Children's experiences of disability: pointers to a social model of childhood disability

The social model of disability has paid little attention to disabled children, with few attempts to explore how far it provides an adequate explanatory framework for their experiences. This paper reports findings from a two-year study exploring the lived experiences of 26 disabled children aged 7-15. They experienced disability in four ways—in terms of impairment, difference, other people's behaviour towards them, and material barriers. Most young people presented themselves as similar to non-disabled children: it is suggested they may have lacked a positive language with which to discuss difference. It is further argued that Thomas's (1999) social relational model of disability can help inform understandings of children's experiences, with 'barriers to being' having particular significance.     

Sexualised Culture and Young People’s Sexual Health: A Cause for Concern?

There is no unified body of knowledge relating to the impact of sexualised culture upon adolescent sexual health. Despite this, concern and public outcry that children are growing up in a cultural milieu saturated with sexualised images exists. Where opinion changes, is not on the existence of sexualised culture, but the nature of its impact upon individuals. The media is often cited as negatively influencing sexuality and sexual behaviours of young people. Current public health policy reflects this belief. In an attempt to re-orientate public health discourses this paper reviews recent literature and research on the relationship between sexualised culture and young people’s sexual health in the UK. It provides an introduction to the evidence and its application within public health policy in the UK. It illustrates a typology of risk and harm and argues that the field is defined by inadequate methodology, covert moralism and one-dimensional interpretation. It identifies a need to expand definitions of young people’s sexual health to include a focus on activity and participation including pleasure, performance, and capacity in order to inform public health and social policy.     

Operationalising professional supervision in this age of accountabilities

Abstract

The paper reviews the tensions, complexities, risks and ambiguities of the role and tasks of the social work supervisor: these can surface in efforts to negotiate individualised supervision agreements with colleagues and with students. Given the marked lack of national and international research attention to processes in social work supervision, the paper explores the skills, principles and arguments for a suggested model of ‘Developmental Supervision’ — in the context of a framework of supervision practice congruent with the knowledge, skills and values of social work. Finally, there is some exploration of the unintended consequences of ‘Quick-Fix’ Supervision for the cutture of decision-thinking and professional practice.     

INVOKING AFFECT

This article interrogates the contemporary emergence of affect as critical object and perspective through which to understand the social world and our place within it. Emphasising the unexpected, the singular or the quirky over the generally applicable, the turn to affect builds on important work in cultural studies on the pitfalls of writing the body out of theory. More importantly for this article, the contemporary interest in affect evidences a dissatisfaction with poststructuralist approaches to power, framed as hegemonic in their negativity and insistence of social structures rather than interpersonal relationships as formative of the subject. The article focuses on the recent contributions of Brain Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in particular, unpacking their celebration of the difference that affect makes. The author's critique of the affective turn focuses on both the illusion of choice that it offers the cultural critic, and its rewriting of the recent history of cultural theory to position affect as ‘the new cutting edge’. While affect may constitute a valuable critical focus in context, it frequently emerges through a circular logic designed to persuade ‘paranoid theorists’ into a more productive frame of mind - for who would not prefer affective freedom to social determinism? Yet it remains unclear what role affect may have once this rhetoric has worked its persuasive magic. In addition, and more worryingly, affective rewriting flattens out poststructuralist inquiry by ignoring the counter-hegemonic contributions of postcolonial and feminist theorists, only thereby positioning affect as ‘the answer’ to contemporary problems of cultural theory.     

Diversity in the School Problems of Economically Disadvantaged Adolescents: Dual Pathways of Reading and Externalizing Problems

This study of economically disadvantaged 13-year-olds examined the relations between serious reading difficulties and clinical levels of externalizing behaviors in school. The variable-centered results showed that family variables, adolescent verbal ability, and negative emotion patterns differed in uniquely predicting reading achievement and externalizing behaviors. The person-centered analyses established robust groups of adolescents showing problems in a single domain, both domains, or neither domain, and that family and adolescent variables distinguished the adolescent groups in predictable ways. Longitudinal results available for a subsample showed that high problem levels for the groups were stable across elementary school and associated with first-grade characteristics. The results provide evidence for relatively independent pathways of reading and externalizing difficulties for young disadvantaged adolescents.     

Parent child relations among very old parents in Wales and the United States: A test of modernization theory

This study contrasts the structure of parent-child relationships of older parents living in Wales, U.K. with those of older parents living in the United States. Specifically, we examine whether the principal dimensions of intergenerational solidarity and their associations with each other, are invariant across two national cultures. Comparable measures are assessed from the responses of older parents participating in three surveys: Bangor Longitudinal Study of Ageing (N = 139), USC Longitudinal Study of Generations (N = 129) and AARP Study of Intergenerational Linkages (N = 102). Overall, there were fewer differences than expected among the samples. Although proximity and contact with adult children were higher among older parents in the Wales sample, there were no appreciable differences in emotional closeness and receipt of help. However, there was a significantly higher correspondence between proximity and emotional closeness among Welsh parents than among both samples of American parents, suggesting that parents in North Wales forge more intimate ties with local children. Moreover, older Welsh parents were more likely than older parents in the American samples to receive help from children who were both proximate and emotionally close. The results are interpreted in terms of the greater importance that neolocality plays in promoting inter generational integration within more traditional cultures and more rural societies.