‘Their families or the disability services will take care of them’: the invisible homeless and how Irish government policy is designed not to help them

Most intellectually disabled adults in Ireland continue to live with their parents. For those who want and/or are forced to move out of the parental home, the default option is to avail of the various kinds of accommodation offered by the Irish disability services. This paper critically investigates the range of housing options available to intellectually disabled adults living in Ireland – some more nominal than others – and the governmental role in facilitating members of this population to live in accommodation of their choosing. The relevant issues are given voice by a mother of an adult with Down syndrome. In her search for appropriate accommodation for her daughter, she provides important experiential knowledge regarding both the shortcomings of current Irish policy and the hidden discrimination to which intellectually disabled people are subjected on a daily basis by banks and private landlords alike.     

The Honest broker Role and Evaluation Research Affirmed

This article responds to criticisms of the honest broker role of evaluation research done in the positivist tradition. Quantified, statistically representative information frequently has greater utility and perceived credibility than activist research. It also better fits the information needs of policymakers. The roles of evaluations in a dynamic, national policymaking environment are explored. Mixed results are shown to be the result of variation in recipients and program implementation as well as assessing multiple outcome variables.     

Out of the Limelight: Discredited Communities and Informal Communication on the Internet

In this article we will suggest that print and related traditional media have been used more successfully in constituting a public sphere than in supporting more private and localized forms of community building (Habermas 1989; Stone 1991). The costs and control of print media, in addition to the stability of the content, have reduced the applicability of these media to the improvisatory and quotidian social processes that groups use to help keep themselves cohesive. In contrast, computer-based interactions have been and are being used extensively to support many of the informal interactions and related activities necessary to communities, giving members new tools for negotiating and rehearsing public forms of group life (Jones 1995). We hope to show how the public aspirations and problems of social groups shape their encounters with computers and encourage them to use computer interaction to manage their public representations.     

Speed Culture: Fast Strategies in Televised Commercial Ads

While various theorists explain the postmodern moment or culture by pointing at an acceleration of transformations in macro-social institutions, such explanations remain often abstract and removed from everyday experience. Seeking to concretize how speed is articulated in popular texts, I analyze here the various strategies TV commercial ads deploy to inscribe speed as a normal and desirable quality of everyday life, objects, and self. Focusing on both pictorial and textual dimensions, I call the reader's attention to these strategies, and discuss the possible social and psychological consequences of the ideological orientations they articulate.     

Mortality,Family and Lifestyles

While there is a large empirical literature on the intergenerational transmission of health and survival outcomes in relation to lifestyles, little theoretical work exists on the long-run prevalence of (un)healthy lifestyles induced by mortality patterns. To examine that issue, this paper develops an overlapping generations model where a healthy lifestyle and an unhealthy lifestyle are transmitted vertically or obliquely across generations. It is shown that there must exist a locally stable heterogeneous equilibrium involving a majority of healthy agents, as a result of the larger parental gains from socialization efforts under a higher life expectancy. We also examine the robustness of our results to the introduction of parental altruistic concerns for children’s health and of asymmetric socialization costs.     

Relations Among Religiousness,Spirituality, and Sexual Practices

Although religiousness is commonly associated with limited sexual activity, little is known about spirituality's unique effect. Study aims involved measuring spirituality's unique affect on young adults' sexual practices (frequency of sex, number of sexual partners, and condom use) and determining whether spirituality adds significant increment over well-established predictors. Three hundred fifty-three (61% female) heterosexual young adults aged 17 to 29 completed this cross-sectional, self-report questionnaire study. Hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated spirituality is positively associated with participants' number of sexual partners and frequency of sex without a condom. Spirituality contributed to the prediction of participants' number of partners and condom use above and beyond the variance accounted for by religiousness, alcohol use, and impulsivity. A moderating effect for gender was found. Spirituality appears to have a unique and strong association with the sexual practices of young adults, particularly women, and should be assessed in future studies of young adults' sexual practices.