Marital Conflict and Children's Adjustment: The Mediating and Moderating Role of Children's Coping Strategies

This prospective, longitudinal study examined the role of children's coping strategies in the link between interparental conflict and children's psychological adjustment. Using a sample of 100 parents and children aged 11–14 years, this study investigated children's venting of negative emotion, social support seeking, and problem solving strategies as mediators and moderators of the relationship between marital conflict and child adjustment. Venting negative emotion mediated the long‐term effects of marital conflict on children's psychological adjustment. This coping response also moderated the relationship between marital conflict and children's anxiety‐depression. The role of non‐constructive coping strategies as a mechanism through which marital conflict affects children's psychological well‐being is discussed, together with the need for research to identify intervention strategies aimed at improving children's coping efficacy in the context of interparental conflict.     

A differential approach to the repeated prisoner's dilemma

The repeated prisoner's dilemma game is converted into a differential game by assuming that the players, instead of making decisions individually for each repetition of the prisoner's dilemma game, make decisions on the ratio of cooperative and noncooperative games that they wish to play over the next few moves, and that the actual plays are then determined using this ratio and a randomizing procedure. Although it sounds like a significant departure, this assumption is probably not too different from reality.Since each player can always obtain by his own action at least the payoff which he would receive from the noncooperative-noncooperative pair of strategies, that part of the differential game which is dominated by such a dual noncooperative strategy for either player is an unlikely outcome. This dominated area can be readily computed for any game, including those with more than two players.Formal testing with empirical data was impossible because of uncertainty about the proper null hypothesis. Nevertheless, experimental results reported by Rapoport are consistent with the theory.The authors are, respectively, Graduate Research Asistant in Economics and Professor of Economics and Public Choice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.     

Sports Involvement as Protection against Depressed Mood

Working within a risk and protection framework, this research brief examines the protective inà uence of team sports involvement on adolescent depressed mood. The objective was to understand whether sports involvement positively contributes to mental health independent of the effects of other known protective factors (parental and peer support); and whether it moderates the depressive effects of family, peer, and school‐based risk factors. Analyses focused on 1,036 high school‐aged youth interviewed at two time points. Regression analysis results indicated a signià cant association between team sports involvement and depressed mood among both males and females, which was reduced to insignià cance after controlling for the other protective factors. One interaction effect was observed: for females, but not males, team sports involvement was shown to protect against depressed mood associated with poor school performance (low grade point average). Thus, the role of sports involvement as a positive instrumental activity for females is discussed.     

The empirical assessment of multidimensional welfare,inequality and poverty: Sample weighted multivariate generalizations of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov two sample tests for stochastic dominance

Sample weighted multidimensional extensions to existing stochastic dominance, inequality and polarization comparison techniques are introduced and employed to examine whether or not ignoring multidimensional and sample weighting aspects result in misleading inferences. The techniques are employed in the context of a sample of nations, in essence each country in the sample is represented by an agent characterized by the per capita GNP of that country, the GNP growth rate of that country and the average life expectancy in that country. In essence the inequality that is being examined is that between the representative agents in these countries, intra country inequality is not being measured. The results suggest that multidimensional techniques lead to substantially different conclusions from those drawn from the use of unidimensional measures and that sample weighting also has a profound effect on the empirical outcomes. An erratum to this article can be found at     

‘I may not know who I am,but I know where I am from’: the meaning of place in social work with children and families

Although social work around the world is understood to be a ‘person‐in‐environment’ activity, policy in UK places more emphasis on individual characteristics than on environmental influences on development and behaviour. This results in social work practice which rightly places a strong emphasis on children's attachments to their parents and other significant people, but which largely fails to recognize their attachments to important places in their lives. Evidence from a range of disciplines is used to demonstrate the fundamental links that exist between place, identity and well‐being. The implications of this evidence for social work with children and families are explored, using practice examples to highlight some of the consequences of a lack of ‘place awareness’, as well as ways in which greater place awareness can be used to promote the well‐being of children and families.     

Evaluation of Tweedie exponential dispersion model densities by Fourier inversion

The Tweedie family of distributions is a family of exponential dispersion models with power variance functions V(μ)=μ ^p for . These distributions do not generally have density functions that can be written in closed form. However, they have simple moment generating functions, so the densities can be evaluated numerically by Fourier inversion of the characteristic functions. This paper develops numerical methods to make this inversion fast and accurate. Acceleration techniques are used to handle oscillating integrands. A range of analytic results are used to ensure convergent computations and to reduce the complexity of the parameter space. The Fourier inversion method is compared to a series evaluation method and the two methods are found to be complementary in that they perform well in different regions of the parameter space.     

Creating pathways to participation: a community-based developmental prevention project in Australia

Pathways to Prevention is a developmental prevention project focused on the transition to school in a disadvantaged multicultural urban area in Queensland. The project incorporates two elements: The Preschool Intervention Program (PIP) promotes communication and social skills related to school success; and the Family Independence Program (FIP) (parent training, facilitated playgroups, support groups, etc) promotes family capacity to foster child development. Using a quasi-experimental design (N= 597), improvements in boys' but not girls' behaviours over the preschool year were found. FIP reached more than a quarter of the target population, including many difficult-to-reach families experiencing high stress. Case studies and other qualitative data suggest positive outcomes.     

An ecological approach to social work with children and families

This paper examines research into the social ecology of parents and children, with particular reference to the effects of social support on family functioning and outcomes for children. The historical failure of social work in the UK to successfully apply the findings from this area of research to mainstream work with children and families is considered in the light of the prevailing child protection discourse. Challenges to this discourse are now beginning to emerge from developments in both research and practice. The implications of these developments for the construction of a new discourse, which recognizes the wider social and political factors that shape the family environment, are discussed. It is argued that there is sufficient research evidence available to demonstrate the potential of community social work strategies, which enhance the social support networks of families, to significantly reduce the incidence of child abuse. A number of successful action-research projects of this nature are considered.