Too Scared or Too Capable? Why Do College Students Stay Away from the H1N1 Vaccine?

Although college students were among the populations that had the highest frequency of infection for H1N1 influenza, only 8% of them received H1N1 vaccine this past flu season nationwide. During the peak of this pandemic, information about H1N1 vaccine was widely available. However, knowledge test and behavioral data indicated that most college students were not equipped with basic facts about H1N1 and the H1N1 vaccine. To investigate socio‐psychological factors that might have deterred this high‐risk population from learning about and getting the H1N1 vaccine, this study tested the utility of a risk information seeking model in addressing this health communication problem. Data collected from an online survey of 371 college students showed that respondents seemed to overestimate how much they knew about the vaccine. Risk information seeking, however, positively influenced their intentions to get the vaccine. Results suggested that to communicate effectively to this population, it is important to emphasize the difference between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge, monitor emotional responses to potential risks, and promote getting flu vaccination as a socially desirable behavior.     

International adoption and the formation of new family attachments

Clinical studies of children in international adoption reveal unique patterns of psychological adjustment to permanent family care. Pre‐adoption history often includes early object loss, medical and nutritional deprivation, multiple care‐giving disruptions, and the lack of primary care‐giving relationships. These factors and the age at the time of adoption are risks to positive emotional and cognitive development. Adoptive parents may be unprepared for the resulting developmental problems. Most significantly, parents and children are often at different points in readiness to establish an attachment relationship. The parents are eager to claim their child, but the child is unready to respond because of emotional fragility and lack of previous attachment experiences. Two clinical vignettes illustrate the importance of a developmental and medical framework in assessing the unique needs of these survivor children, as well as the necessity of an empathic therapeutic holding environment that can sustain the emerging family attachments under stress. The psychological impact of cross‐cultural adoption and traumatic early beginnings reverberates across time but with empathic parental care and treatment recovery can be significant.     

Family violence in gambling help-seeking populations

Elevated rates of family violence among treatment-seeking problem gamblers compared to general population estimates have been reported in Spain, Canada and Australia. This study examined the occurrence of family violence among 454 problem gambling help-seeking clients (370 gamblers, 84 affected others) recruited through 3 national gambling treatment services in New Zealand. Measures used were the Problem Gambling Severity Index, and a modified version of the HITS Scale which assessed physical, emotional, verbal and sexual abuse. Past-year family violence among gamblers in this sample was 46.8% for victimization, 41.2% for perpetration and 55.0% for any form of family violence. Among affected others the occurrence was 65.5% for victimization, 57.1% for perpetration and 71.4% for any form of violence. The most common type of violence was verbal intimate partner violence. Affected others and women gamblers reported higher rates of violence victimization and perpetration. These findings underscore the importance of screening gambling help-seeking clients for family violence, and the development of prevention and treatment programmes to address violence in this population, with particular attention to affected others and women gamblers. Future research should assess coercive control and the gendered nature of family violence among problem gambling help-seekers.     

Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Roles of Stereotypes,Faces, and The Gaydar Myth

In the present work, we investigated the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called “gaydar,” to detect who is gay. We propose that “gaydar” is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g., inferring that fashionable men are gay). Another account, however, argues that people possess a facial perception process that enables them to identify sexual orientation from facial structure. We report five experiments testing these accounts. Participants made gay-or-straight judgments about fictional targets that were constructed using experimentally manipulated stereotypic cues and real gay/straight people's face cues. These studies revealed that orientation is not visible from the face—purportedly “face-based” gaydar arises from a third-variable confound. People do, however, readily infer orientation from stereotypic attributes (e.g., fashion, career). Furthermore, the folk concept of gaydar serves as a legitimizing myth: Compared to a control group, people stereotyped more often when led to believe in gaydar, whereas people stereotyped less when told gaydar is an alternate label for stereotyping. Discussion focuses on the implications of the gaydar myth and why, contrary to some prior claims, stereotyping is highly unlikely to result in accurate judgments about orientation.     

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.     

‘Actually There is a Brain in There’: Uncovering Complexity in Pathways Through Education for Young Adults Who Have Been in Care

Internationally, research has highlighted disruption to the educational trajectories of young people in care, documenting concern about upheaval and poor educational outcomes. We present findings from English data arising from qualitative longitudinal research with care experienced people (16–32 years) who were also in education, employment or training. The analysis extends understanding of the experiences of those who achieve educational ‘success’, including those who followed non‐linear trajectories. The need for a flexible education system, and leaving care entitlements, which take into account the disruption experienced by young people in care and the consequent possibility of delayed educational pathways, is discussed.     

Writing resistance together

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open‐ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.     

Social Network Challenges to Reducing Consumption: The Problem of Gift Giving

Social networks are typically associated with recruitment tactics. In this article, I offer an additional perspective on social networks as a constraint to social change and an under‐recognized challenge to reducing consumption. I draw on 45 interviews with: voluntary simplifiers, religious environmentalists, and green home owners. Informants, failing to withdraw from gift‐giving networks, instead (1) negotiate a reduction in gift giving, (2) green gift giving, and (3) attempt to transform gift giving into a tactic for lifestyle change. Rather than viewing social networks as channels for cultural cohesion, I argue that we need to better conceptualize the way culture and networks are co‐constituted by tactics of influence within areas of contention.     

Complex home care: challenges arising from the blurring of boundaries between family and professional care

Over the last 50 years, increasingly complex care (such as tracheostomy management, dialysis or enteral feeding) has shifted from hospital to home, with a concomitant rise in patient self-management and care given by family members. Recognition of the importance of the contribution of family care to the health system is also growing. This article reports the findings of a New Zealand study which explored the experiences of family carers who manage technical health procedures at home. It then draws attention to some broader issues raised by shifting complex care from professional management in hospital settings to family care at home, namely the ways in which complex home care blurs the boundaries between professional and family care (creating the ambiguous position of the expert carer) and questions of safety and responsibility in family care. We also discuss the implications for policy around family caregiving in New Zealand. Given the potential physical and mental health impacts of caring, it is time for renewed consideration of what family carers should be expected or allowed to manage and how the health system can support them in their important role.