Sharing personal information in the child protection context: Impediments in the Australian legal framework

Professionals, including social workers, in the child protection context are frequently required to make decisions on whether to share sensitive personal information about children, their families, and others with colleagues and across institutional and jurisdictional boundaries. Sharing information across agencies and organisations is essential to allow joined‐up service provision and to effectively protect and support children and their families. A legal framework that supports this decision making is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for effective information sharing. This article examines the complex legal framework that governs information sharing across the Australian states and territories. It identifies a number of structural and regulatory elements that unnecessarily limit information sharing or have a tendency to create a culture that is risk averse, rather than proactive, in sharing information. The article suggests structural and regulatory reforms that would improve the legal framework for sharing information, while at the same time giving due recognition to the human rights that come into tension in this policy context: the right to privacy and the rights of the child.     

‘Working fathers' in Japan: Leading a change in gender relations?

Does the emergent phenomenon of ‘working fathers' herald a process of change in gender relations in Japan? Against the background of the current discourse in Japan about new modes of fathers' participation in the family, the article focuses on the small group of working fathers — men who explicitly organize their working lives around family responsibilities — to examine the potentiality of change. This supposed change in the roles of men (and women), at home and in the workplace, is considered in terms of latency, as a ‘slow‐dripping' process. The qualitative research focuses on Fathering Japan, Japan's leading fathering movement, its ideology, its members and their families. The article offers a critical perspective, juxtaposing gender ideology with practice. Exploring the real‐life experiences of working fathers caught between family and work, especially against Japan's gendered corporate culture, the article also addresses the persistence of gender inequality in Japan.     

Examining individual‐level academic risk and protective factors for foster youth: School engagement,behaviors, self‐esteem,and social skills

Students' school engagement is widely regarded as critical for positive school adjustment and overall academic success. Foster youth persistently face poorer educational outcomes than peers and demonstrate lower levels of school engagement and higher levels of academically threatening behaviors. The goals of the present study were (a) to explore relationships amongst various child‐level correlates of school engagement and problem behaviors—namely, self‐esteem and social skills—and (b) to respectively investigate the protective potential of self‐esteem and social skills in the association between school engagement and behavior problems that threaten educational trajectories. Results indicate significant associations between school engagement and problem behaviors, as well as between self‐esteem, social skills, and school engagement. Further, self‐esteem mediated the association between school engagement and both youth‐ and foster parent‐reported externalizing behavior, and social skills mediated the association between school engagement and both youth‐ and foster parent‐reported externalizing behavior. Implications for future practice, research, and policy are discussed.     

Online psychoeducation with parent management training: Examining the contribution of peer support

Psychoeducation is an empirically based intervention that is increasingly delivered online to individuals and groups. Low participation has been a problem for online designs that include peer support. New technology designs have been called for, and in response, we developed a model that synchronized the delivery of individual and group‐based psychoeducational activities for parent management training. We used a problem‐based learning strategy delivered to caregivers of youth demonstrating oppositional behaviours to encourage the development of helping processes and peer support. This mixed methods intervention study had high rates of participant retention and positive measurable changes for two of its three psychoeducational outcome measures. When we merged the study data, we observed that mutual aid—a frequently sought goal of group‐based interventions—contributed to participant outcomes.     

A post‐socialist legacy in transnational families: Russian and Polish women in Finland

In this article, we bridge the analytical gap between transnational anthropology and the anthropology of post‐socialism to explore the transnational family lives of Russian and Polish women in Finland. We point to three interrelated aspects of the post‐socialist legacy – (1) an inclusive understanding and practice of family that involves the interactions of immediate and extended family configurations; (2) intergenerational solidarity among women; and (3) feminine subjectivity built on the socialist ideal of a working mother. Our ethnographies illustrate that Russian and Polish women maintain their transnational families through networks of transnationally dispersed extended families. In women's lives and selves, traditional gendered motherhood and the liberal idea of a working woman are combined and supported by women's intergenerational companionship across borders. Our case studies show that such concrete, informal relations of affection and care provide women with a sense of security and self‐worth amid transnational change.     

Theorizing race in Hawai‘i: Centering place,indigeneity, and settler colonialism

Scholars have argued that the sociology of race in the United States should be theorized within a settler‐colonial framework, while others have advanced a turn toward empire. Theories of settler colonialism are only recently gaining traction within sociology, however, and insights from Indigenous studies remain unfamiliar to many sociologists of race and ethnicity. Contemporary scholarship on Hawai‘i addresses settler colonialism and indigeneity in ways that could inform the sociology of race. The recent scholarship on Hawai‘i reviewed here advances the theorizing of race in three ways. First, it shows the complexity, endurance, and creativity of Indigenous agency, as well as resistance to colonialism. Second, by critically describing settler colonialism, it distinguishes colonial domination from racial domination, while also demonstrating their entanglements. Third, this body of literature examines how racializations are triangulated, organized by selective assimilation, and shaped by contestations over land, places, and resources. By engaging with these three themes, contemporary scholarship on Hawai‘i suggests pathways for future research at the intersection of race, place, indigeneity, and settler colonialism.     

Parent–child joint media engagement in infancy

Early conversations are an important source in shaping children's cognitive and emotional development, and it is vital to understand how parents use media as a platform to engage in conversations with their young children and what might predict the quality of these interactions. Thus, in the current study we explored the nature of parent–child discourse while engaging in media (i.e., joint media engagement) with infants, and how parent (empathic concern and responsiveness) and child (negative emotionality and regulatory capacity) variables might be associated with the quality of engagement. The current study consisted of 269 infants (50% female, M_age = 17.09 months, SD = 3.93; 59% White) and their primary caregiver (98% mothers) who engaged in a variety of in‐home tasks and parental questionnaires. Results established three meaningful codes for both parent and child that assessed positive and negative joint media engagement. Further, results suggested that parental empathic concern was associated with positive parent and child media engagement, while child negative emotionality was associated with lower levels of distraction. Discussion focuses on the importance of studying parent–child discourse in the context of joint media engagement and recommends limiting media exposure before 18 months of age.     

A generalized Bayesian nonlinear mixed‐effects regression model for zero‐inflated longitudinal count data in tuberculosis trials

In this paper, we investigate Bayesian generalized nonlinear mixed‐effects (NLME) regression models for zero‐inflated longitudinal count data. The methodology is motivated by and applied to colony forming unit (CFU) counts in extended bactericidal activity tuberculosis (TB) trials. Furthermore, for model comparisons, we present a generalized method for calculating the marginal likelihoods required to determine Bayes factors. A simulation study shows that the proposed zero‐inflated negative binomial regression model has good accuracy, precision, and credibility interval coverage. In contrast, conventional normal NLME regression models applied to log‐transformed count data, which handle zero counts as left censored values, may yield credibility intervals that undercover the true bactericidal activity of anti‐TB drugs. We therefore recommend that zero‐inflated NLME regression models should be fitted to CFU count on the original scale, as an alternative to conventional normal NLME regression models on the logarithmic scale.     

Focused estimation for noisy and small data sets: a Bayesian minimum expected loss estimator approach

Central to many inferential situations is the estimation of rational functions of parameters. The mainstream in statistics and econometrics estimates these quantities based on the plug‐in approach without consideration of the main objective of the inferential situation. We propose the Bayesian Minimum Expected Loss (MELO) approach focusing explicitly on the function of interest, and calculating its frequentist variability. Asymptotic properties of the MELO estimator are similar to the plug‐in approach. Nevertheless, simulation exercises show that our proposal is better in situations characterised by small sample sizes and/or noisy data sets. In addition, we observe in the applications that our approach gives lower standard errors than frequently used alternatives when data sets are not very informative.