Deporting Fathers: Involuntary Transnational Families and Intent to Remigrate among Salvadoran Deportees

One‐fourth of deportees from the United States are parents of US‐citizen children. We do not know how separation from families affects remigration among deportees, who face high penalties given unlawful reentry. We examined how family separation affects intent to remigrate among Salvadoran deportees. The majority of deportees with children in the United States were also separated from their spouse, and the vast majority had US‐citizen children. Family separation was the single most important factor affecting intent to remigrate. We interpret these findings in light of immigration policy debates.     

Comparing Social Work Students’ Perceptions of Risk Using Online Discussion Fora: Lessons Learned from a European Pilot Project

Comparisons of international child welfare systems have identified two basic orientations to practice; a ‘child protection’ orientation and a ‘child welfare’ orientation, which are founded upon fundamentally different values and assumptions regarding the family, the origins of childcare problems, and the proper role of the state in relation to the family. This paper describes a project which sought to compare how undergraduate social work students from three European Universities perceive risk in referrals about the welfare of children and to explore the impact of different cultural, ideological and educational contexts on the way in which risk is constructed by students. Students from Northern Ireland, Germany and Poland examined three vignettes via 10 online discussion fora each of which provided a narrative summary of their discussion. The paper presents some findings from the analysis of the qualitative data emerging from the student discussions and draws out the lessons learned in terms of how the project was designed and implemented using online discussion fora.     

Attitudes to Employment of Professionally Qualified Refugees in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the attitudes to work and experiences seeking employment of professionally qualified refugees enrolled on a course to enhance their employability skills in Leeds, United Kingdom (UK). We analyse the results within the framework of conceptual models describing the transition of refugees into employment (which are essentially linear) and those that categorize refugees according to their resettlement styles based on their social features and the host society's response. Our data reinforce that these people are (initially at least) highly motivated to work, strongly identify with their profession and suffer considerable loss of self‐esteem as they are unable to secure appropriate employment. Attitudes to securing employment were often related to their length of time in the UK. Recent arrivals were more positive about returning to their profession, even if this meant retraining, developing skills and time spent in alternative employment. Many of those here for longer were resigned to retraining, and the worst cases felt despair and feelings of betrayal. Our work showed that many had poor job search strategies and a lack of knowledge of the culture and norms of their chosen profession. We argue that the generic support of statutory employment services or the voluntary sector is inappropriate and that there is a role for professional bodies to be more active in their engagement with these groups of people. The results suggest that conceptual models need to be more nuanced to capture the experiences of these refugees: attitudes to work can cycle from optimism to disillusionment, so a linear model will not capture the full complexity, and we also found evidence of shifting among categories of resettlement styles.     

Reconfiguring Social Work Education to Fight HIV–AIDS: A Model for Developmental Contexts

This article charts the response of social work educators in addressing HIV–AIDS. Based at the University of the West Indies in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the faculty within the Social Work Unit developed a model of teaching, research and practice that was innovative and transcended cultural, geographical and professional boundaries. The model has contributed a lasting legacy of knowledge and culturally relevant practices to enhance the capacity and effectiveness of social workers working with people living with HIV–AIDS (PLWHIV). Inherent in the propositions that underpinned the model was a belief in the role of education in alleviating psychosocial and other impacts of social problems. This article describes this unique initiative and discusses its relevance to current social work practice and the implications for contemporary social work education. The authors argue that while social work draws on a common body of knowledge, an established set of professional skills and a universal code of values, these central tenets of the profession should not be regarded as concrete and fixed but must be figured and reconfigured as needed to address emerging contemporary problems and their specific sociocultural manifestations.     

Reporting Systems for Sustainability: What Are They Measuring?

The dominance of the neoliberal discourse in the sustainability debate has tended to privilege the economy over environment and social dimensions with implications for what is measured by sustainability monitoring systems. Moreover, systems to measure sustainability, including those influenced by neoliberal discourse, lack robust definitions and fail to address the interrelationship between social, economic and environmental contexts. If sustainability indicators are to help understand the interrelated forces driving change, by providing indications of sustainability, then the indicators should be derived from an epistemologically consistent conceptual framework which encapsulates clearly defined phenomena. The paper discusses whether sustainability indicators in the Australian context are derived from an epistemologically consistent framework. It is argued that the validity of current sustainability reporting systems is contestable.     

Johann Peter Süssmilch: A German Prophet in Foreign Countries

The clergyman Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707–1767), chaplain to King Frederick II of Prussia, deserves to be called the father of German demography and was recognized as such in his own lifetime in his country of origin and throughout Europe, except possibly in France and Italy. In his Göttliche Ordnung (1741 and 1761–2), he attempted to explain the regularity of vital phenomena as being due to divine intervention. His conception of a ‘divine’ order soon gave way to that of a ‘natural’ order. His life tables, though incorrect, continued to be used by insurance offices well into the nineteenth century. His views about the relationships between mortality on one hand, and fertility and nuptiality on the other led to controversies between Malthus, Sadler and other scholars. Later, his ideas were given a broader economic and social interpretation. Whether as the last representative of ‘primitive’ demography, or the first scientific scholar of the subject, he contributed to the triumph of political arithmetic throughout Europe.     

Strong laws of large numbers for dependent heterogeneous processes: a synthesis of recent and new results

This paper surveys recent developments in the strong law of large numbers for dependent heterogeneous processes. We prove a generalised version of a recent strong law for Lz-mixingales, and also a new strong law for Lpmixingales. These results greatly relax the dependence and heterogeneity conditions relative to those currently cited, and introduce explicit trade-offs between dependence and heterogeneity. The results are applied to proving strong laws for near-epoch dependent functions of mixing processes. We contrast several methods for obtaining these results, including mapping directly to the mixingale properties, and applying a truncation argument.     

Memory for One‐Time Experiences in the Second Year of Life: Implications for the Status of Episodic Memory

Memory based on a one‐time experience is an important element of its definition as “episodic.” Infants' memories for one‐time experiences over long delays are largely unexplored. Using elicited imitation, we tested 20‐ and 16‐month‐olds' (Experiment 1) and 13‐month‐olds' (Experiment 2) memories as a function of number of experiences and delay. Over 1 month, 20‐ and 16‐month‐olds remembered individual actions of one‐time events; 20‐month‐olds also remembered temporal order; with verbal reminders, 16‐month‐olds did as well. Over 3 months, recall depended on multiple experiences. Thirteen‐month‐olds' required multiple experiences, even over 1 month. The findings speak to the gradual emergence of an important element of episodic memory, namely the ability to preserve memories of one‐time experiences over long periods of time.     

Nativity and Self‐Assessed Health among Pre‐Retirement Age Hispanics and Non‐Hispanic Whites1

Economic, social and familial resources are known to influence subjective health assessments. We examine the salience of nativity in determining how these resources influence self‐assessed health using a large, nationwide sample of Hispanic and non‐Hispanic white adults. The results indicate that while education, accumulated assets and marital status benefit the physical and emotional health of the native and foreign‐born, family resources and income are significant only for the native‐born. English language proficiency is a significant protective factor for both groups and is especially protective for immigrants. These surprising findings call into question previous studies stressing the positive role of the family in maintaining immigrant health.