FOUR USEFUL INTERVENTIONS IN BRIEF FAMILY THERAPY*

At the Brief Family Therapy Center we have developed some interventions that have repeatedly been found useful. Once a generalizable intervention is designed for a particular case and found effective, the team attempts to replicate by using it in other appropriate situations. When a pattern of usefulness emerges, it is time to think about and study what is going on that makes the intervention useful. The purpose of this paper is to describe four such interventions, the situations in which to use them or not use them, and our thinking about what is going on in each example.     

Assessing Competency in A Specialized Program

This paper discusses the results of fusing different social work education trends in planning a relevant curriculum. These trends include a focus on practice-specific competencies, specialization of graduate programs, and the emerging role of students as consumers and evaluators of their educational experiences. Recommendations for designing processes of evaluation are offered.     

Within‐rhythm Class Native Language Discrimination Abilities of Basque‐Spanish Monolingual and Bilingual Infants at 3.5 Months of Age

Language rhythm determines young infants' language discrimination abilities. However, it is unclear whether young bilingual infants exposed to rhythmically similar languages develop sensitivities to cross‐linguistic rhythm cues to discriminate their dual language input. To address this question, 3.5‐month‐old monolingual Basque, monolingual Spanish and bilingual Basque‐Spanish infants' language discrimination abilities (across low‐pass filtered speech samples of Basque and Spanish) have been tested using the visual habituation procedure. Although falling within the same rhythmic class, Basque and Spanish exhibit significant differences in their distributions of vocalic intervals (within‐rhythmic class variation). All infant groups in our study successfully discriminated between the languages, although each group exhibited a different pattern. Monolingual Spanish infants succeeded only when they heard Basque during habituation, suggesting that they were influenced by native language recognition. The bilingual and the Basque monolingual infants showed no such asymmetries and succeeded irrespective of the language of habituation. Additionally, bilingual infants exhibited longer looking times in the test phase as compared with monolinguals, reflecting that bilingual infants attend to their native languages differently than monolinguals. Overall, results suggest that bilingual infants are sensitive to within‐rhythm acoustic regularities of their native language(s) facilitating language discrimination and hence supporting early bilingual acquisition.     

Understanding and Reducing Inconsistency in Seatbelt‐Use Decisions: Findings from a Cardinal Decision Issue Perspective

This article has two aims. The first is to present results that partly explain why some automobile drivers choose to use their seatbelts only part time, thereby exposing themselves to unnecessary risk. The second is to offer and illustrate the “cardinal decision issue perspective”⁽¹⁾ as a tool for guiding research and development efforts that focus on complex real‐life decision behaviors that can entail wide varieties of risk, including but not limited to inconsistent seatbelt use. Each of 24 young male participants drove an instrumented vehicle equipped to record continuously seatbelt use as well as other driving data. After all trips were finished, each participant completed an interview designed to reconstruct how he made randomly selected seatbelt‐use decisions under specified conditions. The interview also examined whether and how drivers established “decision policies” regarding seatbelt use. Such policies were good predictors of inconsistent seatbelt use. Drivers who had previously adopted policies calling for consistent seatbelt use were significantly more likely than others to actually drive belted. Meta‐decisions about seatbelt policy adoption appeared to rest on factors such as whether the driver had ever been asked to consider selecting a policy. Whether a driver made an ad hoc, on‐the‐spot seatbelt‐use decision was associated with a perceived need to make such a decision. Finally, participants with full‐time policies were especially likely to deploy their seatbelts by default, without recognizing the need to decide about belt use on a trip‐by‐trip basis. We end with recommendations for reducing inconsistencies in seatbelt use in actual practice.     

Food Pantries and the Populations They Serve: Strange Bedfellows or Strategic Partners?*

Although it is often assumed that food pantries are managed by middle‐class directors whose social background differs significantly from that of their target populations, no systematic empirical evidence concerning this issue exists to date. Moreover, scholarship has yet to explore the extent to which the presumably distinctive social positions of pantry directors and clients might result in the stigmatization of poverty, social welfare programs, and the poor by agency directors. Drawing on insights from attribution theory, this study seeks to shed light on demographic and attitudinal differences between pantry directors and food‐needy persons. The study begins by comparing the demographic characteristics of food pantry directors in a two‐state region of the South (Alabama‐Mississippi) with those of the food‐needy population in the region. It then moves on to contrast attitudinal disparities between these directors and food‐needy persons related to such issues as the causes of poverty, the effects of social welfare programs, and the character of those who utilize food assistance programs. Noteworthy differences in race, education, and religiosity emerge when comparing directors with the populations they serve; however, directors did not differ markedly from their potential clients in key social attitudes. When asked specifically about food pantry clients, directors responded with a mix of sympathy and suspicion. While a substantial portion of directors attribute poverty to structural causes, a significant number also characterize clients seeking food assistance as possibly having unsavory motivations for doing so. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings.     

Speech Perception by 6‐to 8‐Month‐Olds in the Presence of Distracting Sounds

The role of selective attention in infant phonetic perception was examined using a distraction masker paradigm. We compared perception of /bu/ versus /gu/ in 6‐ to 8‐month‐olds using a visual fixation procedure. Infants were habituated to multiple natural productions of 1 syllable type and then presented 4 test trials (old‐new‐old‐new). Perception of the new syllable (indexed as novelty preference) was compared across 3 groups: habituated and tested on syllables in quiet (Group 1), habituated and tested on syllables mixed with a nonspeech signal (Group 2), and habituated with syllables mixed with a non‐speech signal and tested on syllables in quiet (Group 3). In Groups 2 and 3, each syllable was mixed with a segment spliced from a recording of bird and cricket songs. This nonspeech signal has no overlapping frequencies with the syllable; it is not expected to alter the sensory structure or perceptual coherence of the syllable. Perception was negatively affected by the presence of the auditory distracter during habituation; individual performance levels also varied more in these groups. The findings show that perceiving speech in the presence of irrelevant sounds poses a cognitive challenge for young infants. We conclude that selective attention is an important skill that supports speech perception in infants; the significance of this skill for language learning during infancy deserves investigation.     

A cross-sectional audit of student health insurance waiver forms: an assessment of reliability and compliance

To assess the reliability of using a waiver process to ensure compliance with health insurance requirements established by a university, the author conducted a cross-sectional verification and compliance audit of insurance waiver forms received for the 1999/2000 academic year. This study revealed that a waiver form process could not be relied upon to enforce compliance.