Social work with African refugee children and their families

This article explores the issues and dilemmas that arise when social workers attempt to work with African refugee and asylum seeking children and their families. There is a complex interplay between social workers’ skills and knowledge in this area and the prevailing social attitudes towards these groups of service users. By initially setting the context of mass movement of peoples from situations of danger in their countries of origin, the discussion highlights the key issues and shows the tensions of practice intervention in this area. Drawing on a small‐scale research study with social workers and discussions with immigration officers and workers in voluntary agencies working with refugees and asylum seekers, the article draws some conclusions about the lessons that can be learnt in order to improve practice.     

Betting the future online

The Internet has brought, among other things, the online betting exchange. From desks in the City or from laptops on sunny beaches, those in the know or out of it can place bets with each other on anything under the sun, whether likely—Australia beating England at cricket—or the reverse. If you have a hunch that a genetically engineered Tyrannosaur will wander down Oxford Street next year, and if you want to put money on it, Internet betting exchanges will find someone to accommodate you. Leighton Vaughan Williams explains how a simple change in tax regime has brought something other than just a more efficient gambling system. It has created a strangely accurate way of foretelling the future.     

Peer Led Focus Groups and Young People

Peer led focus groups, a qualitative social science research method, and their use with young people are examined. The paper outlines three developments that have contributed to their emergence, namely: traditional focus groups, peer education and participatory research. Drawing on a study in progress, the advantages and challenges associated with peer led focus groups are discussed. A key benefit is that the power differential between the adult researcher and the researched is removed, at least at the point of data collection, rendering peer led focus groups one of few research contexts in which young people can speak collectively with no adult present.     

Decision-making in betting markets

The placing of a bet is a classic example of decision-making under uncertainty. A betting market is also an example of a simple financial market, but one which possesses the advantage that each bet is characterised by a well-defined end point at which it possesses a definite value, i.e. the amount won or lost. Leighton Vaughan Williams explains the implications for our understanding of economic decision-making of the observed tendency for the expected returns on bets to differ markedly at different odds levels.     

Child,Caregiver, and Temperament Contributions to Infant Joint Attention

Little is known about variables that may contribute to individual differences in infant joint attention, or the coordination of visual attention with a social partner. Therefore, this study examined the contributions of caregiver behavior and temperament to infant joint attention development between 9 and 12 months. Data were collected from 57 infants using a caregiver–infant paradigm, an infant–tester paradigm, and a parent report of infant temperament. Nine‐month measures of caregiver scaffolding and infant initiating joint attention (IJA) with testers were significantly related to 12‐month infant IJA with testers. A temperament measure of positive emotional reactivity was related to 9‐month IJA, and a measure of negative emotional reactivity was related to 12‐month IJA. Temperament and caregiver scaffolding measures, however, were not associated with the development of infant responding to joint attention. These results further the understanding of the multiple processes that contribute to joint attention development in infancy, and support the hypothesis that initiating and responding measures tap different aspects of joint attention development.     

Getting Off: Development of a Model Program for Gay and Bisexual Male Methamphetamine Users

An evidence-based gay-specific cognitive behavioral therapy (GCBT) intervention for methamphetamine-using gay and bisexual men was adapted for use in a community-based setting, thereby moving research into practice. The 48-session, 16-week GCBT intervention was revised to 24 sessions requiring 8 weeks and renamed Getting Off: A Behavioral Treatment Intervention for Gay and Bisexual Male Methamphetamine Users. GCBT was modified for implementation within the limited resources and capacity of community-based organizations while also retaining drug use and HIV risk reduction outcomes. Since 2007, Getting Off has been sustained with public health funding at the community site and has been adopted by multiple community-based sites.     

Rendering To Cesa: On the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations

In a recent number of the Journal Ian Cesa recognises the importance, for social researchers, of the newly developed Australian Standard Classification of Occupations, but offers an incorrect account based upon a superseded, preliminary draft. In this brief note a concise and correct summary of the classification is given with references to the relevant and current publications which explain the implementation of the classification for various purposes.     

Anxious Embodiment,Disability, and Sexuality: A Response to Margrit Shildrick

This piece responds to Margrit Shildrick's “Dangerous Discourses,” which offers a theorization of embodiment useful to several fields of scholarship, including disability studies, gender theory, and queer theory. I argue that these fields must take sexuality seriously as a site for both bodily construction and bodily disruption and that the complexities of corporeal contact offer a way to map how discourses of (dis)ability, gender, and race delimit what we perceive as a human body. More expansively, I contend that perception is just as constructed as gender, with norms of embodiment shaping what we perceive as the boundary between disabled and nondisabled bodies. Shildrick's article then becomes a starting point to ask how we might perceive not just difference but differently, opening up new ways to think and live embodiment.