Principles of Protection for Internally Displaced Persons

For forced migrants who have not left their country but are internally displaced persons, human rights law provides an important framework through which to analyse and address their plight. Two principal reasons underpin this assertion.
First, owing to the compelling need: human rights violations cut across all phases of internal displacement, causing its occurrence, characterizing the conditions of physical insecurity and material deprivation in which the internally displaced often find themselves, and impeding equitable and lasting solutions.
Second, as internally displaced persons remain within the territory of their state, refugee law does not apply and, instead, human rights law provides the fundamental basis for addressing their plight. In addition to human rights law, other standards of international law are also relevant, namely international humanitarian law when displacement occurs in situations of armed conflict and refugee law by analogy.
Drawing on these three standards of international law, Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement have been developed which set out what protection should mean for internally displaced persons in all phases of displacement. This article traces the origins and provides an overview of the content of the Guiding Principles, the text of which is reproduced in full in the Appendix.     

Associations Between Social Anxiety and Nonverbal Processing Skill in Preadolescent Boys and Girls

This study was designed to investigate the potential association between social anxiety and children's ability to decode nonverbal emotional cues. Participants were 62 children between 8 and 10 years of age, who completed self-report measures of social anxiety, depressive symptomatology, and nonspecific anxious symptomatology, as well as nonverbal decoding tasks assessing accuracy at identifying emotion in facial expressions and vocal tones. Data were analyzed with multiple regression analyses controlling for generalized cognitive ability, and nonspecific anxious and depressive symptomatology. Results provided partial support for the hypothesis that social anxiety would relate to nonverbal decoding accuracy. Difficulty identifying emotions conveyed in children's and adults' voices was associated with general social avoidance and distress. At higher levels of social anxiety, children more frequently mislabeled fearful voices as sad. Possible explanations for the obtained results are explored.     

Spreading the word ... hospice information systems

The rapid spread of Saunders' thinking across the world has been facilitated by the Hospice Information service and library at St Christopher's Hospice which she helped to create and further enhanced by Help the Hospices. We have set this article in the context of the Web and other information systems as they are developing today. "Connecting people" and "collecting people's experiences" were terms often used by Cicely Saunders when she described the work of Hospice Information, a service that has in some measure contributed to the rapid spread of her thinking across the world and which is currently in close contact with palliative care workers in over 120 countries. Connecting--or networking--putting people and organizations in touch with each other for mutual benefit and collecting and disseminating people's experiences are central to our work as a U.K. and international resource on hospice and palliative care for professionals and the public. Add to these the crucial role of information provision and advocacy for patients, carers, and health professionals alike and we hope that you may begin to appreciate how our respective organizations have contributed to the spread of Cicely Saunders' vision.     

A natural lead-in approach to response-adaptive allocation for continuous outcomes

Response-adaptive (RA) allocation designs can skew the allocation of incoming subjects toward the better performing treatment group based on the previously accrued responses. While unstable estimators and increased variability can adversely affect adaptation in early trial stages, Bayesian methods can be implemented with decreasingly informative priors (DIP) to overcome these difficulties. DIPs have been previously used for binary outcomes to constrain adaptation early in the trial, yet gradually increase adaptation as subjects accrue. We extend the DIP approach to RA designs for continuous outcomes, primarily in the normal conjugate family by functionalizing the prior effective sample size to equal the unobserved sample size. We compare this effective sample size DIP approach to other DIP formulations. Further, we considered various allocation equations and assessed their behavior utilizing DIPs. Simulated clinical trials comparing the behavior of these approaches with traditional Frequentist and Bayesian RA as well as balanced designs show that the natural lead-in approaches maintain improved treatment with lower variability and greater power.     

Child Protection Social Workers' Engagement in Continuing Professional Development: An Exploratory Study

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study into the nature of child protection social workers' engagement in, and understanding of, continuing professional development (CPD) in Ireland. Qualitative methods were used given the exploratory nature of the research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight child protection social workers from a community-based child protection department in Ireland. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. A review of the literature is provided and key findings are outlined and discussed. These findings relate to the nature and frequency of participation in CPD, perceived motivators and barriers to participation in CPD, and social workers' views on the potential impact of statutory registration of Irish social workers (which was implemented in the months after this study was carried out) on CPD participation. Research limitations and suggestions for future research are considered, along with the implications of this study for social work practice.     

The Time-Course for the Capture and Hold of Visuospatial Attention by Fearful and Happy Faces

Fearful faces both capture our attention and hold it. However, little is known about the time-course for the capture and hold of spatial attention by fearful, and other emotional, faces. In three dot-probe studies we examined this time-course. Experiments 1 and 2 used fearful and neutral faces. In Experiment 1, dot-probe targets occurred 133, 266, and 532 ms post-face onset and in Experiment 2, dot-probe targets occurred 84, 168, 336, and 672 ms post-face onset. In Experiment 1, for both 133 and 266 ms conditions, reaction times were fastest for congruent trials and slowest for incongruent trials with reaction times for baseline trials falling between the two. The same pattern was found for the 84 and 168 ms conditions in Experiment 2. For the later time-points in both experiments there were no significant differences between conditions. To examine whether this time-course is unique to fearful faces, a third dot-probe experiment using time-points identical to Experiment 2 was conducted with happy and neutral faces. The results from Experiment 3 suggest that happy faces captured and held attention in the 168 and 336 ms conditions. Together, the results indicate that attention is captured and held by fearful faces at times earlier than approximately 300 ms, while happy faces also captured and held attention, but on a slightly different time-course from 168 to 336 ms.     

Women's Attitudes Toward Family Formation and Life Stage Transitions: A Longitudinal Study in Korea

Although it is well documented that family attitudes become less traditional over cohorts, little is known about how individuals' attitudes change over time. More research also is needed on how the within‐individual changes relate to important life stage events such as marriage, childbirth, and transitions in education and work. Evidence is particularly lacking in Asian countries, which have socioeconomic and cultural contexts very different from those in the West. To fill these gaps in the literature, the authors analyzed the attitudes toward family formation of Korean women in their 20s and 30s (N = 6,042). Individual fixed effects regression using the panel data from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families revealed that women became more traditional over time and that transitions to marriage and motherhood partly accounted for the change. These findings are explained within the context of very low fertility in Korea and have implications for other rapidly changing societies.     

Dosage matters: The relationship between participation in the Nurturing Parenting Program for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and subsequent child maltreatment

This article uses statewide data on caregivers of young children referred to the Nurturing Parenting Program (NPP) for allegations of abuse and neglect to examine the relationship between program dosage and subsequent maltreatment. At six months after participating in the program, caregivers who attended more sessions were significantly less likely to be reported for child maltreatment, holding other factors constant. At two years after participating, caregivers attending more sessions were significantly less likely to have a substantiated maltreatment incidence, controlling for other characteristics of families associated with maltreatment. These findings demonstrate the program is associated with preventing short-term allegations and longer-term substantiated incidences of maltreatment for a child welfare population. By demonstrating the importance of participation in the NPP, we increase the evidence about effective parent education programs for this population.