Mental health literacy beliefs. A comparison of psychiatric trained nurses and enrolled nurses in Singapore

The views of mental health professionals may influence diagnosis and management options. This study reports nurses' views about the management of three common psychiatric disorders--schizophrenia, depression, and mania. Results demonstrate the effect of greater psychiatric education and training, received by psychiatric trained nurses, on mental health literacy.     

Exploring the underlying factors inducing design changes during building production

Although design changes is a significant inhibiting factor to schedule management and cost control in building projects globally, however, the reasons remain largely unknown, and the construction industry is unable to manage the problem effectively. A triangulated approach was employed where 39 reasons were first explored through semi-structured interviews with experienced practitioners. Subsequently, a national survey was used to rank the reasons. ‘Value engineering’, ‘lack of coordination among various professional consultants’ and ‘change of requirement’ ranked the highest. Next, exploratory factor analysis revealed eight underlying factors. Finally, the influence of these manifested factors was validated statistically using partial least squares based structural equation modelling. The three most critical factors found are ‘competency of project team', ‘quality and workmanship’, and ‘site constraints and safety consideration’. This paper contributes to the development of new underlying factors inducing design changes, which largely explain design changes as well as enable practitioners and researchers to devise effective preventive measures in controlling design changes in building projects.     

Parental Self‐Efficacy for Reducing the Risk of Adolescent Depression and Anxiety: Scale Development and Validation

Burgeoning research suggests that parents can reduce the risk of anxiety and depression in their adolescents and that parental self‐efficacy (PSE) may be related to parental risk and protective factors for these disorders. As there are currently no measures available to assess PSE in relation to parenting behaviors that may reduce adolescent risk for depression and anxiety, we developed and validated a measure of PSE, the Parental Self‐Efficacy Scale (PSES). Using a sample of 359 parents and 332 adolescents (aged 12–15), the PSES was found to have high reliability, confirmatory factor analysis supported its validity, and most of the hypothesized relationships between the PSES and other measures of parenting practices and adolescent depressive and anxiety symptoms were supported.     

Strategic Government Spending in South Korea and Taiwan: Lessons for Emergent Democracies*

Objectives. How is government spending used strategically in South Korea and Taiwan? As nations generally considered to have weathered democratization, government allocations in South Korea and Taiwan are instructive on how spending may be used strategically without undermining democratization. Methods. The similar sociocultural, historical, political, and economic experiences of the two nations underlie a most‐similar‐systems approach to study how their differences influence diversity in strategic spending and, correspondingly, political outcomes such as size of the government party in the legislature. This article evaluates defense and civilian expenditures for South Korea and Taiwan from 1975 to 2006. Results. Three results are interesting. First, different elections—legislative elections in South Korea, presidential elections in Taiwan—lead to increases in spending. Second, in both nations, defense spending increases in election years but not social spending; however, defense spending benefits the government‐party in the legislature in South Korea but not in Taiwan. Third, when the strategic uses of spending are accounted for, democratization does not directly affect allocations. Conclusions. These results explicate that government spending is a viable resource for party building in new democracies; however, the results also underscore that governing parties in new democracies benefit from spending only insofar as it is used to build the nation's or party's strengths—not undermine the opposition—under competitive elections.     

Becoming independent: political participation and youth transitions in the Scottish referendum

Sociological debates on youth engagement with electoral politics play out against a backdrop of supposed ‘decline’ in civic participation (e.g. Putnam 2000 , Norris, 2011 ), in turn contextualized by theories of individualization in ‘late’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity (Beck, Giddens). However, the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum catalysed remarkably high levels of voter turnout among this youngest group, and was accompanied by apparently ongoing political engagement. We explored this engagement among a strategic sample of young ‘Yes’ voters, in the immediate aftermath of this exceptional political event. Analysis of qualitative interview data generated an unanticipated finding; that interviewees narrated their political engagement biographically, articulated their referendum participation reflexively, and located their new political ideas, allegiances and actions in the context of their own transitions to ‘independent’ adulthood. This inspired us to rethink young people's political engagement in relation to youth transitions. Doing so enables a synthesis of divergent strands in the sociology of youth, and offers new insights into the combinations of ‘personal’ agentic and ‘political’ structural factors involved in young people's politicization.     

Young Australians' labour market engagement and job aspiration in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

Young people tend to bear the brunt of adverse employment consequences of a crisis due mainly to the precarious nature of their job and their over-representation among jobseekers who are having to find employment when jobs are scarce. Using quarterly welfare payment data for the period 2019–2021 from the Department of Social Services, we noted a marked increase in the percentage of 16- to 21-year-olds who received youth allowance (other) payments. While a greater proportion of Indigenous youth than non-Indigenous youth received the payments from 2019 to 2021, the gap widened following the outbreak of the pandemic. Further, applying regression analysis to data from the 2019 and 2020 waves of the 2015 Cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth (LSAY), we find no statistically significant change in individual-level labour force status between 2019 and 2020. However, pandemic-induced labour market crises appear to have been associated with reduced work hours, heightened career concerns and sustained nonemployment, where potential impacts are larger among traditionally vulnerable youth groups such as female, Indigenous and overseas-born young persons. The study highlights the need for recognising the intersectionality of youth and other forms of identity (such as gender, Indigenous status and nativity) while designing labour market policies.     

Maternal Positive and Negative Interaction Behaviors and Early Adolescents' Depressive Symptoms: Adolescent Emotion Regulation as a Mediator

This study examined the relation between mothers' positive and negative interaction behaviors during mother–child interactions and the emotion regulation (ER) and depressive symptoms of their adolescent offspring. Event‐planning (EPI) and problem‐solving interactions (PSI) were observed in 163 mother–adolescent dyads, and adolescents also provided a self‐report of ER responses and depressive symptoms. Sequential analyses of mother–adolescent behaviors during the interaction tasks indicated that adolescents with more depressive symptoms were more likely to reciprocate their mothers' negative affective behaviors. Adolescents whose mothers displayed less positivity and more negativity (i.e., less frequent positive and more frequent negative behaviors) during the EPI displayed more emotionally dysregulated behaviors in the PSI and reported more frequent maladaptive ER responses. Adolescents whose mothers behaved negatively toward them more frequently during mother–adolescent interactions also reported more depressive symptoms. The frequency with which adolescents engage in maladaptive ER responses mediated the association between maternal negativity and adolescents' concurrent depressive symptoms.     

Cultivating Interest and Competency in Gerontological Social Work: Opportunities for Undergraduate Education

Undergraduate social work programs are well-positioned to recruit students to gerontology, but little is known about how well curricular activities help foster students' commitment to the field. This study considers whether a small group of undergraduate students' interactions with older adults positively impacts students' plans to work with older adults; perceptions of skills; and feelings of comfort and competency in working with older adults. Experiences from this study suggest that experiential learning can positively impact students' perceptions of work with older adults, but may not be enough to draw students to the field. Implications for undergraduate education are discussed.     

‘The Anarchists' World Cup’: Respectable Protest and Media Panics

In 2005 225,000 people marched through Edinburgh enjoining the G8 to ‘Make Poverty History’. The coalition's own assessment of their campaign highlighted the importance of media by focusing on the extent of media coverage. Media outlets, however, have their own agendas. Detailed analysis of newspaper coverage preceding the G8 Summit suggests a disjuncture between campaign objectives and media frames. This paper explores how far newspaper accounts of G8-related protests were ‘framed’ in terms of social movement aims, and how far in terms of anticipated violence. Our findings lead us to caution against an uncritical equation of ‘coverage’ and ‘success’, offering a more nuanced account of the interplay between social movements and media.