Diet of Florida coyotes in a protected wildland and suburban habitat

Coyotes (Canis latrans) arrived to Florida (USA) in the 1960s and are currently found throughout most of the state. The purpose of this study was to determine if the diet of Florida coyotes differed between suburban and wildland habitat types or across seasons. Fresh coyote fecal samples were collected from wildland and suburban habitats in Pinellas County, Florida (USA; 27°54′N, 82°41′W) from May 2005 to March 2007. Diet items in the 49 wildland and 71 suburban samples were identified to the lowest possible taxonomic level by gross morphological characteristics and medullary configurations of dorsal guard hairs. A Poisson regression was utilized to determine the main and interactive effects of habitat and season on the number of different food items per sample. Coyotes in the wildland habitat had greater diet diversity than suburban coyotes. In addition, anthropogenic waste was recovered over twice as often from coyote fecal samples collected in the suburban habitat. In the wildland habitat, vegetative matter (96%), Insecta (53%), and Rodentia (45%) were recovered most often, as opposed to berries (56%) and Lagomorpha (32%) in the suburban habitat. In both habitats, vegetative matter, berries, and Lagomorpha were recovered most often from coyote fecal samples, whereas Odocoileus virginianus, Lagomorpha, and berries varied the most between wet and dry seasons. This study suggests that as urbanization increases, diet diversity for the coyote will likely decrease and consumption of anthropogenic items will likely increase. As a result of this, human–coyote conflicts may become more common—particularly in counties, like Pinellas, that are undergoing urbanization.     

Towards an interactional approach to reflective practice in social work

Reflective practice is a key aspiration within social work; being a reflective practitioner is considered to be a foundational attribute of the social work professional. However, achieving reflective practice is not straightforward. Reflection is inevitably subject to issues of memory and recall, so that the recollection of a case is likely to differ in important ways from the original instance. Moreover, giving an account of an event to one's peers or supervisors involves aspects of justification and self-presentation that may emphasise selectively and ignore key details of the original event, whether through a process of conscious omission or subconscious forgetting. This article reports on a knowledge exchange project that sought to enhance criminal justice social workers’ reflective practice through the use of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method, an approach that is methodologically and theoretically grounded in the study of talk-in-interaction, drawing on video re-enactments of real encounters between practitioners and service users. We argue that by engaging collaboratively in this way, the practitioners and researchers learned a great deal about how practice in criminal justice social work is ‘done’ and also about the wider context within which criminal justice social work is practised.     

The importance of demographic analyses in state- and local-level policy evaluations: A case study analysis of property taxes in Texas,USA

The reluctance of policy-makers to incorporate detailed demographic analyses in policy analyses often means that population composition is ignored in state and local policy evaluations. This article uses standard demographic projection, standardization and rate decomposition techniques to examine the implications of changing population composition for the property tax revenue base of Texas. The authors find that if current socioeconomic differentials persist into the future, projected compositional changes in the household population of Texas will significantly impact property tax revenues. Thus revenue projections based on aggregate growth and current average property value would seriously overestimate future property tax revenues in Texas because changes in the composition of the population lead to disproportionate growth in households likely to live in lower valued housing unite. The results indicate that the continuing focus of state and local policy-makers on changes in population size alone may be ill-advised and demonstrate the increasing importance of local- and state-level demographic analysis in a period of increasing Federal devolution of service provision.     

The role of bears and bear ceremonialism in Navajo Orthodox traditional lifeway

The Navajos, who now number over 200,000 in population, are the largest, and one of the most culturally intact Indian tribes in North America. Reigning over a reservation of some 25,000 square miles in size, the Navajos, like many other tribal people have long respected and honored bears as being fellow “being” with whom they share the land. Because of the bears power, intelligence, acute senses, and physical features which closely resemble that of a human, they have also played a major role in Navajo tribal legends and ceremonialism. The purpose of this article is to briefly examine the place of bears and bear ceremonialism within the structure of traditional Navajo beliefs and religious practices.     

Development and immediate impact of a self-instruction curriculum for an adolescent indicated drug abuse prevention trial

This article describes the development and immediate impact of a self-instruction indicated drug abuse prevention program, Project Towards No Drug Abuse (TND). Self-instruction programming often is used to help youth that are at high risk for dropout and drug abuse to complete their high school education, and is a method of choice among educators at alternative high schools. This article describes the justification for the self-instruction program, keys to good programmed self-learning, and how a 12-session health educator delivered program was converted to a self-instruction format. In addition, the immediate impact of a 3-group experimental trial is presented. Health educator led, self-instruction, and standard care control conditions are compared on knowledge change, and the two program conditions are compared on process ratings. Self-instruction programming can be successfully adapted from a health educator-led format, though the lack of student group interaction in this modality may limit its receptivity among students.     

Informal mentoring and young adult employment

This study explores the role of informal mentoring (i.e., developing an important relationship with a non-parental adult) in the transition to full time employment among young adults (age 23–28). Multivariate analysis of the Add Health data reveals that mentoring is positively related to the likelihood of full time employment, and the relationship involves both selection and causation processes. Entrance into the world of work facilitates the development of mentoring relationships, especially among youth who identify work-related mentors after adolescence. These relationships have the potential for promoting attachment to the labor force. Mentoring relationships that develop outside of work settings and during adolescence have a positive impact on the odds of full time employment. The receipt of guidance and advice from mentors, as well as access to weak-tied mentoring relationships, teacher mentors, and friend mentors all contribute to the increased odds of employment in young adulthood. However, adolescent mentoring may be less effective among young women than it is among young men.     

Jokers wild: the importance of humour in the maintenance of organizational culture

Humour may have a number of different effects within organizations, but it is usually manifested in one of two major‘joke forms’: standardized/canned or situation/spontaneous. Using examples of each from fieldwork conducted in a large manufacturing bakery, it is argued that both forms depend for their effect on their appositeness to the‘joke in the social structure’Both forms share the capacity to enable the reversal, within the humorous framework, of problematic social relations, patterns of control, or customary mystifications. Humour may be used to create ambiguity or to promote closure: its impact on the organizational culture will depend on the extent to which the symbolic transformations achieved within its boundaries can be transposed into material,‘real-world’relationships.     

Parent and Child Therapy: An Attachment‐Based Intervention for Children With Challenging Problems

Parent and Child Therapy (PACT) is an attachment‐based intervention for children aged between 4 and 12 years old experiencing emotional and behavioural problems. It is appropriate for distressed parent—child relationships which have not responded to systemic family therapy. PACT seeks to reframe parent—child relationship distress using narrative techniques and experiential tasks based on the concept of supported looking. Therapy occurs in parallel for parent and child using a one‐way screen. PACT improves parents' reflective capacity and sensitivity, and for the child's sense of security in her primary attachment relationship. An outline of the four stages of PACT is presented along with a case study to illustrate the course of PACT. Finally, we discuss the dissemination of PACT within a busy child and adolescent mental health service and outline our plans for future outcome evaluation.     

The relative autonomy of the state and the origins of British welfare policy

This paper assesses the relative influence of organizational vs. class power in affecting the timing and the shape of the British welfare reforms of 1908–1911. Rather than viewing these reforms as either the outcome of the direct pressure of business or as an internal response from a newly bureaucratized state to solve social problems, this analysis finds more evidence for a perspective that emphasizes the more indirect, more mediated class biases inherent in the British state as setting the context within which action on welfare reform occurred. Specifically, I argue that state managers used their newly developed organizational capacity to shape the Liberal reforms according to their own purposes but these purposes were limited by several class-based factors. The historical conclusions point to a synthesis of the relative autonomy approaches to the capitalist state advanced in the neo-Marxist work of Poulantzas, Offe, and Block.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1988 meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.