Parenting stress among US Army spouses during combat‐related deployments: the role of sense of coherence

The present study seeks to model the effects of parenting stress on contentment experienced by spouses of soldiers deployed to Iraq for long periods of time (n= 200). Using the ABC‐X model from family stress and resiliency theory, a path analysis determined that, in addition to parenting stress, the length of deployment and the ethnic background of the Army spouse also acted as contributing stress factors influencing not only contentment, but perception of family coping and the sense of coherence experienced by the spouse during long‐term deployments (mean = 4.6 months). The mean age of children in the home was found to have significant effect on sense of coherence in this particular sample of women. The influence of the stressors in the statistical model on life contentment was mostly ameliorated by sense of coherence (i.e. perception of comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness in daily life). In other words, spouses with higher sense of coherence experienced better contentment with their lives during deployments. The study also captures qualitative responses and provides several themes associated with daily experiences of Army spouses. Implications for both military and civilian social workers are discussed.     

Systematic handling of missing data in complex study designs – experiences from the Health 2000 and 2011 Surveys

We present a systematic approach to the practical and comprehensive handling of missing data motivated by our experiences of analyzing longitudinal survey data. We consider the Health 2000 and 2011 Surveys (BRIF8901) where increased non-response and non-participation from 2000 to 2011 was a major issue. The model assumptions involved in the complex sampling design, repeated measurements design, non-participation mechanisms and associations are presented graphically using methodology previously defined as a causal model with design, i.e. a functional causal model extended with the study design. This tool forces the statistician to make the study design and the missing-data mechanism explicit. Using the systematic approach, the sampling probabilities and the participation probabilities can be considered separately. This is beneficial when the performance of missing-data methods are to be compared. Using data from Health 2000 and 2011 Surveys and from national registries, it was found that multiple imputation removed almost all differences between full sample and estimated prevalences. The inverse probability weighting removed more than half and the doubly robust method 60% of the differences. These findings are encouraging since decreasing participation rates are a major problem in population surveys worldwide.     

Girls with honour‐related problems in a comparative perspective

Schlytter A, Linell H. Girls with honour‐related problems in a comparative perspective
Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 152–161 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. The aim of this study was to learn to perceive the indicators of honour‐related problems in a girl's everyday life. Our investigation included all girls aged 13–18 years who were about to be taken into care in 2006. The comparative analysis was based on 37 County Court cases in Stockholm County. The girls' exposure to harm in 13 of the 37 cases could be coupled to the demands and values of the honour culture. All the girls in the ‘honour’ group had been victims of mental abuse; they were more isolated than the girls in the ‘other reason’ group and none of the girls in the ‘honour’ group chose to meet their parents in court. We found that the honour culture life situation is new to the social services, which for these girls can mean that they do not have access to the same legal protection as other girls.     

Different problems – same treatment. Swedish juvenile offenders in community‐based rehabilitative programmes

Ginner Hau H, Smedler A‐C. Different problems – same treatment. Swedish juvenile offenders in community‐based rehabilitative programmes Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 87–96 © 2009 The Author, Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Young delinquents may be regarded as children in need of rehabilitation or as offenders deserving of consequences proportional to the committed crime. The focus has increasingly been on the latter, while research shows that individual risk assessment is essential for effective rehabilitation. This study explored self‐reported history of antisocial behaviour among Swedish male offenders 15–17 years of age (n= 189) who were sentenced to participate in rehabilitative programmes conducted by local social services. Antisocial behaviour was extensive and, according to a principal component analysis, consisted of three dimensions: (i) adolescent delinquency; (ii) violence and theft; (iii) drug‐related crimes. Using cluster analysis, the participants were divided into four subgroups representing different levels and characteristics of delinquency, which explained 73 per cent of the variance in antisocial behaviour. The conclusion is that assignment to rehabilitative programmes appeared unrelated to subgroups, i.e. to risk level. Organisational obstacles to an evidence‐based practice are discussed.     

Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections,challenging dominant understandings of autism

In this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements. We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities approach. Our aim is not to offer a cross-cultural account of autism or to assume a coherence or universality of ‘autism’ as a singular diagnostic category/reality. Rather, we map the ways in which what is experienced and understood as autism, plays out in different cultural contexts, drawing on the notion of ‘epistemic communities’ to explore shifts in knowledge about autism, including concepts such as ‘neurodiversity’, and how these travel through cultural spaces. The paper explores two key epistemic tensions; the dominance of ‘neuro culture’ and dominant constructions of personhood and what it means to be human.     

Organizational perspective to gender mainstreaming in the Finnish state administration

Gender mainstreaming has been celebrated as a new policy strategy for change in gender relations. However, its transformative potential seems to be lost in the process of implementation. The aim of this article is to evaluate the policy effectiveness of gender mainstreaming and its ability to bring about change in gendered social structures and practices. Previous research has focused on gender mainstreaming as a policy strategy. This article provides a new perspective on the problems of implementation by approaching gender mainstreaming from an organizational perspective. Gender mainstreaming takes place in certain organizational contexts, implemented by local actors. This article reveals the practices of implementation in the Finnish state administration, specifically in the Ministry of Defence. The analysis is based on a discursive reading of thirteen group and individual interviews collected in the Ministry of Defence in 2012. The article pinpoints two interlinking problems concerning implementation of gender mainstreaming on the organizational level. First, the state officials, who should implement gender mainstreaming, do not have enough information to do so successfully. Second, there is resistance toward gender mainstreaming on the organizational level. This article suggests that negotiations about gender, gender equality and gender mainstreaming as complex issues concerned with social power relations should be included in the process of implementing gender mainstreaming.     

Desertification and the political agenda

Why, more than ten years after the United Nations Conference on Desertification, can so little progress on implementing the Plan of Action be reported? The answer lies, in part, in the characteristics of the issue. As an issue, desertification lacks definitional clarity, and geographic and resource specificity; it is intractable, long-term and latent; and it has a technical bias and no clearly defined villain. These characteristics make it difficult to muster the requisite political support needed to generate sustained policy attention from the public and decisionmakers. If the real problems encompassed by desertification are to be solved, the issue needs to be reframed and recast into a set of manageable and feasible objectives.     

People,fire, and wildland environments

The mixing of people, wildlands, and fire hazards—the urban/wildland interface—is creating a management problem that offers both challenges and opportunities to resource managers. This paper provides an overview of the many facets of the urban/wildland fire interface. The nature of the problem is defined, and the steps that managers have taken since the mid-1980s to define the problem and increase awareness are described. Building awareness of policy problems, however, is only a first step in any policy development process. Concern and interest must be translated into sustained policy action. To do so will require capturing the attention of a broader audience, transferring technological improvements to all impacted interests, and systematically evaluating a broad range of innovative policy alternatives. The activities taking place in Palm Coast, Florida illustrate the involvement and resources of local citizens, researchers, and government entities that will need to be marshalled to work toward a solution of the problem.     

Rethinking reification

Conclusion By now this essay has accumulated over twenty alleged meanings, senses, or aspects of reification; there seems not much point in listing them. Some of them are mutually consistent, almost overlapping; others are incompatible. Some are in accord with the dictionary definition, others not. With some, the sense in which some entity is being converted into a res is evident; with others, try as I might, I cannot find such a sense. The dictionary entry itself is rather slipshod, and interpreters have expanded the term's meaning almost indefinitely beyond it. The main ways in which Lukács and Berger and Luckmann use the word do not fit into the dictionary definition at all. They make the meaning of reification dependent on concepts like can and could that are themselves heavily dependent on the particular context of their use. Lukács's and Berger and Luckmann's discussions are confusing and very probably confused. The whole thing is a swamp.Can this concept be saved? And should it?Within the limits of the dictionary definition, the concept does its work well enough. When Stephen Gould, say, criticizes psychologists for reifying intelligence by assuming that the I.Q. test must be testing something, he and the concept perform a clear and useful function. But if the main concerns are those of Lukács and Berger and Luckmann, in my opinion the term mystifies more than it reveals. Their concerns could be accommodated within the dictionary definition as reification of persons, in the sense of denying people's capacity for agency. But although Lukács and Berger and Luckmann do occasionally use the word this way, for the most part they do not. So articulating their concerns within this sense of the word would require extensive rewriting of their arguments. Would political theorists who share those concerns not do better to abandon the concept?I would unhesitatingly advise it, except for one, crucial consideration. There really is something going on among us that we urgently need to think and talk about, and that Lukács's and Berger and Luckmann's conceptions of reification were meant to address. People do feel trapped, in a way that makes Kafka's little fable so perfectly emblematic for our experience. Despite the prevalence in modern society of all of Berger and Luckmann's social circumstances that favor dereification, very many people do feel helpless to influence the conditions that constrain their lives. Millions of Americans turn their backs on politics, judging that engagement in it would make no significant difference. Millions of members of the underclass feel worthless - though also filled with diffuse rage - because society seems to have no use for them. Almost all of us function in large organizational systems, whether as parts of the machinery or materials being processed, and have learned to take that condition for granted. We function within an economy that depends on a system of international banking and finance that everyone knows to be in constant danger of collapse. Almost all of us submit without question to the technological imperative that daily exhausts our resources, destroys our health, and poisons the earth. And we march like sleepwalkers down the road marked deterrence and nonproliferation, toward nuclear doom. Experts and critics offer various diagnoses of our condition, but whatever measures are actually taken to treat it seem only to make it worse.This familiar litany of troubles suggests a malaise far too extensive and too grave for the powers of political prudence. When a society, or an entire civilization, or even the whole human species seems bent on self-destruction, one suspects systematic, pervasive, fundamental derangement in people's patterns of both thought and conduct. Calling on political prudence here is almost bound to mean calling for more of the same. Here what is needed is a more basic realignment of assumptions, of the sort that has traditionally been associated with great political theory.Wading through the dismal swamp of reification theory, as this essay does, can leave one feeling that such concepts, and political theory itself, are hopelessly abstracted from reality and of no practical use in relation to our urgent political problems, so that political prudence is the only hope. But political reality itself, and the prudence by which gifted actors know how to move within it, always presuppose and depend on theoretical frameworks - if not self-conscious, deliberate theorizing, then unexamined, inherited theory or, more likely, fragments of theories that may well be outdated or mutually inconsistent. So if we seem today bereft of political prudence and judgment, close to our wits' end, that may be because our wits are operating out of such incoherent fragments of inherited assumptions.The message to be derived from the familiar litany of our troubles and our sleepwalking, then, is not the familiar exhortation to, For God's sake, do something before it is too late! For while we may feel inert, we are already doing something - a lot of things - and they are the source of our troubles. Like Kafka's mouse, we run and run. Berger and Luckmann's and Lukács's concept of reification was meant to address precisely those troubles that are the large-scale outcome of our myriad activities, sustained and enlarged by nothing more than what we do. The problem is how to stop, how to do something else, what else to do.That is a problem as much for thought as for action, a problem for action informed and empowered by new thought. Part of the value of Berger and Luckmann's - and even more of Lukács's - discussion of reification is that they tried to provide a general theory of the nature and roots of our condition, orienting us to likely avenues for action, feasible ways and means, probable allies and opponents. Their efforts, this essay has argued, were confused and deeply flawed. The concept of reification is probably not a good tool for the job, and bad tools mean sloppy work. But better sloppy work with a bad tool than no work at all. Those of us who persist in reaching for the word reification as a tool should probably employ greater care. We should require ourselves to specify in each case precisely what we mean, and attend to whether and how our various meanings in various contexts are interrelated. But whether we revise the concept of reification, or abandon it, or just let it continue to slop along in its present state of dishevelment doesn't much matter. What matters is that we continue to think - hard and critically, theoretically and politically - about the conditions that Lukács and Berger and Luckmann were trying to address.Our thinking here must be simultaneously theoretical and political: theoretical in the sense of radical, cutting through conventions and cliches to the real roots of our troubles, seeing social arrangements large-scale and long-range, as if from the outside, which may be what Lukács meant by intending totality. Yet the thinking must also be political, in the sense of oriented to action, practical, speaking in a meaningful way to those capable of making the necessary changes, those Lukács called the we of genesis. For Lukács, of course, that meant the proletariat. But one need not be a Marxist to see the need for locating such a we, and the point of seeking it among those with an objective interest in the right sort of change and the potential power to bring it about. The aim is not some new doctrine to save us from ourselves, but a transformed way of seeing what we already tacitly know and do, which restores us to our real world - the concrete here and now, as Lukács puts it - and our real, living selves, including our capacities for action. That would mean not some access to mysterious, infinite powers, but the appropriation of our actual powers, recognizing the present moment as the moment of decision, the moment of the birth of the new, as Lukács says, out of which we jointly make the future. That is no return to Hegelian idealism, but a recovery of the practical, political Marx.Thinking both theoretically and politically in this way is no easy task; indeed, it is almost a contradiction in terms. Yet it may well be our best hope, and the world is in a hurry. Despite all of the political and philosophical difficulties, unless we undertake this task we may well guarantee our own entrapment, assuring that we will end up like Kafka's mouse, rather than human and free.

---