Poverty dynamics in eight countries

Despite very different macroeconomic conditions, demographic structures and degrees of income inequality, favorable income changes among low-income families with children were widespread and strikingly similar across the eight countries in our study. In most European countries, the combination of modest inequality and extensive mobility among the poor enabled virtually all families to avoid relative income deprivation at least occasionally. However, even substantial mobility among the poor in the Unites States could not elevate the living standards of one in seven white and two in five black families to a level that was half that enjoyed by a typical American family.This paper is the result of a collaborative research project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the European Science Foundation as part of its Network on Household Panel Studies. CEPS/INSTEAD provided substantial in-kind support. Deborah Laren provided excellent research assistance. Jos Berghman, Tim Callan, Bengt-Olof Gert, Peter Gottschalk, Pierre Hausman, Bruno Jeandidier, Kjell Janssen, Stephen Jenkins, Anders Klevmarken, Katherine McFate, Udo Neumann, Willard Rodgers, Gaston Schaber, Tim Smeeding, Daniel Stripinis, Hedwig Vermeulen, Wolfgang Voges and Brendan Whelan provided substantial assistance and advice during the course of the project. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the conference Poverty and Public Policy in Paris in January, 1991. The paper was edited by Timothy M. Smeeding, Syracuse University, using two anonymous referees.     

Neighborhood resources, racial segregation, and economic mobility: Results from the Gautreaux program

This study uses the unique design of the Gautreaux residential mobility program to estimate the long-run impacts of placement neighborhood conditions on the AFDC receipt (N = 793) and employment levels (N = 1258) of low-income Black women. We find that women initially placed in neighborhoods with few Black residents and moderate to high neighborhood resources experienced significantly more time employed when compared with women placed in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Blacks and a low level of resources. Women placed in neighborhoods with high levels of resources and low Black populations also spent significantly less time on welfare than women placed in highly Black segregated areas with low levels of resources.     

Adoption from care in Northern Ireland: problems in the process

ABSTRACT This is a study of the processes for freeing children for adoption in Northern Ireland. The focus was the time taken from admission to care to adoption order. The findings confirmed that the process is dogged by delay at each stage. In total the average time from the child becoming looked after to the granting of an adoption order was 4.5 years. Most of the time taken was in the stages for which social services had lead responsibility, principally the decision to pursue adoption as the plan for a child. The children were very young when admitted to care – average age 1 year 7 months. Most were admitted to care because they were being neglected. Their parents were well known to social services and had multiple problems. Most parents unsuccessfully contested the social services’ application and this contributed much to the delay. Their former foster parents adopted almost half of the children and these children tended to be placed more quickly with their adopters than those placed with adopters who were not their foster parents prior to the adoption process.     

The Faculty Field Liaison: An Essential Role for Advancing Graduate and Undergraduate Group Work Education

The faculty field liaison is responsible for representing a school’s social work program in monitoring agency internship sites and agency field instructors for an assigned cohort of the program’s BSW or MSW internship students. This article focuses on the faculty field liaison’s role in effectively monitoring the internship site and field instruction to ensure the internship experience is successfully providing the group work skills and knowledge the BSW or MSW student intern needs to be an effective group work practitioner. The field instructor role has been given a lot of attention in the social work literature, but the role of the faculty field liaison has been given little to no attention. This is despite the faculty field liaison’s significant responsibility of representing the BSW and MSW program by bridging the relationships between the program, the field instructor, and the internship student. This article identifies the importance of the faculty field liaison responding to concerns in group work education in the classroom and field setting. Practice vignettes illustrating the work of the faculty field liaison in monitoring group work assignments and field instruction supervision for graduate and undergraduate social work interns are provided.     

The Consequences of Parental Underestimation and Overestimation of Youth Exposure to Violence

This study investigated differences in parent and child estimates of the child's exposure to violence. Using data (N = 1,517) from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, analyses related differences between parent and child reports of the child's exposure to violence to the child's psychosocial functioning. Most parents (66%) underestimated their children's exposure to violence. Further, parental underestimation was associated with the child's internalizing and externalizing problems and delinquent behaviors but parental overestimation was not. Family support partially mediated these associations. Parental underestimation of the child's exposure to violence, therefore, reflected lower levels of family support, which in turn led to more internalizing and externalizing problems and delinquency for the child.     

Neural Correlates of Individual Differences in Infant Visual Attention and Recognition Memory

Past studies have identified individual differences in infant visual attention based upon peak look duration during initial exposure to a stimulus. Colombo and colleagues found that infants that demonstrate brief visual fixations (i.e., short lookers) during familiarization are more likely to demonstrate evidence of recognition memory during subsequent stimulus exposure than infants that demonstrate long visual fixations (i.e., long lookers). This study utilized event‐related potentials (ERPs) to examine possible neural mechanisms associated with individual differences in visual attention and recognition memory for 6‐ and 7.5‐month‐old infants. Short‐ and long‐looking infants viewed images of familiar and novel objects during ERP testing. There was a stimulus type by looker type interaction at temporal and frontal electrodes on the late slow wave (LSW). Short lookers demonstrated an LSW that was significantly greater in amplitude in response to novel stimulus presentations. No significant differences in LSW amplitude were found based on stimulus type for long lookers. These results indicate deeper processing and recognition memory of the familiar stimulus for short lookers.     

Adolescents' and Parents' Perceptions of Runaway Behavior: Problems and Solutions

This exploratory study examined runaway adolescents' and parents' perceptions about youth and family life and explored reasons youth run away and what could be done that would help them remain home. Comparisons between adolescents' and parents' reports of family functioning demonstrated significant discrepancies. Few parents assumed any responsibility for the runaway behavior or change efforts. More adolescents blamed themselves or cited difficulties in parent–child relationships and offered ideas that entailed altering their attitudes and behaviors or family relationships. The implications of the findings for interventions and future research efforts are explored.     

Emotion Socialization as a Framework for Understanding the Development of Disorganized Attachment

Recent years have seen the emergence of accounts of the origins of the Disorganized attachment relationship in early mother–infant interaction, each building on the pioneering work of Main and Hesse—dysfunctional emotional processes figure prominently in all these accounts. This paper applies a framework based on two complementary theories of emotion socialization, Gianino and Tronick's (1992 ) Mutual Regulation Model and Gergely and Watson's (1996 ) Social Biofeedback Theory, to suggest an emotion‐based mechanism consistent with recently proposed models of the development of Disorganized attachment. The framework is used to generate hypothetical accounts of the role of dysfunctional emotional processes and maladaptive emotion socialization in early mother–infant interaction in the development of Disorganized attachment along two distinct pathways, one associated with actual abuse of the infant and the other associated with maternal unresolved trauma.