THE CONSEQUENCES OF CARING:

Sociologists of emotion have examined the ways that workers are required to manage their emotions on the job, while studies of family emotion work reveal the effort involved in providing emotional support at home. Analyzing data collected from married or cohabiting women hospital workers, we examine the relations between women's job and family emotion work and the effects of both on women's job-related well-being. Consistent with "scarcity" views of women's emotional energy, we find that performance of family emotion work has negative consequences for women's job-related well-being. Consistent with "expansion" perspectives, however, women who perform some emotional labor on the job are more likely than other women to perform family emotion work. Our findings support a view that incorporates elements of both scarcity and expansion perspectives. We conclude that the job-related well-being of women hospital workers is less influenced by performance of emotional labor at work than it is by women's and their partners' involvement in family emotion work.     

Youth characteristics associated with behavioral and mental health problems during the transition to residential treatment centers: the Odyssey Project population

This study aimed to determine what youth characteristics were associated with emotional and behavioral problems exhibited within the first three months of placement in residential treatment centers (RTCs) in a sample of youth from 20 agencies in 13 states. Two primary research questions were addressed: 1) What characteristics were associated with behavior during the transition to care? 2) Were the characteristics associated with behavior during the transition the same for boys and girls? Data were drawn from the Time 1 phase of the longitudinal national Odyssey Project dataset developed by the Child Welfare League of America. Measures included an extensive child and family characteristics (CFC) form and the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The results revealed significant gender-specific patterns of associations between youth characteristics and behavior exhibited during the transition to RTC placement. Notably, a sexual abuse history was associated with Externalizing for girls and Internalizing for boys and entering on psychotropic medication was associated with Internalizing for girls and boys and Externalizing for boys only. Results suggest many avenues for refining practice.     

Female victims of domestic violence: which victims do police refer to crisis intervention?

Factors associated with activation of a volunteer-based crisis intervention services program for victims of police-reported intimate partner violence (IPV) were examined to determine if those for whom services were activated were representative of the overall eligible population. The study population comprised 2,092 adult female victims of male-perpetrated police-reported IPV. Crisis intervention services were requested by responding patrol officers in 415 (19.8%) of these incidents. Activation of crisis intervention services was more likely for victims who were married to their abusive partner, pregnant, or of Latina or Asian race/ethnicity and among IPV incidents involving physical abuse, visible victim injuries, and arrest of the abusive partner. Additionally, one of the city's five police precincts was less likely than the remaining four to utilize these services. Activation of crisis intervention services was associated with factors related to need and feasibility of service delivery, but differential activation at the precinct level was also found to be influential.     

Providing psychiatric-mental health care for Native Americans: lessons learned by a non-Native American PMHNP

Providing culturally sensitive psychiatric-mental health nursing care to Native Americans requires a unique set of understandings. Traditional tribal customs and beliefs, historical events of the past 500 years, and acculturation and enculturation have affected Native Americans' health and well-being. In 2004, I had the opportunity to practice as a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner with a Native American tribe in the southwestern United States. This article describes the lessons I learned while practicing on the reservation and suggests ways other non-Native American practitioners can best serve this population.     

Are peer educators really peers?

OBJECTIVE, PARTICIPANTS, AND METHODS: To determine whether peer educators are considered peers by their audiences, the authors compared 28 peer educators and 28 college students on their personal qualities using self-report surveys. RESULTS: Students who wanted to become peer educators reported higher self-esteem, greater leadership skills, and fewer risky health behaviors than did demographically similar college students. However, peer educators appeared similar to their colleagues in terms of personal values and personality temperament. CONCLUSIONS: Although peer educators are natural leaders with strong self-esteem and more healthy behaviors, they appear to be quite similar to their audiences in regard to values and temperaments, making them successful role models and arguably true peers.     

Cultural and Status Differences in Intergroup Conflict Resolution: A Longitudinal Study of a Middle East Dialogue Group in the United States

Supporters of the contact hypothesis have arguedthat positive intergroup contact is facilitated whenparticipants have equal status with one another.However, the exact dimensions of equal status are often unclear, having been defined variously as equaloccupational status, having close friends of anotherrace, or having equal roles in the contact situation.This paper argues that cultural differences between groups must be taken into account, particularlywhen intergroup contact occurs in formal conflictresolution exercises. Non-Western participants will beat a disadvantage when attempting to find common ground with Western participants in conflictresolution exercises based on Western culturalpractices. Based on a 6-year participant observationstudy of a Palestinian-Jewish dialogue group, this paper argues that familiarity and expertise in usingthe culture-based rules of interaction play an importantbut often subtle role in intergroup conflict resolution.Participants must have some basic equality in their ability to function within thedominant culture.     

Are Ballot Order Effects Heterogeneous?*

Objective. Past research on ballot order effects has typically focused on the average benefit a candidate receives if placed at the top of the ballot. This study addresses a gap in the literature by examining the possibility that a simple average may mask systematic differences in how the ballot order effect varies across candidates and voters. Methods. Using data from all Australian federal elections between 1984 and 2004, a sample that covers 1,187 separate electoral contests and 7,113 candidate × election observations, this study estimates the effect of ballot order on a candidate's share of the primary vote. To determine whether ballot order effects differ across voters as well as candidates, the study also makes use of electorate‐level demographic data from the 1996 and 2001 Australian censuses. Results. The results of these estimations indicate that being placed first on the ballot increases a candidate's vote share by about 1 percentage point. As a proportion of their total vote, this effect is much larger for independents and minor parties than for major parties. The ballot order effect appears to be similar for male and female candidates, and does not show strong trends upward or downward over the 20‐year period covered by our study. Across electorates, the ballot order effect is higher in places where voters are younger and fluency in English is lower. Conclusions. A statistically significant ballot order effect was a consistent feature of Australian federal elections between 1984 and 2004. Moreover, this study challenges the assumption that ballot order effects are homogenous, and finds that the effect of being placed atop the ballot varies across both candidates and voters.     

Structured measurement error in nutritional epidemiology: applications in the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition (PIN) Study

Preterm birth, defined as delivery before 37 completed weeks' gestation, is a leading cause of infant morbidity and mortality. Identifying factors related to preterm delivery is an important goal of public health professionals who wish to identify etiologic pathways to target for prevention. Validation studies are often conducted in nutritional epidemiology in order to study measurement error in instruments that are generally less invasive or less expensive than "gold standard" instruments. Data from such studies are then used in adjusting estimates based on the full study sample. However, measurement error in nutritional epidemiology has recently been shown to be complicated by correlated error structures in the study-wide and validation instruments. Investigators of a study of preterm birth and dietary intake designed a validation study to assess measurement error in a food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) administered during pregnancy and with the secondary goal of assessing whether a single administration of the FFQ could be used to describe intake over the relatively short pregnancy period, in which energy intake typically increases. Here, we describe a likelihood-based method via Markov Chain Monte Carlo to estimate the regression coefficients in a generalized linear model relating preterm birth to covariates, where one of the covariates is measured with error and the multivariate measurement error model has correlated errors among contemporaneous instruments (i.e. FFQs, 24-hour recalls, and/or biomarkers). Because of constraints on the covariance parameters in our likelihood, identifiability for all the variance and covariance parameters is not guaranteed and, therefore, we derive the necessary and suficient conditions to identify the variance and covariance parameters under our measurement error model and assumptions. We investigate the sensitivity of our likelihood-based model to distributional assumptions placed on the true folate intake by employing semi-parametric Bayesian methods through the mixture of Dirichlet process priors framework. We exemplify our methods in a recent prospective cohort study of risk factors for preterm birth. We use long-term folate as our error-prone predictor of interest, the food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and 24-hour recall as two biased instruments, and serum folate biomarker as the unbiased instrument. We found that folate intake, as measured by the FFQ, led to a conservative estimate of the estimated odds ratio of preterm birth (0.76) when compared to the odds ratio estimate from our likelihood-based approach, which adjusts for the measurement error (0.63). We found that our parametric model led to similar conclusions to the semi-parametric Bayesian model.     

Forensic, cultural, and systems issues in child sexual abuse cases--part 1: an introduction

This article introduces the first in a two-part special issue focusing on forensic, cultural, and systems issues in child sexual abuse cases. The five articles contained in this issue include a diversity of perspectives on approaches to extended interviews and evaluations of child sexual abuse suspicions, an exploration of the ways culture affects child sexual abuse disclosure and reporting, considerations relevant to the management of a child's mental health needs while forensic process are ongoing, and the use of anatomical dolls in forensic interviews. We call for attention to several practice areas, including (a) prioritizing a child's mental health needs while minimizing disruption of forensic processes, (b) developing best practices and models of child sexual abuse assessment and evaluation when a one-session forensic interview is insufficient, (c) appropriately evaluating child sexual abuse concerns when they occur without a disclosure and/or in children with communication limitations, and (d) the integration of cultural sensitivity into interviews and evaluations.