Does Australia Have a Filipina Brides Problem?

This paper challenges the assumption that Australian-Filipina marriages are prone to high rates of marital breakdown; and the belief that the incidence of Australian-Filipina marriages is sufficiently large to warrant the introduction of restrictive immigration policies for Filipinas. First we set the problem of Filipina bride migration in perspective by viewing it in the wider context of Australian immigration patterns — something that has been largely neglected in the discussion so far. Then we review the evidence on marital breakdown and show that Filipina-Australian marriages have been more successful than is commonly assumed. Finally, we consider the standard explanation of the breakdown of Filipina-Australian marriages in terms of ‘cultural differences’. Our conclusion is that much of the discussion has been based on implicit racial and sexual prejudices, rather than factual evidence.     

A FAMILY THERAPIST RATING SCALE*

This article reports the development of a scale for evaluating family therapist skills. The scale includes ten items within each of five skill categories. All items were found to discriminate significantly between videotaped segments of effective and ineffective family therapist skills. Also all skill categories discriminated significantly between experienced and inexperienced family therapists. The interrater reliability and internal consistency of the categories were also judged to be acceptable. Suggestions are presented for uses of the scale in therapist training research.     

Church-based organizing as participatory research: The northwest community organization and the pilsen resurrection project

Participatory research (PR) is a method of social investigation, an educational process and a process of collective action. Few examples of PR in the urban United States currently exist. Church-based community organizing’s process of systematically identifying values and concerns as a way of building relationships based on personal and social knowledge is fundamentally similar to the key characteristics of PR. Two examples of church-based organizing in inner city Chicago neighborhoods are the Northwest Community Organization and the Pilsen resurrection Project. Identification of such church-based organizing efforts as PR may help identify additional urban United States examples of PR, but also raises questions as to the role of the academic and the practical value of PR for community groups.     

An alternative to the kolmogorov-smirnov test for goodness of fit

A test is proposed which requires a better fit in the extremes of a distribution than the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for H₀. not to be rejected. Critical values are calculated for sample sizes up to 100, and approximate critical values are found for larger samples. The power of the test is obtained for a number of distributions, and it is shown that the test is more powerful than some existing tests for a wide range of cases