Comprehensive assessment of youth violence in five Caribbean countries: Gender and age differences

Differences in gender and age have been established in the context of crime, violence, and prevalence of risk and protective factors. These studies are often notable only in the Western Hemisphere. Despite growth in crime and violence in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), relatively little understanding of violence in CARICOM member states exists. In light of these concerns, the major purposes of this study include: (1) comprehensively assessing the scope of the four behaviors (i.e., engagement, victimization, witness, and report) in relation to violence and youth’s perceptions of risk and protective factors in family and school domains, and (2) examining how they differ by youth’s gender and age. This study draws on assessment data on youth violence in five CARICOM Member States: Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago using a completed 51-item quantitative questionnaire from approximately 512 students. The results suggest that violence engagement, victimization, witness, and report significantly differed by gender and age. Male students were more likely to engage in violence, but less likely to report such violence to adults. Similarly, older students reported that they were more likely to engage in and witness violence. For risk and protective factors, female students reported significantly higher scores on domestic violence, whereas male students had higher scores on the access to drugs/weapons. Older students also tended to report higher levels of some school risk factors and lower levels of some protective factors in both family and school.     

Teaching social work students to speak up

It takes courage to defend your values or boundaries in the face of emotional and social risks. Social work advocacy, relationships, resilience and education all rely on the ability to engage in ‘difficult conversations’, defined as dialogue to defend personal values or boundaries in the face of potential social or emotional risks. Yet, students often speak of feeling scared, unskilled and prone to instinctive response patterns when trying to speak up, making the question of how we can teach moral courage an important and understudied area of pedagogical research. In this article, we describe a Canadian pilot study to develop and evaluate learning activities developed for an undergraduate social work practicum seminar course to help students to speak up. We describe the key elements of the learning activities co-developed with students, and outline the SPEAKER model which resulted from the study as a way of helping students to assess, safely engage in and experience success with, these difficult conversations. Drawing on the concepts of embodied learning, the pedagogy of discomfort and identity theory, we suggest the value of building learning around the naturally occurring ‘difficult conversations’ faced by students in their practicum and other areas of their life.     

“How Could I Have Done This?” Thoughts of Mothers of Children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

Biological mothers of children with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) must cope with the struggles of parenting a child with special needs with the knowledge that their children’s problems are due to their alcohol use during pregnancy. Qualitative interviews were conducted by telephone with 11 biological mothers of children with FAS. This group of mothers understood their use of alcohol during pregnancy through reliance on the disease model, inaccurate or incomplete knowledge of the consequences of drinking during pregnancy, the advice of others, and a lack of awareness of the pregnancy.     

Formal Alternative Transportation Options for Older Adults: An Assessment of Need

ABSTRACT

This study measured the need for formal alternative modes of transportation among older adults by applying traditional factors of the Behavioral Model. Survey participants who regularly drove were compared to those who could no longer drive. Race/ethnicity and self-reported health were significant predictors of perceived need for transportation services for both groups. However, income and service awareness were significant predictors only for drivers, while family proximity was a significant predictor only for non-drivers. Results suggest the importance of gaining a better understanding of the factors associated with need for senior-focused transportation services to more effectively plan such programs.     

Sharing personal information in the child protection context: Impediments in the Australian legal framework

Professionals, including social workers, in the child protection context are frequently required to make decisions on whether to share sensitive personal information about children, their families, and others with colleagues and across institutional and jurisdictional boundaries. Sharing information across agencies and organisations is essential to allow joined‐up service provision and to effectively protect and support children and their families. A legal framework that supports this decision making is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for effective information sharing. This article examines the complex legal framework that governs information sharing across the Australian states and territories. It identifies a number of structural and regulatory elements that unnecessarily limit information sharing or have a tendency to create a culture that is risk averse, rather than proactive, in sharing information. The article suggests structural and regulatory reforms that would improve the legal framework for sharing information, while at the same time giving due recognition to the human rights that come into tension in this policy context: the right to privacy and the rights of the child.     

Beyond Repair: Interpretation,Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play-Technique

This article puts clinical child psychoanalysis into conversation with recent debates about critical method in order to question the turn toward so-called “reparative reading” in feminist and queer theory. While Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s original call for a new kind of reparative method culled its key terms (“reparative” and “paranoid”) from child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the scholars who have adopted reparativity in critical theory pay little attention to Klein’s work. In this article, I take up Klein’s theory of the depressive position and reparativity as she elaborated them in her clinical work with children, particularly her wartime analysis of “Richard” in 1941. Klein interpreted Richard’s play—his clinical “war games”—through her idiomatic vocabulary of “attack” and “repair.” By situating this case and Klein’s larger theory of psychic reparations in the political climate of wartime Europe, I argue that Klein’s writings point to the ethico-political dangers inherent in reparative endeavors, which name the object and narrate its injury and repair according only to the perimeters of one’s own self. From this reading, I propose that there might be a benefit to foregoing the injury/repair framework implicit in reparative agendas—both critical and clinical alike. By returning reparativity to Klein, I therefore aim not to offer a corrective to Sedgwick or to the scholars following her, but rather to interrogate the ethical stakes of all reparative endeavors, be they political, intellectual, or clinical. At the most basic level, then, this article argues that the space of the clinic is an important (and often undervalued) object for the consideration of critical method.     

The Effect of Different Cultural Lenses on Reliability and Validity in Observational Data: The Example of Chinese Immigrant Parent–Toddler Dinner Interactions

This study used a mixed methodology to investigate reliability, validity, and analysis level with Chinese immigrant observational data. European‐American and Chinese coders quantitatively rated 755 minutes of Chinese immigrant parent–toddler dinner interactions on parental sensitivity, intrusiveness, detachment, negative affect, positive affect, and parents' confidence. They also gave qualitative coding rationales for their quantitative ratings. Analysis of quantitative ratings indicated systematic differences associated with coder ethnicity. Such differences could threaten the reliability between coders with different ethnicities. Analysis of qualitative rationales revealed different cultural links between concepts and behavior cues, which could challenge the cross‐cultural validity of a macro‐level coding system. When a coding system is incongruous with coders' cultural schemata, even after intensive training, the effect of culture cannot be eliminated. Implications of these findings for observational cultural research are discussed.     

'Ladettes' and 'Modern Girls': 'troublesome' young femininities

‘Ladettes’ are argued to be a sign, and product, of contemporary development and change; their fortunes are presented as inextricably related to the conditions of late modernity. Using the past to shed light on the present, this paper considers whether fears and claims about the behaviour of some contemporary young women in Britain are exclusive to the present. Two data sets inform the discussion: first, representations of ladettes in national and local newspapers from 1995 to 2005; second, materials relating to the ‘modern girl’ published in the popular print media between 1918 and 1928. Although there have been important changes in the conditions of girlhood since the 1920s, this historical comparison highlights continuities in the representation of ‘troublesome’ youthful femininities. We explore similarities and differences in the characteristics attributed to the modern girls of the twenties and the ladettes of recent years, and the dominant discourses that underpin popular constructions of troublesome young women.     

Krafting the obesity message: A case study in framing and issues management

This study examined the application of framing theory in issues management. Using case study methodology, the researchers analyzed message frames used by Kraft Foods in its public response to the obesity crisis, how the Kraft frames were reported by the media and whether Kraft's approach might help define effective framing and issues management practices in public relations. The study suggested that framing was indeed useful in Kraft's attempt to manage the issue of obesity.