Signs of resilience in sexually abused adolescent girls in the foster care system

In a sample of 99 sexually abused adolescent girls in the foster care system (64% in congregate living situations and 36% in family/foster care homes), nearly half were psychologically functioning well despite having experienced moderate-to-severe emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. It was hypothesized that these girls with resilient trajectories would differ from the currently symptomatic girls on several protective factors: education, future orientation, family support, peer influence, and religion. The results revealed that the girls with resilient trajectories were significantly more certain of their educational plans and optimistic about their future and had more positive peer influences.     

R-squared and prediction in regression with ordered quantitative response

This paper is concerned with the use of regression methods to predict values of a response variable when that variable is naturally ordered. An application to the prediction of student examination performance is provided and it is argued that, although individual scores are unlikely to be well predicted at the extremes of the range using the conditional mean, conditional on covariates, it is possible to usefully predict where an individual is likely to feature in the rank order of performance.     

Educating a New Generation of Social Workers: Challenges and Skills Needed for Contemporary Agency-Based Practice

Schools of social work are continually challenged to provide professional training which effectively prepares students for the ever-changing and increasingly demanding contemporary practice context. This paper provides an overview of emerging clinical, organizational, and research trends and challenges within agency-based social work practice in the past decade. Implications of these changes for the profession will be discussed and recommendations will be offered for ways in which academic and field educators can best equip social work students with the skills needed to meet these challenges of the current agency-based practice context. These recommendations for social work practice, education, and research include the development of an integrated set of clinical, organizational, and research skills; directions for curriculum renewal and expansion; and academic field partnerships for future research.     

Working to learn and learning to work: A profile of service-learning courses in university public relations programs

The purpose of this study was to use quantitative survey methodology triangulated with qualitative interviews to explore faculty perceptions in four key areas of service-learning in public relations programs: (1) conceptualization, (2) outcomes, (3) institutional support, and (4) instructional techniques. Results support findings in other disciplines. Public relations course goals reflect four different types of stated learning outcomes: (1) application to real-world settings, (2) teamwork, (3) interactions with PR clients, and (4) civic responsibility, but most educators include reflection opportunities only on public relations concepts and not on community engagement.     

Does Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Extraction Affect How Much Youth in Rural Pennsylvania Like Their Community?

Prior research on the impacts of boomtowns on youth provides mixed results. Recent qualitative work suggests youth are ambivalent about change associated with extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale. The Rural Youth Education longitudinal study of youth in rural Pennsylvania provides a unique opportunity to examine youth views about their communities before and during development of the Marcellus Shale. We use two waves of data from 10 rural school districts to assess differences in youth reports of how much they liked their community pre‐Marcellus (2005) and during Marcellus activity (2009), creating a natural experiment. Youth characteristics, aspirations, perceptions of job and educational opportunities, and views about their community are included in multinomial multivariate logistic regression models to predict how much youth like their community. We find no difference in youth liking their community pre‐Marcellus, but a larger share of youth in communities experiencing Marcellus activity by 2009 like their community “a lot” than those in areas not affected. The Marcellus effect strengthens when controls for other factors typically associated with extraction activity and views of community are included in the model, suggesting other, unmeasured aspects of Marcellus‐related activity influence how much youth like their community.     

Improving Social Work Students' Understanding of Health and Social Justice Knowledge through the Implementation of Service Learning at a Free Community Health Clinic

Service learning is a teaching strategy that involves engaging in a mutually beneficial partnership between a community and students in the classroom. Social work education and service learning share core values of service and social justice and, when unified, can offer students unique opportunities to engage in meaningful application of knowledge and skills in a real-world setting. This article provides an exemplar describing the unique student learning outcomes that resulted from a service learning partnership between graduate-level social work students in a diversity course and a community health clinic serving Latino immigrants and Burmese refugees.     

The Distribution of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov,Cramer–von Mises,and Anderson–Darling Test Statistics for Exponential Populations with Estimated Parameters

This article presents a derivation of the distribution of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov, Cramer–von Mises, and Anderson–Darling test statistics in the case of exponential sampling when the parameters are unknown and estimated from sample data for small sample sizes via maximum likelihood.     

Birth outcomes for Arabic-named women in California before and after September 11

Persons who were perceived to be Arabs experienced a period of increased harassment, violence, and workplace discrimination in the United States in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001. Drawing on prior studies that have hypothesized that experiences of discrimination increase the risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, this study explores whether there was an effect on birth outcomes for pregnant women of Arab descent. California birth certificate data are used to determine the relative risk of poor birth outcomes by race, ethnicity, and nativity for women who gave birth in the six months following September 2001, compared with the same six calendar months one year earlier. The relative risk of poor birth outcomes was significantly elevated for Arabic-named women and not for any of the other groups.