Indigenous Sistergirls’ Experiences of Family and Community

ABSTRACT

While increasing attention has been paid to the experiences of Indigenous sistergirls over the past decade there still remains a dearth of empirical research on the experiences of this diverse population of Indigenous people. This paper seeks to add to the small body of existing literature by reporting on a thematic analysis of existing media in which 18 sistergirls shared their experiences of family and community. The thematic analysis identified two themes within each of these topics. Specifically, when talking about family, both familial acceptance and rejection were salient themes. When talking about community, both the traditional role of sistergirls in their communities and negative responses from communities were salient themes. The paper concludes by suggesting that increased knowledge about the lives of sistergirls may assist social workers in supporting sistergirls both in their own outreach endeavours, and in providing more culturally competent services.     

‘I Want to Bring Him from the Aeroplane to Here’: The Meaning of Animals to Children of Refugee or Migrant Backgrounds Resettled in Australia

Separation from animals with whom children have caring relationships can lead to considerable loss and grief, perhaps especially in the case of migration. This article reports on a thematic analysis of interviews undertaken with children of migrant or refugee backgrounds who had resettled in Australia. Findings suggest that children who spoke about animals framed their experiences in ways that either evoked a sense of loss with regard to animals or referred to animals as engendering a safe haven following resettlement. The article concludes by exploring potential service responses and encourages a focus on animals' needs in the context of migration.     

Do Hybrid Organizational Forms of the Social Economy have a Greater Chance of Surviving? An Examination of the Case of Montreal

The objective of this article is to contribute to an understanding of the evolution of a population of social economy enterprises faced with the economic crisis, namely by referring to the case of Montreal. We apply a two-step approach. For one, we use an innovative discrete-time survival model that takes spatial heterogeneity into account. In a second step, this model is used to predict the survival of different forms of the social economy, according to various proposed typologies for identifying hybrid organizational forms. It is understood that certain organizational forms (professional social economy) have fared better than others (emerging social economy). Organizations combining several sources of financing and several forms of paid or volunteer work likewise have greater chances of survival.     

Can incentives for research harm research? A business schools’ tale

This paper develops a simple model of the market for academic publications in business and economics. The supply of papers is presented as the outcome of a game between researchers and schools’ deans under imperfect information about the quality of a given paper. The demand for papers brings into the picture the editorial selection process. After defining the equilibrium of this market, the model allows us to study the consequences of more powerful incentives for publication in major journals. It turns out that too large bonuses, as implemented by business schools in the recent years, might bring about several unpleasant consequences, such as a drop in the quality of major journals, a decline in the number of top-tier publications realized by leading research institutions and a fall in the expected compensation of top researchers.     

Bayesian Nonparametric Inference for Random Distributions and Related Functions

In recent years, Bayesian nonparametric inference, both theoretical and computational, has witnessed considerable advances. However, these advances have not received a full critical and comparative analysis of their scope, impact and limitations in statistical modelling; many aspects of the theory and methods remain a mystery to practitioners and many open questions remain. In this paper, we discuss and illustrate the rich modelling and analytic possibilities that are available to the statistician within the Bayesian nonparametric and/or semiparametric framework.     

Impaired Metacognitive Capacities in Individuals with Problem Gambling

Impaired insight into behavior may be one of the clinical characteristics of pathological gambling. In the present study, we tested whether the capacity to evaluate accurately the quality of one’s own decisions during a non-gambling task was impaired in problem gamblers. Twenty-five problem gamblers and 25 matched healthy participants performed an artificial grammar-learning paradigm, in which the quality of choice remains uncertain throughout the task. After each trial of this task, participants had to indicate how confident they were in the grammaticality judgements using a scale ranging from 1 (low confidence) to 7 (high confidence). Results showed that (i), problem gamblers’ performance on the grammaticality test was lower than controls’; (ii) there was a significant correlation between grammaticality judgments and confidence for control participants, which indicates metacognitive insight and the presence of conscious knowledge; (iii) this correlation was not significant in problem gamblers, which suggests a disconnection between performance and confidence in this group. These findings suggest that problem gamblers are impaired in their metacognitive abilities on a non-gambling task, which suggests that compulsive gambling is associated with poor insight as a general factor. Clinical interventions tailored to improve metacognition in gambling could be a fruitful avenue of research in order to prevent pathological gambling.     

Search and research: the influence of editorial boards on journals’ quality

This paper considers the search for the best papers by the editors of an academic journal. At each period, each editor receives a set of submissions and has to decide which paper to accept. Some editors being more demanding than others, researchers choose the quality level of their papers taking as given the composition of the editorial board. According to the specific structures of the editorial board, various equilibria may appear. We show that the journal will publish a high number of high quality papers only when the editorial board is composed by a homogeneous set of very demanding editors.