Queering Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services: The Subversion of Heteronormativity in Practice

This article explores the exercise of heterosexist‐infused power relations within a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) inpatient unit in the UK. The ways in which heterosexism may wield its power within CAMHS in conjunction with the support of sexism, adultism, classism and sanism are discussed. That is, this article contributes to the understanding and subverting of heteronormativity in practice. With this focus in mind, other forms of intersecting oppressions are detailed to highlight the role they play in both controlling young people and teaching them about the workings of patriarchy and social norms. The aim of the article is to contribute to the disruption of the heteronormativity inherent in the arrangements within CAMHS and the dominant normative practice that produces multiple subjectivities in this setting.     

Rolling forward: addressing needs in the homeless community

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this pilot study was to use a bottom up, or grounded, approach to understand, from the perspective of the individuals living in the homeless community, what they feel would enable them to become housed and stay permanently housed. Organizations which serve homeless individuals often use a top down approach and implement programs without asking the homeless what they most need to find permanent housing. This project used intensive interviews to determine the needs of unhoused individuals in a mid-sized city with a tourist-centered economy in the south eastern United States. Working local homeless shelters, and various other intermediaries we collected data from 102 homeless individuals and 11 service providers. The major theme that emerged in our research is that the homeless individuals we interviewed were, for the most part, they were able to meet many of their basic needs, such as securing food, clothing, a place to bathe and wash their clothes, as well as obtain physical and mental care. However, they perceived lack of reliable and affordable transportation to be a significant barrier to obtaining and maintaining employment, making and keeping appointments, and maintaining their social support network.     

The Relationship Between Perceptions of Response to Disclosure of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Later Outcomes

This study assessed whether perceptions of others’ reactions to disclosure are related to psychological and physical outcomes among individuals with a history of child sexual abuse. Eighty-six female undergraduates completed a series of questionnaires assessing child sexual abuse, nonsexual trauma, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, somatic symptoms, disclosure, and social reactions to disclosure. Those who reported child sexual abuse endorsed higher levels of psychological and physical symptoms than those who reported a nonsexual traumatic event. Child sexual abuse survivors who reported more hurtful responses to disclosure had higher levels of posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and physical symptoms than nonsexual trauma survivors. These findings suggest that many survivors of CSA may need psychological services, and an important focus of treatment may be assessing and strengthening social support.     

Border Scans: Sovereignty,Surveillance and the Customs Service in Ghana

This article explores the relationship between surveillance techniques and the production of sovereign statehood in an effort to track the day-to-day practices through which state authority is constituted in the context of globalization. This article explicitly probes the processes through which new forms of sovereignty come into being within the life of the state. It takes as its point of departure the operations of Ghana's Customs Service, a body charged with policing the nation's frontiers and collecting the bulk of state revenue. Contrasting the work of a multinational firm contracted by the government of Ghana to carry out Customs duties and the conventional roles of Ghanaian Customs officers, this article examines the ways in which the manifold technologies of neo-liberalism (from contractual forms and modes of accountability, to the apparatuses of surveillance) redefine the capacities, authority, and imagination of both state and self, held by state agents. Here we see a sovereignty that is increasingly derived outside of the state even as the play of sovereign power is intensified and deeply diffused within it.     

Separable Attentional Predictors of Language Outcome

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word–object association, 14 months; MBCDI vocabulary size and multi‐word productions at 18 months of age). Path analyses were conducted for two different language outcomes. The analysis for vocabulary revealed unique direct prediction from infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (i.e., maintaining attention to a target event in the presence of competing events) and joint attention (i.e., more frequent response to tester's bids for attention) for larger vocabulary size at outcome; this model accounted for 48% of variance in vocabulary, after controlling for baseline communication status (assessed at 11 months). The analysis for multi‐word productions yielded direct effects for infants' distractibility, but not joint attention; this model accounted for 45% of variance in multi‐word productions, again after controlling for baseline communication status. Indirect effects were not significant in either model. Results are discussed in light of the unique predictive role of attentional factors and social/attention cues for emerging language.     

FROM FOSTER CARE TO FOSTERING CARE: The Need for Community

Using an interpretive ethnographic framework, we investigate how being in a caring community benefits foster children and their families during a time of crisis. Through (re)telling the stories of the untimely death of Carl Connor, a parent of four foster children, we examine the community of Hope Meadows as the site where the activities of caring occurred. Care as a set of relational and moral practices is presented, and we describe how care is facilitated by the purpose as well as the physical and social dimensions of Hope Meadows. The stories of Carl Connor's death provide a foundation for a gendered theory of moral community.     

Bootstrap adjustments for empirical bayes interval estimates of small-area proportions

Empirical Bayes approaches have often been applied to the problem of estimating small-area parameters. As a compromise between synthetic and direct survey estimators, an estimator based on an empirical Bayes procedure is not subject to the large bias that is sometimes associated with a synthetic estimator, nor is it as variable as a direct survey estimator. Although the point estimates perform very well, naïve empirical Bayes confidence intervals tend to be too short to attain the desired coverage probability, since they fail to incorporate the uncertainty which results from having to estimate the prior distribution. Several alternative methodologies for interval estimation which correct for the deficiencies associated with the naïve approach have been suggested. Laird and Louis (1987) proposed three types of bootstrap for correcting naïve empirical Bayes confidence intervals. Calling the methodology of Laird and Louis (1987) an unconditional bias-corrected naïve approach, Carlin and Gelfand (1991) suggested a modification to the Type III parametric bootstrap which corrects for bias in the naïve intervals by conditioning on the data. Here we empirically evaluate the Type II and Type III bootstrap proposed by Laird and Louis, as well as the modification suggested by Carlin and Gelfand (1991), with the objective of examining coverage properties of empirical Bayes confidence intervals for small-area proportions.     

INTERGENERATIONAL FAMILY LITERACY: WORKING TOGETHER

This paper brings intergenerational family literacy programs to the attention of both an education and a social welfare readership. It describes how they benefit both children of parents with unmet literacy needs and the parents themselves. The paper presents results, from a Department of Employment. Education and Training national study, which show an important overlap between adult literacy teachers and family support workers in their interests in their clients, and argues for the need for cross-sectoral cooperation. Australian examples of such cooperation are provided and a scheme is proposed linking a number of government agencies to provide intergenerational family literacy programs offering a suite of needed services.     

Gender Inequality in Nonmetropolitan and Metropolitan Areas1

Abstract Nonmetropolitan-metropolitan differences in the United States are large and growing, but we know relatively little about how they interact with gender differences. Using data from the CPS, the Census PUMS, and the GSS, we find nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas are quite similar in the gender gap in earnings and in rates of married women's labor force participation. Occupational sex segregation is higher and some gender attitudes are a few percentage points less egalitarian in nonmetropolitan areas. Each of these dimensions of gender stratification has been declining over the last two decades and the declines are roughly similar in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas. Variations in gender stratification have been greater over time than across place. Thus, while both place and gender are important dimensions of stratification, there appears to have been little interaction between the two.