panel study provided a partial longitudinal check for several of these cross-sectional findings. The findings are discussed in terms of public policy options.     

Estimation of the Joint Risk from Multiple-Compound Exposure Based on Single-Compound Experiments

In the absence of data from multiple-compound exposure experiments, the health risk from exposure to a mixture of chemical carcinogens is generally based on the results of the individual single-compound experiments. A procedure to obtain an upper confidence limit on the total risk is proposed under the assumption that total risk for the mixture is additive. It is shown that the current practice of simply summing the individual upper-confidence-limit risk estimates as the upper-confidence-limit estimate on the total excess risk of the mixture may overestimate the true upper bound. In general, if the individual upper-confidence-limit risk estimates are on the same order of magnitude, the proposed method gives a smaller upper-confidence-limit risk estimate than the estimate based on summing the individual upper-confidence-limit estimates; the difference increases as the number of carcinogenic components increases.