Parental Depressive Symptoms, Children's Representations of Family Relationships, and Child Adjustment

This study extends the investigation of family process models of parental dysphoria and child adjustment, by examining depressive symptoms in both fathers and mothers, and by examining children's representations of family relationships as possible explanatory mechanisms. Participants were 232 children (Time 1 mean age: 5.99; 105 boys, 127 girls) and their cohabiting parents, who participated for three consecutive years. Children's internal representations of multiple family relationships were assessed by means of a story stem completion task. Structural equation modeling indicated that children's inter‐parental and attachment representations are part of the process whereby parental depressive symptoms influence child externalizing symptoms. Maternal depressive symptoms also predicted changes in children's representations of marital and attachment relationships over time. The implications for family process models of relations between parental depressive symptoms in community samples and child development are discussed.     

A different head? Parental agency and early intervention

This paper considers the agency and identity of parents of children with Down syndrome within early intervention. It draws upon semi‐structured, conversational interviews with nine parents and the reflections of one of the authors upon their experiences within early intervention programmes. It considers how representations of the deficit model permeate the participation of the parent in this process. It explores the multiple identities of the parents and links these to notions of parental participation within the current policy context of early intervention in England. The notion of parental agency is an implicit driver within the current early intervention programmes, yet it appears to be compromised by the nature of those programmes.     

A Bayesian False Discovery Rate for Multiple Testing

Case-control studies of genetic polymorphisms and gene-environment interactions are reporting large numbers of statistically significant associations, many of which are likely to be spurious. This problem reflects the low prior probability that any one null hypothesis is false, and the large number of test results reported for a given study. In a Bayesian approach to the low prior probabilities, Wacholder et al. (2004) suggest supplementing the p-value for a hypothesis with its posterior probability given the study data. In a frequentist approach to the test multiplicity problem, Benjamini & Hochberg (1995) propose a hypothesis-rejection rule that provides greater statistical power by controlling the false discovery rate rather than the family-wise error rate controlled by the Bonferroni correction. This paper defines a Bayes false discovery rate and proposes a Bayes-based rejection rule for controlling it. The method, which combines the Bayesian approach of Wacholder et al. with the frequentist approach of Benjamini & Hochberg, is used to evaluate the associations reported in a case-control study of breast cancer risk and genetic polymorphisms of genes involved in the repair of double-strand DNA breaks.     

Marital Conflict and Children’s Adjustment: Evaluation of the Parenting Process Model

This investigation tested whether parenting mediates longitudinal associations between marital conflict and children’s adjustment. Data were drawn from a three‐wave study of 283 families with children aged 8 – 16 years at Wave 1. Relations among marital conflict, parenting (behavioral control, psychological autonomy, and warmth), and children’s adjustment (externalizing and internalizing) were examined. Structural equation models indicated multiple dimensions of parenting mediated relations between marital conflict and children’s adjustment. When including controls for earlier adjustment, behavioral control continued to mediate relations between marital conflict and change in children’s internalizing symptoms over time. These results advance parenting process models for relations between marital conflict and child adjustment and provide impetus for study of other pathways, including direct and child effects.     

Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing to Increase Vocalizations in Children with Language Delays: a Review

Stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) is a procedure used to increase vocalizations in children with significant language delays. However, results from studies that have examined the effectiveness of SSP have been discrepant. The following review of the literature summarizes the results from 13 experiments published between 1996 and 2014 that used this procedure with children with language delays. Studies were analyzed across various participant and procedural variables, and an effect size estimate (nonoverlap of all pairs) was calculated for a portion of the participants in the studies reviewed. Results indicated an overall moderate intervention effect for SSP of speech sounds. Recommendations are provided for future researchers about information to report and potential avenues for future studies.     

Improving Social Work Education in Vietnam Through International Cooperation: The ‘Social Work Education Enhancement Program’

This paper describes an initiative to improve social work education in Vietnam through a three-year international collaborative, including US Aid for International Development, San José State University, eight universities in Vietnam, Vietnam's government ministries, and Cisco Systems, Inc. The social work profession was officially recognized by the Vietnamese government in 2010. Despite the rapid expansion of social work education programs, there are significant limitations in the universities' ability to provide social work education. The goal of the Social Work Education Enhancement Program (SWEEP) is to strengthen the capacity of Vietnam's undergraduate social work programs to deliver quality education and prepare trained, job-ready social workers. The SWEEP project aims to improve the administration of social work education, the professional capacity of faculty, social work curriculum, and networking technology to enable centers for excellence in learning and scholarship. To ensure that the SWEEP team targeted training and technical assistance activities that were culturally congruent, a comprehensive needs assessment and frequent mid-course evaluations were conducted, showing many shared and unique contextual issues facing universities. The collaborative process of developing social work education which fits the local context can be replicated in other countries that are in the early stages of social work development.     

Processes of State Delegitimization in Post-independence Rural Mozambique: the case of Namapa District,Nampula Province1

Abstract This article argues that the first two decades of Mozambican independence witnessed a proliferation of rural claims to access to, and control over, labor, land and tribute and that this trend contributed to the delegitimization of the Frelimo state. Taking Namapa District, Nampula Province as a case study, it shows the ways in which the reinstatement of chiefs as agents of the local administration in 1992 only served to widen the cascade of claims and counterclaims in many localities and, hence, to further undermine the legitimacy of official authority. Under the circumstances, the achievement of a “decentralized despotism” remained an elusive proposition. Processes of local socio-political change are interpreted within the context of Mozambique's structural adjustment program and its transition to multiparty rule.     

Day-Care supply by Dutch municipalities

In this article the supply of day care is assumed to be demand-induced. Demand factors include both direct and indirect effects. The indirect effects follow from the composition by gender and political party of the members of the town council. The higher the percentage of both left-wing and female councillors the higher the supply of day care. Although the direct effects of the demand factors are found to be stronger than the indirect effects, the results indicate that the mediating effect of the composition of the council according to gender and political party cannot be ignored.