Bringing the Media in: Newspaper Readership and Human Rights*

Cross‐national studies examining human rights outcomes have seldom considered the role of the news media. This is unfortunate, as a large body of work in media studies suggests that the news industry effectively educates citizens, shapes public attitudes, and stimulates political action. I juxtapose these two literatures in a cross‐national context to examine the print media’s impact on a state’s human rights performance. First, examining micro‐level evidence from the World Values Survey, I show that an individual’s level of media consumption, including newspaper readership, is positively associated with participation in human rights organizations. Next, I present macro‐level evidence regarding the aggregate effect of a society’s newspaper readership on its human rights record. Analyzing an unbalanced dataset with a maximum of 459 observations across 138 countries covering four waves during the 1980–2000 period, I use ordered probit regression to examine the relationship between a state’s newspaper readership and its Amnesty International rating. I find that newspaper readership exerts strong, positive effects on a state’s human rights practices net of other standard predictors and temporal/regional controls. Moreover, the effect of readership is robust to a number of alternative specifications that address concerns with ceiling effects, measurement bias, influential observations, sample composition, mediation, endogeneity, and the impact of alternative forms of media consumption (i.e., the Internet and television).     

Looking After Children: assessing outcomes in child care. The experience of implementation

A Department of Health initiative has supported the implementation of Looking After Children in over 90 per cent of local authorities in England. The process has required major organisational change and new values and attitudes towards children looked after away from home. Difficulties arise where management and monitoring systems are not available to support these wider changes and to assess the quality of practice. Nevertheless clear benefits to using the system can be identified. Pilot projects in Sweden, Canada and Australia provide an opportunity to compare experiences internationally; strong parallels are evident in some of the current issues facing child welfare.     

‘Youth are not something to check off your to do list’: Poetic inquiry into the symbols youth,parents and professionals use to reimagine supports for youth in foster care

The child welfare system is characterized by fixed power structures, coercion and hierarchies that privilege the perspectives of a select few. These oppressive aspects of the system quelch youth voice and others' voices, especially those with lived experience, frequently omitting them from case- and system-level decisions. Acknowledging the empowering potential of creative and arts-based research, this study used poetic inquiry with youth in or formerly in foster care, parent partners and professionals working in child welfare, inviting them to reimagine how the system could support youth in foster care towards thriving. Through seven poetry focus groups, 41 participants wrote individual and relational poems. Analyses focused on how symbols were used and their suggestions for revisioning child welfare. Seven themes identified the types of symbols used in poems: 1) Nature/Natural Phenomena, 2) Human Body/Senses, 3) Actions, 4) Physical Objects, 5) Paperwork, Cases, Bureaucracy, 6) Connectedness/Family and 7) Strong Emotions. Beyond demonstrating a novel arts-based method, findings offer a new, creative space for understanding the foster care system. Symbols were powerful and cut across life experiences and identities. A key implication pointed to using symbolic language to aid the work of revisioning child welfare towards humanistic and embodied approaches, social justice and well-being.     

The Many Faces of Rural Capitalism

The territorial growth and capitalist development of the United States that began in the late eighteenth century entailed ‐‐ among other things ‐‐ a massive expansion of agriculture that continued until the 1920s. Though based on private, freehold property in land there was no single pattern to this agrarian growth or to agriculture's integration into national and global flows of commodities, finance, and labor. Slave and non‐slave systems expanded in parallel until 1860, but even the destruction of slavery during the Civil War and the subsequent emergence of industrial and finance capitalism did not impose uniformity on American agriculture or undermine independent, household‐based farming.     

“I've Fallen for You like a Blind Roofer:” Some Effects of Listener Characteristics on Interpreting Opening Lines

Until recently, the revolutionary effects of the development of metacommunication theory have been felt in message/behavioral research but have been ignored in the listening arena. In 1992, Cline and Clark (1992a) coined the term relational listening to capture the phenomenon of partners in interpersonal relationships actively attempting to decide the relational information that is embedded in interpersonal messages at an abstract level. Reasoning that relational listening begins at the beginning of a relationship (at the inception of relational contact), Cline and Clark 1992a; 1992b) focused their previous investigations of relational listening on the interpretation of opening lines. Those studies pointed listener characteristics as factors that significantly influence the interpretation of opening tines as a process of relational listening. The present investigation pursues this line of research by focusing on the listener's gender, the listener's self-perceived attractiveness, and the listener's communication predispositions as factors influencing the interpretation of opening lines.     

An alternative ethics for research: Levinas and the unheard voices and unseen faces

Abstract

Some social scientists have criticised the workings of research-ethics committees on the grounds that their biomedical model is ill-suited to some social-science research in both practical and philosophical terms. In this paper we review these criticisms and propose an alternative approach to pre-research ethical review that is based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.     

Functional testosterone: Biochemical assessment of hypogonadism in men – Report from a multidisciplinary workshop hosted by the Ontario Society of Clinical Chemists

Objectives. In 2004, the Ontario Society of Clinical Chemists (OSCC) held an invitational multidisciplinary workshop to establish the most reliable, cost-effective approach to the biochemical assessment of hypogonadism in men.

Methods. Specialists across Canada in clinical biochemistry, endocrinology, family medicine and urology were invited to participate in this workshop which included individual presentations and a consensus component addressing two challenge statements: 1) ‘Determinations for total testosterone (TT) are equivalent to those for bioavailable testosterone (BAT) or calculated BAT (cBAT) or free testosterone (FT) (by analogue radioimmunoassay or equilibrium dialysis) or calculated FT (cFT)’; 2) ‘There is no good evidence that borderline low testosterone concentrations in men should be treated’. The main outcomes were to identify what agreement exists in Canada, what issues were still controversial, and what research remains to be addressed.

Results. Six recommendations based on expert opinion addressed these main themes: investigate with morning total testosterone (TT) followed by repetition and reflexive testing of sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) if testosterone is 8–15 nmol/L with automatic calculation of cBAT; discontinue the use of analogue free testosterone assays; and definitive methods and standards must be available to ensure standardized results.

Conclusions. Total testosterone is a reliable marker for the initial investigation of men presenting with symptoms of hypogonadism; cBAT is a reasonable follow-up test in patients with equivocal biochemical or consistent symptomatic findings.     

Developing cultural competence for social work with families living in poverty

Social workers need to have a good understanding of the cultural contexts within which the families they are working with are living. Whilst each context will be unique in many respects, the majority of families involved with social workers will share the experience of living in impoverished circumstances. At a time when levels of family poverty are rising rapidly in the UK and many other European countries as a result of a global financial crisis followed by economic recession and major cuts in public spending, it is particularly important that social workers understand the impact of poverty on the lives of the adults and children with whom they are engaged. One of the best ways of developing an understanding of any aspect of culture is to listen to people talking about their lives. Using a combination of research evidence based on the first-hand accounts of parents and children, and analysis of selected practice examples drawn from anti-poverty social work in England, the key elements of culturally competent practice for social work with families living in poverty are identified.