A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Financial Literacy Curriculum for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Financial literacy programs are quickly gaining in popularity around the globe. A relatively new target group is survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), an economically vulnerable group for whom resource acquisition is related to personal safety and well-being. This study is a randomized controlled trial of a financial literacy curriculum designed for and delivered to a sample of 300 IPV survivors from 14 agencies in seven US states and Puerto Rico. Findings, based on difference-in-difference analyses and OLS regression models, indicate a strong effect of the curriculum on self-reported financial knowledge and behaviors and support the expansion of similar programs for survivors.     

‘A lad tried to get hold of my boobs,so I kicked him’: an examination of attempts by adults with learning difficulties to initiate their own safeguarding

People with learning difficulties are considerably more likely to experience sexual and other forms of violence than non-disabled people. Nevertheless, several respondents in this study have demonstrated some self-protective competencies. Most knew of their right not to be violated and a number of participants described situations when they had attempted to initiate their own safeguarding. Some had asked others for help with this. However, appropriate assistance was not always provided. This indicates that risk may be aggravated by social barriers. This paper focuses on highlighting the resistance skills that are prevalent amongst some people with learning difficulties. It concludes with suggestions on ways in which individuals may be further supported to realise their potential to play a more active role in directing and regaining their own protection.     

Strengthening Clinical Research in Marriage and Family Therapy: Challenges and Multilevel Solutions

There is a critical need for high‐quality and accessible treatments to improve mental health. Yet, there are indications that the research being conducted by contemporary marriage and family therapy (MFT) scholars focuses less on advancing and disseminating clinical interventions than in previous decades. In this article, we describe challenges to increasing rigorous clinical research in MFT. We use systems mapping and the intervention‐level framework to identify strategic goals designed to drive innovation in clinical research in the field. It is our hope this article encourages dialog and action among MFT stakeholder groups to support clinical science that will improve the health and functioning of families.     

The Impact of Abuse History and Trauma Symptoms on Successful Completion of a Prostitution-exiting Program

This study examines the trauma symptoms and life experiences of 49 women in a residential prostitution-exiting program and identifies differences among women who complete 90 days of the program and women who drop out of the program prior to completing 90 days. The majority of the women reported childhood abuse, adult abusive relationships, and victimization. Women who completed 90 days of treatment were found to be older than the non-completers. Non-completers were more likely to report clinically significant trauma symptoms including dissociation, poor coping behaviors, sex-related issues, and dysfunctional sexual behavior than completers. These findings suggest the importance of incorporating trauma-focused intervention early in the services provided in the exiting programs as well as the need to address the traumatic symptoms related to childhood and adult trauma histories. Findings also indicate the importance of clinically addressing trauma-related sexual issues, concerns, and behavior.     

Youth Style: Articulating cultural anxiety

In their everyday efforts to put together how they “look,” adolescents visually capture and articulate complex issues that society finds difficult to express verbally. In this paper we explore these “looks” as one example of youth appearance style and as a reflection of, and an impetus for, cultural anxieties. In doing so we draw on a series of multi‐method field studies conducted over the last ten years. A key feature of these studies has been the involvement of young people themselves as key informants and co‐investigators. Data from these studies can help clarify relationships between youth appearance style and cultural themes of sexuality and violence.     

Generalized Weibull Linear Models

For the first time, a new class of generalized Weibull linear models is introduced to be competitive to the well-known generalized (gamma and inverse Gaussian) linear models which are adequate for the analysis of positive continuous data. The proposed models have a constant coefficient of variation for all observations similar to the gamma models and may be suitable for a wide range of practical applications in various fields such as biology, medicine, engineering, and economics, among others. We derive a joint iterative algorithm for estimating the mean and dispersion parameters. We obtain closed form expressions in matrix notation for the second-order biases of the maximum likelihood estimates of the model parameters and define bias corrected estimates. The corrected estimates are easily obtained as vectors of regression coefficients in suitable weighted linear regressions. The practical use of the new class of models is illustrated in one application to a lung cancer data set.     

A new mixture model on the simplex

This paper is meant to introduce a significant extension of the flexible Dirichlet (FD) distribution, which is a quite tractable special mixture model for compositional data, i.e. data representing vectors of proportions of a whole. The FD model displays several theoretical properties which make it suitable for inference, and fairly easy to handle from a computational viewpoint. However, the rigid type of mixture structure implied by the FD makes it unsuitable to describe many compositional datasets. Furthermore, the FD only allows for negative correlations. The new extended model, by considerably relaxing the strict constraints among clusters entailed by the FD, allows for a more general dependence structure (including positive correlations) and greatly expands its applicative potential. At the same time, it retains, to a large extent, its good properties. EM-type estimation procedures can be developed for this more complex model, including ad hoc reliable initialization methods, which permit to keep the computational issues at a rather uncomplicated level. Accurate evaluation of standard error estimates can be provided as well.