Termination: When the therapist leaves

Despite an expansion of our knowledge about loss and grief little has been written on the experience and techniques employed during a forced termination. This article examines the theory, applications of theory, and transference/countertransference issues surrounding the author's experience as she moved to another state and transferred or terminated with her patients.Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual Symposium of the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training, March 1989.     

THE PROFESSIONAL INVOLVEMENT OF HIGHLY EDUCATED WOMEN: THE IMPACT OF FAMILY

The purpose of this article is to examine factors related to the professional involvement of highly educated women. Three indicators of involvement are considered: nonemployment, part-time work, employment not making use of highest degree. The sample consists of 663 women who received high-level degrees from a large midwestern university between 1964 and 1974. Results indicate that both family role position and role bargaining outcomes play a major role in determining the level of involvement. Indicators of the latter, including previously untested measures of the timing of family and career beginnings and husband's moves for his wife's career, were important determinants of all three measures of involvement. As a caveat, we question the culturally pervasive assumption that lower involvement is necessarily negative. Information from a small number of in-depth interviews suggests that these women value an overall balance between work and family rather than consistently high levels of professional involvement. Future research must explore this possibility.     

Police-reported intimate partner violence during pregnancy: who is at risk?

The objective of this retrospective cohort study was to determine risk factors for police-reported intimate partner violence (IPV) during pregnancy among Seattle residents with a registered live birth or fetal death in Washington State. Logistic regression was used to calculate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) and 95% confidence intervals for the association between demographic, behavioral, and obstetric history risk factors and any, physical, and non-physical police-reported IPV. Significant risk factors for any police-reported IPV during pregnancy included unmarried status (aOR 2.36), public health program use (aOR 1.33), smoking or alcohol use during pregnancy (aORs 1.45 and 1.80, respectively), previous live birth (aOR 1.39), and previous spontaneous or induced abortion (aORs 1.39 and 1.34, respectively). Risk factors for physical IPV varied only slightly from those for any IPV, and fewer factors were associated with nonphysical IPV. Demographic, behavioral, and obstetric history risk factors are potential markers of IPV risk during pregnancy.     

Global gendered anti-Black belonging and racial ideology

We review theorizations of gendered anti-Blackness and the scholarship on the politics of belonging. Bridging together this literature, we propose gendered anti-Black non-belonging as an alternative framework for addressing African descendant women's expressions and realities of belonging in the United States and Portugal. We select these two cases for their remarkably distinct—yet related—racial ideologies of the state. In the United States, colorblindness is the main ideology of the state whereas in Portugal anti-racial ideology pervades. As we will highlight, the experiences of belonging among African descendant women in the United States and Portugal challenge the veracity of these racial ideologies which work to render gendered anti-Black oppression invisible. In both cases, anti-Black non-belonging means that African descendant women are vulnerable to gendered state violence and racist practices impacting their individual and group belonging; as a result, the right for Black bodies to be in a particular place and space is constantly contested, and, often, violently regulated and disciplined. Yet, anti-Black belonging is both a matter of oppression and resistance. African-descendant women draw from their everyday knowledge of domination to employ resistance. In doing so, as we will argue, they rewrite the national narrative of race, gender and belonging in Portugal and the United States.     

Clustering transformed compositional data using K-means,with applications in gene expression and bicycle sharing system data

Although there is no shortage of clustering algorithms proposed in the literature, the question of the most relevant strategy for clustering compositional data (i.e. data whose rows belong to the simplex) remains largely unexplored in cases where the observed value is equal or close to zero for one or more samples. This work is motivated by the analysis of two applications, both focused on the categorization of compositional profiles: (1) identifying groups of co-expressed genes from high-throughput RNA sequencing data, in which a given gene may be completely silent in one or more experimental conditions; and (2) finding patterns in the usage of stations over the course of one week in the Velib' bicycle sharing system in Paris, France. For both of these applications, we make use of appropriately chosen data transformations, including the Centered Log Ratio and a novel extension called the Log Centered Log Ratio, in conjunction with the K-means algorithm. We use a non-asymptotic penalized criterion, whose penalty is calibrated with the slope heuristics, to select the number of clusters. Finally, we illustrate the performance of this clustering strategy, which is implemented in the Bioconductor package coseq, on both the gene expression and bicycle sharing system data.     

Child protection and fathering where there is domestic violence: Contradictions and consequences

Children live in different contexts of protection and vulnerability when exposed to domestic violence. The negative impacts for many children are consistent and widely acknowledged. However, the implication that this requires men who use violence to address their fathering has been slower to emerge. This article draws from 69 in‐depth qualitative interviews with men, women, and workers across four men's behaviour change programmes in rural Victoria, Australia. Particular attention is given to men's attitudes to their fathering and the formal and informal consequences they experienced as a result of their violence and its impact on their fathering. Although most men came to recognize that their violence impacted their children, they failed to make the connection that the involvement of statutory child protection services in their lives was a direct consequence of their abusive behaviour. This article explores this disconnection by fathers who use violence, their attitude to the involvement of statutory child protection services, and identifies the implications for social work practitioners in addressing this issue.     

Implementing the Power to Kids programme in home-based (foster) care: Identifying the SAFETY approach

Sexual abuse and dating violence are chronic problems for children and young people in out-of-home care. This study explored the impact of a prevention and response programme Power to Kids, which targets harmful sexual behaviour (HSB), child sexual exploitation (CSE) and dating violence (DV) for children and young people in home-based (foster) care. Twenty-eight case managers, 25 foster carers and 13 children and young people participated in a mixed methods study in Victoria, Australia informed by the research question: How does the Power to Kids programme impact the sexual health and safety of children and young people in home-based (foster) care? The data analysis revealed a SAFETY approach whereby the sexual health and safety knowledge of carers and case managers was enhanced, and carers were given permission to have Brave Conversations with children and young people, who could then apply the new knowledge to their lives. Case managers were upskilled in identifying indicators of sexual abuse and empowered to escalate stalled therapeutic and disruption practice when children and young people were identified as experiencing HSB, CSE or DV.     

Detection of structural breaks in a time-varying heteroskedastic regression model

A Bayesian method for estimating a time-varying regression model subject to the presence of structural breaks is proposed. Heteroskedastic dynamics, via both GARCH and stochastic volatility specifications, and an autoregressive factor, subject to breaks, are added to generalize the standard return prediction model, in order to efficiently estimate and examine the relationship and how it changes over time. A Bayesian computational method is employed to identify the locations of structural breaks, and for estimation and inference, simultaneously accounting for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. The proposed methods are illustrated using simulated data. Then, an empirical study of the Taiwan and Hong Kong stock markets, using oil and gas price returns as a state variable, provides strong support for oil prices being an important explanatory variable for stock returns.