Choosing intercountry adoption: an Australian study of the motivations and attitudes of intending and recent adoptive parents

Humanitarian reasons are often reported as the main motivating force for undertaking intercountry adoption. This article reports on a qualitative interview‐based Australian study in which 32 adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents talk frankly about their desire to use intercountry adoption as a pathway to parenthood, rather than as an altruistic method of providing a child with a family. The study aimed to investigate motivations of intending and recent adoptive parents for deciding to form a family through intercountry adoption and to contribute to understanding about why intercountry adoption is the preferred option over available alternatives for family formation. The findings from this study raise interesting questions regarding recruitment efforts for children needing families; not only in relation to intercountry adoption, but also in developing recruitment strategies for foster carers for local children needing care.     

Resident interaction and social well-being in an oil boomtown in western North Dakota

Previous studies on the social well-being of residents living in energy boomtowns focus primarily on demographic characteristics of residents. These studies do not consider that there could be a relationship between residents’ social well-being and whether they interact with new residents moving into their community. The current study includes a measure of interaction with new residents as it examines five dimensions of the social well-being of residents living in an oil boomtown in western North Dakota. Surveys were distributed door-to-door to residents living in Williston North Dakota during the fall of 2015. Research findings show that people who reported that they interact with new residents moving into their community felt safe from crime and violence in their community; felt more socially integrated in their community; had high levels of community trust and community satisfaction, and believed that they could count on their neighbors. These findings are important because they highlight the significance of social interaction in communities that experience rapid population growth resulting from increased energy production.     

Black adolescents' racial discrimination and suicide behaviors: Testing perceived school safety as a protective moderator

The current study examined associations between Black adolescents' (M_age = 15.55, SD = 1.23) racial discrimination and suicide behaviors (i.e., suicide ideation, suicide plan, and suicide attempts), and whether perceived school safety was a protective moderator. Furthermore, we tested gender differences in relations, which were not significant. Racial discrimination predicted greater suicide behaviors, and school safety informed less suicide behaviors. School safety moderated the relation between discrimination and suicide plan, such that at low school safety, discrimination predicted having a suicide plan but was not significant at high school safety. Furthermore, school safety moderated the relation between discrimination and suicide attempts. At low school safety, discrimination predicted more suicide attempts, but was not significant at high school safety.     

Appreciating the world of autism through the lens of video interaction guidance: an exploration of a parent’s perceptions,experiences and emerging narratives on autism

This study seeks to identify understandings and narratives around autism spectrum disorder (ASD) through the application of video interaction guidance (VIG). In adopting a social constructionist approach, the case study used a person-centred model to explore a parent’s experiences and emerging narratives of ASD through the lens of VIG. Findings of the current study suggest that VIG offers an effective tool for in-depth exploration of complex, multi-storied understandings of ASD and the perceived parental role. The intervention was perceived to promote greater awareness of the child’s communication skills, beyond the ‘common’ understandings of ASD, by providing a novel outsider perspective on interactions. The intervention also promoted parental efficacy through recognition of parenting skills in supporting the development of strength-based narratives. VIG was seen to provide a platform for an exploration of existing narratives and the construction of new, preferred realities.     

Power mobility and the built environment: the experiences of older Canadians

In this article, we employ data from qualitative interviews with 15 men and 14 women aged 51–92 to examine older Canadian adults’ experiences of utilizing power wheelchairs and motorized scooters in the context of the built environment. When functioning properly and utilized within accessible spaces, power mobility devices provided many of the participants with the autonomy they desired. However, the features and functionality of power mobility equipment also constrained participants’ abilities to negotiate their surroundings and maintain valued social roles and physical activities. Participants’ experiences of power mobility technology as enabling or disabling were further complicated by the organization of the built environment, as the men and women described encountering various barriers to mobility within both public and private spaces. We discuss our findings in relation to the extant literature concerning the social and spatial construction of disability.     

Die Analyse sozialer Kontexte

Individual behaviour is always embedded in social contexts such as networks, companies, neighbourhoods. They constitute a central condition to explain individual behaviour. We discuss major problems of context analysis. We first define context to then explore how contexts affect behaviour—the social mechanisms. We specify a multilevel model to demonstrate theoretical problems linking levels and the associated problems of adequate statistical modelling. An example is the explanation of individual behaviour by country level data.We then discuss cross pressures between contexts; here, we show how similar theoretical approaches of Simmel and Lazarsfeld are. Finally, we turn to two other problems of context analyses: non-linear effects and selection bias. We resume our arguments by suggesting a preliminary theory of contexts and strategies for future research.     

Performance of localized regression tree splitting criteria on data with discontinuities

Properties of the localized regression tree splitting criterion, described in Bremner & Taplin (2002) and referred to as the BT method, are explored in this paper and compared to those of Clark & Pregibon's (1992) criterion (the CP method). These properties indicate why the BT method can result in superior trees. This paper shows that the BT method exhibits a weak bias towards edge splits, and the CP method exhibits a strong bias towards central splits in the presence of main effects. A third criterion, called the SM method, that exhibits no bias towards a particular split position is introduced. The SM method is a modification of the BT method that uses more symmetric local means. The BT and SM methods are more likely to split at a discontinuity than the CP method because of their relatively low bias towards particular split positions. The paper shows that the BT and SM methods can be used to discover discontinuities in the data, and that they offer a way of producing a variety of different trees for examination or for tree averaging methods.     

Attending to sibling issues and transferences in psychodynamic psychotherapy

This paper urges that attention be paid to the meaning and importance of early sibling relationships as manifested in clients' and therapists' lives and psychodynamic psychotherapy.