FROM THE SANCTUARY TO THE SLAMMER: EXPLORING THE NARRATIVES OF EVANGELICAL PRISON MINISTRY WORKERS

Current survey research reveals that religious conservatives exhibit more punitive attitudes toward criminal offenders than their nonreligious and mainline counterparts. Despite the pervasiveness of conservative Protestant support for the punitive treatment of criminal offenders, evangelical-run prison ministry programs have proliferated in recent decades. This study uses in-depth interviews to examine the motivations of prison ministry workers. The narratives demonstrate that prison ministry workers embrace a distinctive orientation of compassion and, through sustained contact with inmates, they negotiate the tension between conservative religious values and their practical experiences working in prison ministry. From this overarching theme of compassion, three important subthemes emerged: (1) the calling of prison ministry, (2) special connections to the prison context, and (3) a sense of comfort and security with inmates. Overall, we observe how prison ministers negotiate two competing moral logics—judgment and compassion—in light of their religious convictions and experiences with inmate outreach.     

新闻框架的倾向性研究

美国媒介的自由主义神话使人们常常认为美国新闻记者是监督政府、捍卫民权的领袖,然而,这种媒介自由主义偏见却受到越来越多的质疑。美国主流媒体对儿童医疗保险计划报道的个案显示,新闻框架存在显著的倾向性。这种倾向性不仅表现为新闻偏见的简单正负二分,更彰显于谁是政策受益者、推理基础何在以及争论复杂性如何等三个不同的信息维度。美国政治文化中的个人主义,相对单纯、政治冷漠的受众,媒介对官方信息来源的依赖,以及媒介对于那些有权操纵结果的政府官员的偏向,使得新闻报道并没有像人们想象的那样站在公众一方。新闻倾向性成为新闻决策偏见和官方新闻管理技巧之间互动的产物。     

Promotional Opportunities: How Women in Corrections Perceive their Chances for Advancement at Work

Utilizing a theoretically derived sample, selected women who worked in corrections were interviewed in order to better understand what barriers women thought most impeded their success in moving up the organizational ladder. This work rests on the qualitative case study methodology. Three major themes emerged from interviews. Women believed that their chances for promotion within corrections were negatively impacted by: a belief that they could not perform the job as well as comparable men, an environment marked by sexual harassment, and problems in balancing work and home responsibilities. Male correctional officers were viewed as dominating the field. Further, there was a belief among these women, who worked in corrections, that comparable men were generally perceived as more capable.     

Optimal designs for threshold-determining limiting dilution assays

In common with other non-linear models, the optimal design for a limiting dilution assay (LDA) depends on the value of the unknown parameter, θ$\theta$, in the model. Consequently optimal designs cannot be specified unless some assumptions are made about the possible values of θ$\theta$. If a prior distribution can be specified then a Bayesian approach can be adopted. A proper specification of the Bayesian approach requires the aim of the experiment to be described and quantified through an appropriate utility function. This paper addresses the problem of finding optimal designs for LDAs when the aim is to determine whether θ$\theta$ is above or below a specified threshold, _θ0${\theta }_0$.     

Children and regeneration: setting an agenda for community participation and integration

Unlike other marginalised groups children are often not in a position to enter into dialogue with adults about their community needs and environmental concerns. Despite the current emphasis on involving communities in the regeneration of their own neighbourhoods, young people are still seemingly invisible in decision‐making processes. This paper looks at recent attempts to increase public participation in local decision‐making, proposes a typology of community action that recognises the different ways in which children may be drawn into the process of neighbourhood renewal and offers a set of recommendations that, if taken up, provide an agenda that will strengthen the active social commitment of young people in general. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contorted, Folded, Torn: Environmental Values, Cartographic Representation and the Politics of Disability

This paper explores the merit of incorporating the personal geographies of individuals with impaired mobility into the production of access and mobility maps. If cartographers take it upon themselves to produce maps without first seeking to understand these geographies or images of place, they are likely to infuse their work with their own values and meanings. This becomes especially important if it is accepted that maps may have a political role. The issue of accessibility is inherently political, cities are literally crippled when members of their population are restricted from reaching their full potential due to inadequate planning and design. The paper describes an attempt to develop a cartographic process which incorporates the values of the user group into all stages of map design. The project highlights the complex nature of environmental imagery and the merit of producing symbolic cartographic representations of environmental values.     

Physical aggression after being crowded

Subjects were given an opportunity to aggress using a Buss machine either immediately or 30 minutes after competing or cooperating on a task in a crowded or uncrowded situation. It was found that for subjects who were allowed to aggress immediately, crowding reduced aggression under the competitive set but had no effect under the cooperative set. This effect of crowding was not found with the delay subjects. The results of this study are consistent with the findings of other studies that social withdrawal rather than aggression may occur in response to aversively dense conditions. The lack of crowding effect after a 30-minute delay suggests that the effect of the laboratory crowding experience is transient in nature and best generalized to short-term crowding experiences such as those encountered on elevators and buses.     

The Adult Life Cycle of Poor African American Fathers

Abstract

This article is based on the qualitative findings of a 4-year study of 150 adult African American men who are non-custodial fathers. Using social constructionist and ecological frameworks, issues of individual, personality and family development are explored and implications for micro and macro social work practice are discussed.     

Burden‐of‐illness vaccine efficacy

In recent years, many vaccines have been developed for the prevention of a variety of diseases. Although the primary objective of vaccination is to prevent disease, vaccination can also reduce the severity of disease in those individuals who develop breakthrough disease. Observations of apparent mitigation of breakthrough disease in vaccine recipients have been reported for a number of vaccine‐preventable diseases such as Herpes Zoster, Influenza, Rotavirus, and Pertussis. The burden‐of‐illness (BOI) score was developed to incorporate the incidence of disease as well as the severity and duration of disease. A severity‐of‐illness score S > 0 is assigned to individuals who develop disease and a score of 0 is assigned to uninfected individuals. In this article, we derive the vaccine efficacy statistic (which is the standard statistic for presenting efficacy outcomes in vaccine clinical trials) based on BOI scores, and we extend the method to adjust for baseline covariates. Also, we illustrate it with data from a clinical trial in which the efficacy of a Herpes Zoster vaccine was evaluated.     

Understanding dissociation in relation to child trauma,mental health needs,and intensity of services in child welfare: A possible missing link

Abstract

While there is limited research on the role of dissociation among children and adolescents, emerging evidence links child trauma history, dissociation, risk behaviors, and other negative outcomes among youth. This study examined dissociation in relation to mental health needs and intensity of services among a large sample of youth in Illinois child welfare, upon entry into care and in residential treatment settings. The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS), a comprehensive, trauma-informed assessment strategy and information integration/planning tool was the primary measure. This study included two overall samples of child welfare-involved youth, ages 3–18: at entry into care (N?=?27,737) and in residential treatment (N?=?5,758). Findings indicated that rates of clinically significant dissociation were generally highest among younger youth (under age 14) and among youth with more cumulative and severe trauma. Dissociative youth were significantly more likely to exhibit several risk behaviors (e.g., fire setting and self-harm) and mental health symptoms (e.g., psychosis and somatization). Those youth with significant dissociation at entry into care were more likely to be psychiatrically hospitalized, placed into residential treatment, with greater likelihood of placement disruptions within the 2 years following entry into care. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the value of identifying and assessing dissociation and other trauma-related symptoms that may be less recognized but can be linked to high-risk behaviors and other negative outcomes within child welfare and across child-serving systems. Understanding dissociation may be an important component of training, service/treatment planning, and clinical care within child-serving systems.