Examining Mental Health Court Completion: A Focal Concerns Perspective

Sociologists have long‐raised concern about disparate treatment in the justice system. Focal concerns have become the dominant perspective in explaining these disparities in legal processing decisions. Despite the growth of problem‐solving courts, little research has examined how this perspective operates in nontraditional court settings. This article used a mixed‐method approach to examine focal concerns in a mental health court (MHC). Observational findings indicate that gender and length of time in court influence the court's contextualization of noncompliance. While discussions of race were absent in observational data, competing‐risk survival analysis finds that gender and race interact to predict MHC termination.     

Short notices

H. J. Dyos (ed.), Urban History Yearbook 1974, 192; Urban History Yearbook 1975, 188 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, £3.00).

J. R. Raveosdale, Liable to Floods: Village Landscape on the Edge of the Fens, A.D. 450–1850 (1974), xi+206 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £5.50).

Joel Samaha, Law and Order in Historical Perspective. The Case of Elizabethan Essex (1974), xvi+176 (Academic Press, London and New York, £4.70).

Charles Carlton, The Court of Orphans (1974), 145 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, £3.50).

Hans Christian Johansen, Belolkningsudvikling og familiestruktur i det 18. árhuadrede (1975). 211 (Odense University Press, Odense, Denmark, D.kv. 60+VAT). (Population and family structure in eighteenth‐century Denmark)

Paul Butel, Les négotiants bordelais, l'Europe, et les Iles au dix‐huitième siècle (1974), 427 (Aubier‐Montaigne, Paris, 70 fr.). (Bordeaux merchants, Europe, and the French West Indies in the eighteenth century)

Marcus Cunliffe, The Age of Expansion 1848–1917 (1974), 336 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £4.95).

Pamela and Harold Silver, The Education of the Poor. The History of a National School, 1824–1974 (1974), z+197 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, £3.95).     

First Nations youth redefine resilience: listening to artistic productions of ‘Thug Life’ and hip-hop

In recent decades, resilience research has striven to atone for the Eurocentric nature of research conducted with Canada's Aboriginal populations. It has been cautioned, however, that if resilience research fails to account for Aboriginal population's diversity, it risks culturalized images and pan-Aboriginalism. Definitions of resilience should be framed within community-specific models, recognizing dynamic subjects interacting in multiple social worlds. In partnership with six Saskatchewan First Nations communities, our work seeks to understand what resilience means to youth who live on-reserve. We draw on findings from two community-based projects developed with the Battleford Agency Tribal Chiefs First Nations. These projects used arts-based and mixed-methods to identify community strengths and barriers surrounding youth resilience. Although study findings show the influence of family, programming, and culture, our model is emended to show the importance of youth's own definitions of resilience, even when these may appear antithetical to conventional norms. Drawing on the youth's artistic pieces, evolving themes focus on hip-hop culture and Thug Life; showing youth creating a place to belong when they are experiencing a lack of belonging. Within the framework of listening to youth-driven resilience, we put forward an alternative model of reaching youth using positive elements of Thug Life and hip-hop.     

Political Literacy or a ‘Sentimental Education'?—Programmes for coexistence in Israeli Schools

This article describes the provision of activities to promote co‐existence between Arabs and Jews in Israel, specifically in the secondary school sector. In examining patterns of change in this area it becomes clear that student and teacher participation in the activities has been determined by several main variables, including the level of political violence in the society, with which there is a negative correlation, the peace process which has had a similarly strong positive influence on the uptake of coexistence activities; and the changing roles of government and non‐governmental organisations in this field. The article also examines the theories and ‘purposes’ underpinning the activities, as perceived by Israeli educationalists. The former can be located on a broad spectrum ranging from a ‘human relations’ approach, stressing the affective capacities of students, to a more explicitly political, cognitive approach. There are significantly fewer differences among the ‘purposes’: the specific skills which educationalists hope students will develop. Many skills considered central to co‐existence activities were common to both the ‘human relations’ and ‘political’ approaches. This indicated either a lack of communication between representatives of NGOs from whom the theories are developed and articulated and the teachers and schools who implement the programmes, or an ultimate mutual dependence between the affective and cognitive modes of conflict resolution.     

Alternative Foldover Plans for Two-Level Nonregular Designs

Foldover is a classic technique used to select follow-up experimental runs when an initial experiment yields ambiguities. While foldover has been soundly investigated for regular designs, less research has been devoted to this technique for nonregular designs. Previous work focuses on the use of the generalized minimum aberration criterion to obtain optimal foldover plans. In contrast, this article utilizes the concept of minimal dependent sets (MDSs) and associated criteria to rank foldovers of nonregular designs. We propose an integer programming-based solution to aid in the location and enumeration of MDSs. MDS-optimal foldovers for selected nonregular designs are presented and discussed.     

Digital Games as a Context for Children's Cognitive Development: Research Recommendations and Policy Considerations

We document the need to examine digital game play and app use as a context for cognitive development, particularly during middle childhood. We highlight this developmental period as 6- through 12-year olds comprise a large swath of the preadult population that plays and uses these media forms. Surprisingly, this age range remains understudied with regard to the impact of their interactive media use as compared to young children and adolescents. This gap in knowledge about middle childhood may reflect strong and widely held concerns about the effects of digital games and apps before and after this period. These concerns include concurrent and subsequent influences of game use on very young children's and adolescents’ cognitive and socioemotional functioning. We highlight here what is currently known about the impact of media on young children and adolescents and what is not known about this impact in middle childhood. We then offer recommendations for the types of research that developmental scientists can undertake to examine the efficacy of digital games within the rapidly changing media ecology in which children live. We conclude with a discussion of media policies that we believe can help children benefit from their media use. Our hope is that this review will foster greater investigation of the cognitive socialization, as raised over 20 years ago by developmental psychologist and early games researcher Patricia Greenfield, that digital games serve during the middle childhood period, and childhood more generally.