What’s keeping you awake at night? Challenges facing trainers in South Africa

Corporate Trainers experience many organizational challenges that require new skills. This qualitative study sought to determine the challenges faced by South African Education Training and Development university students employed as trainers in corporate roles. Findings suggest that trainers require contextual and generic soft skills to meet the requirements of their jobs and that the term trainer embraces a variety of roles of different focus and different status. While there appear to be a common set of problems facing trainers irrespective of location, the interventionist skills and employment policies of the South African government have an important influence on activity in the organization.     

Social and Emotional Functioning of Older Asian American Adolescents

This study identified a constellation of psychosocial problems reported by older Asian American adolescents that was different from their Caucasian peers. When compared to 386 Caucasian American adolescents from the same community, Asian American students performed better academically and reported fewer delinquent behaviors. However, these Asian American youth reported higher levels of depressive symptomatology, withdrawn behavior, and social problems. They also perceived themselves more poorly and were more dissatisfied with their social support. These differences highlight the unique mental health needs of older Asian American youth. Practice recommendations are made that consider traditional Asian values and the role that family members can play in the development of effective treatment plans.     

Uncertainty and the Rise of the Work‐Family Dilemma

Existing research argues that women's wages, consumerism, and changing attitudes dismantled the male bread‐winner system. Families' economic need is dismissed with the suggestion that mothers' rhetoric of “need” was a smoke screen to defend against social stigma for working mothers. Drawing on biennial data from 1965 to 1987, I suggest that consumptive certainty of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to economic uncertainty in the 1970s and beyond. Economic uncertainty provided impetus, legitimacy, and justification for young families to adopt new work‐family arrangements. Hence, economic uncertainty is conceptualized as a real circumstance that substantiates families' reasonable perceptions of need.     

From violence to alliance: Maroons and white settlers in Jamaica, 1739–1795

During the First Maroon War, violent battles between Maroons and British colonists were frequent and violent. How then, after the peace treaties, did former enemies negotiate their new positions as allies? How did colonists accept this new status quo while balancing it with racial beliefs of the era? This article examines Maroon and colonist efforts to progress in a physically difficult and socially charged environment while living side-by-side with a large enslaved population. Ultimately, some influential planters, as opposed to poorer settlers, came to recognise the mutual benefits this uneasy peace provided. That is not to say these colonists were not fearful of the Maroons but that they recognised the usefulness of the Maroon communities.     

Study-work satisfaction and psychological distress in older university students

In order to study the relationships between work satisfaction and mental health in a group known to be at risk for psychological distress, university students who were somewhat older than usual (n=568, average age 24 years) provided infomiation by questionnaire about their satisfactions from study and paid work, and their level of psychological distress. The measure of study satisfaction was a modified form of Warr et al.'s (1979) Job Satisfaction Scale, and had good reliability. Study satisfaction waslower for undergraduate than for postgraduate students, due to lack of clearly defined identity, less supportive relations with fellow-students and teaching staff, and financial hardship. For all subjects the availability of teacher support predicted study satisfaction, and study satisfaction had a major influence on the students' psychologcal well-being.     

Mothers and child care: policies,values and theories

Government expansion of child care services is based on the assumption that both parents are employed (the adult worker model) and make cost‐benefit calculations in choosing child care (the rational economic choice model). This paper addresses this assumption, based on research examining mothers' assessments of appropriate child care. These assessments involve complex moral and emotional decisions around their own and their children's needs, and differ between social groups. On this basis, we conclude that the assumptions underlying current child care expansion policy are inadequate, and that the mere expansion of services is not enough.     

A Weibull Regression Model with Gamma Frailties for Multivariate Survival Data

Frequently in the analysis of survival data, survival times within the same group are correlated due to unobserved co-variates. One way these co-variates can be included in the model is as frailties. These frailty random block effects generate dependency between the survival times of the individuals which are conditionally independent given the frailty. Using a conditional proportional hazards model, in conjunction with the frailty, a whole new family of models is introduced. By considering a gamma frailty model, often the issue is to find an appropriate model for the baseline hazard function. In this paper a flexible baseline hazard model based on a correlated prior process is proposed and is compared with a standard Weibull model. Several model diagnostics methods are developed and model comparison is made using recently developed Bayesian model selection criteria. The above methodologies are applied to the McGilchrist and Aisbett (1991) kidney infection data and the analysis is performed using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Faith‐Based Social Service Organizations and Government Funding: Data from a National Survey*

Objective. The objective of the research reported in this article is to test four hypotheses concerning government funding among faith‐based social service coalitions: that it is positively related to size and organizational professionalism; positively related to attitudes toward government funding; positively related to social activism; and negatively related to organizational religiosity. Method. Our method is the application of OLS and probit analysis to data from a national survey of 656 such organizations. Results. Using three measures of government funding and 12 predictor variables, results are mixed in their support of the size and professionalization hypothesis and generally support the remaining hypotheses. These findings are replicated when we compare coalitions that had and had not applied for government funding. Conclusions. Our findings emphasize that greater religious expressiveness dissuades coalitions from both seeking and receiving government funding, but higher levels of social activism expedite both.