‘Individual and connected’: an exploration of young people’s discourses about youth cafes in Ireland

Since 2000, youth cafes are accorded prominence in Irish youth policies and research. Youth cafes are drug and alcohol free recreational spaces and research shows that they impact positively on young people. Youth cafes are broadly similar to youth clubs, but they are less structured and are primarily youth-led spaces. This paper draws on qualitative materials from a national study of youth cafes in Ireland, arguing that young people’s perceptions of youth cafes are linked to individuality and connectedness. In this paper, we explore these discourses surrounding individuality and connection in detail and argue that youth work in the twenty-first century must simultaneously appeal to young people’s need for space to ‘be’ and to find themselves and provide a structure within which they can relate to others and wider society.     

走向真正的环境审美：化解景观审美经验中的边界和对立

为了使审美体验在环境公共行动中发挥出更加积极的作用，美学家必须化解与景观和环境相关的审美体验、审美判断以及决策中的一系列对立性要素，诸如审美主体与客体的对立、非人类与人类的对立、个体与群体的对立、地方民众与专家的对立。真正的环境审美体验是积极的、参与性的、可交流的，而不是消极的、私人的、主体性的。通过这种体验，我们可以消除一些妨碍美学在公共领域发挥重要作用的障碍。一些途径可以打破人与自然的界限，比如园艺、环境艺术以及相关的对于环境的审美估价方式，都能够发展人与自然的和谐关系。为了鼓励对景观更加亲密、更加积极的审美参与，应当重视审美沟通的价值，即与更多的人讨论和分享我们的环境审美体验和审美价值。     

Inequalities in child welfare intervention rates: the intersection of deprivation and identity

Child welfare systems internationally exhibit very large inequalities in a variety of dimensions of practice, for example, in rates of child protection plans or registrations and out‐of‐home care. Previous research in the midlands region of England (Bywaters; Bywaters et al.) has detailed key aspects of the relationship between levels of neighbourhood deprivation and intervention rates. This paper reports further evidence from the study examining the intersection of deprivation with aspects of identity: gender, disability, ethnicity and age. Key findings include a decreasing gender gap and a decreasing proportion of children in need reported to be disabled as deprivation increases. The data challenge the perception that black children are more likely than white to be in out‐of‐home care, a finding that only holds if the much higher level of deprivation among black children is not taken into account. Similarly, after controlling for deprivation and age, Asian children were found to be up to six times less likely to be in out‐of‐home care. The study requires replication and extension in order that observed inequalities are tested and explained. Urgent ethical, research, policy and practice issues are raised about child welfare systems.     

Developing Children's Participation: Lessons from a Participatory IT Project

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, advances in the sociology of childhood and the consumer rights movement have placed the spotlight on children's rights in society, challenging those working with children to examine how they share power and ensure that children's views are taken on board. While childrens’ service practitioners are broadly supportive of the concept of participation and there are numerous examples of how children's participation has been realised in practice, many are unsure where to begin due to the range of options, considerations and challenges associated with participatory work. This article describes and analyses the process used by Barnardos in developing and implementing a participatory approach in a children's IT project in Galway City, Ireland. The process employed, the challenges encountered and the added value the participatory approach brought to the project are outlined. Finally, four broad lessons emerging from the experience are discussed, namely, that a clear framework and reflective practice is valuable that good participatory work is inextricably linked with good project management; that small efforts at participatory work can increase capacity and appetite for further work; and that there is a role for informal approaches in the context of a formal participatory framework. © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.     

Personality and other Factors Affecting Stress in Families

From a large urban centre in Australia a population of fifty families were selected for interview. Of these, twenty-six families were divided into two groups — high-stress and low-stress. When compared on twenty-eight variables, the following were found to be associated with the high-stress families: Spouse personality mismatch on the extroversion-introversion scale from Lanyon's Psychological Screening Inventory, associated communication problems, spouse mismatching on the discomfort (neuroticism) scale, higher discomfort and alienation scores for wives than for husbands and lower than usual non-conformity scores for husbands. While single parenting was also associated with high stress, single mothers showed lower discomfort scores than mothers in two parent high stress families. It is concluded that important intrinsic factors may contribute significantly to stress in families and that the previously reported higher levels of neuroticism among married females when compared to married males are often associated with personality mismatching and communication problems in the family.     

Rerum Novarum and the modern corporation

This paper argues that Rerum Novarumis a classic text. The classic character of Rerum Novarumis evident in relation to contemporary business ethics, particularly when Pope Leo addresses questions concerning the moral workplace and the moral economic order. The paper is in three parts. The first section explores Rerum Novarumand Pope Leo's model for creating the moral workplace. The second section argues that Rerum Novarumanticipates, both conceptually and normatively, the thrust of much contemporary work in business ethics. Conceptually the encyclical responds to issues on the micro and macro arenas as does contemporary business ethics. Normatively the encyclical argues that moral reasoning ought to be a part of management decisions. Rerum Novarumappeals to personal forces and calls upon the conscience of managers. The third section suggests that the decisions of some modern corporations are consistent with the insights of Leo XIII. Three cases are used to illustrate themes in Rerum Novarumthat are morally significant today.     

Infants’ learning of non-adjacent regularities from visual sequences

Tracking adjacent (AD) and non-adjacent (NAD) dependencies in a sequence of elements is critical for the development of many complex abilities, such as language acquisition and social interaction. While learning of AD in infancy is a domain-general ability that is functioning across different domains, infants’ processing of NAD has been reported only for speech sequences. Here, we tested 9- to 12- and 13- to 15-month-olds’ ability to extract AxB grammars in visual sequences of unfamiliar elements. Infants were habituated to a series of 3-visual arrays following an AxB grammar in which the first element (A) predicted the third element (B), while intervening X elements changed continuously. Following habituation, infants were tested with 3-item arrays in which initial and final positions were switched (novel) or kept consistent with the habituation phase (familiar). Older infants successfully recognized the familiar AxB grammar at test, whereas the younger group showed some sensitivity to extract to NAD, albeit in a less robust form. This finding provides the first evidence that the ability to track NAD is a domain-general ability that is present also in the visual domain and that the sensitivity to such dependencies is related to developmental changes, as demonstrated in the auditory domain.