The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian Americans

The status attainment model highlights the role of family socioeconomic status (SES) in the intergenerational reproduction of educational attainment; however, the model falls short in predicting the educational outcomes of the children of Asian immigrants, whose attainment exceeds that which would have been predicted based on family SES alone. On the other hand, the cultural capital model gives primacy to the role of middle-class cultural capital in reproducing advantage, but neglects contextual factors outside the family. We fill a theoretical and empirical niche by introducing a model of cultural frames to explain how the children of immigrants whose families exhibit low SES and lack middle-class cultural capital attain exceptional educational outcomes. Based on in-depth interviews with adult children of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants randomly drawn from the survey of Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles, we show that Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant parents and their children use ethnicity as a resource to construct and support a strict “success frame” that helps the poor and working class override their disadvantages. However, there are unintended consequences to adopting such a strict success frame: those who do not meet its exacting tenets feel like ethnic outliers, and as a result, they distance themselves from coethnics and from their ethnic identities because they link achievement with ethnicity. We conclude by underscoring the benefits of decoupling race/ethnicity and achievement for all groups.     

Evidence-Based Practice in Social Work: Challenges and Opportunities for Clinicians and Organizations

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is increasingly emphasized in social work, yet effective approaches for translating research evidence into social work practice remain elusive. Despite a growing body of evidence describing effective interventions with a variety of populations, social workers continue to encounter substantial challenges with incorporating knowledge gained from these intervention studies into their routine practice with clients. This paper presents the current research outlining the known barriers and promoters to using EBP in social work clinical practice. Because social workers practice within the context of organizations, we consider the barriers that exist at both the individual and organizational levels that affect clinical social work practice. In addition to addressing the various challenges to incorporating research evidence into practice, we will also discuss a variety of emergent opportunities accompanying the move toward EBP that can be leveraged by clinicians in their social work practice with clients.     

Why Does Involvement in Voluntary Associations Promote Trust? Examining the Role of Network Diversity

Scholars argue that trust is fundamental to maintaining a healthy society, and consequently, recent evidence that trust may be declining in the United States has generated an interest in the determinants of trust. According to the social capital literature, particularly the work of Robert Putnam, involvement in voluntary associations influences the development of generalized trust. One way in which organizational participation is thought to foster trust is through creating more diverse, or bridging, social networks. However, scarcely any research has empirically examined this mechanism. Using data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, I test whether network diversity (ties to persons from different social backgrounds) accounts for some of the influence of organizational involvement on trust. The results suggest that the influence of involvement in multiple associations on trust is largely mediated by its influence on network diversity. In addition, while recent research observes that some predictors of trust vary by race and ethnicity, I find no differences in these relationships across non‐Hispanic white, African American, and Latino respondents.     

Institutionalizing Public Scholarship: Lessons from Feminism and Symbolic Interactionism

This article contributes to recent debates about public sociology by considering the potential harmful consequences of seeking legitimacy for committed scholarship within academic institutions. After discussing public scholarship's place within the corporate university, we reflect on how institutionalizing “scholarship with commitment” might create routine practices and standardized expectations that could discourage organic interactions with various publics. Feminism's role in the academy exemplifies the consequences of institutionalizing committed scholarship. Drawing on insights from feminist and symbolic interactionist traditions and writing from a Canadian perspective, we discuss promising strategies for resisting the stagnation and/or habitualization of public and committed scholarship.     

A Developmental Approach to Recognition of Prior Learning in Social Work Field Education

This paper comments on the policy issue of recognition of prior learning (RPL) in social work education. Contrasting approaches to RPL are explored through a case study of Charles Sturt University’s experiences with RPL in its professional entry social work programs. RPL for field education in Australian social work education has been a contested issue within the profession and for social work education providers since its introduction in 2008. Notwithstanding the Australian Association of Social Workers’ credentialist approach to RPL, Charles Sturt University’s experience is that a developmental approach is preferable and can be a transformative professional education strategy.     

Body Disapproval Among Adolescent Male Sexual Offenders: Prevalence and Links to Treatment

Using a large sample of male youth adjudicated for sexual crimes (N = 306), we examined the relationship between body disapproval, childhood sexual abuse, and sexually aggressive behaviors using four different linear regression models. In the models we explored different aspects of sexually aggressive behavior including victim age, level of sexual perpetration, use of threats, and total number of victims. We found a clinically significant statistical trend of the effect of body disapproval on victim age (p = .067). In addition, childhood sexual abuse was significantly related to all aspects of sexually aggressive behaviors (p < .05). Overall, 19.6 % of the sample youth self-reported at least clinically concerning levels of body disapproval. These clinically important results indicate that the incorporation of body disapproval treatment may be useful in the overall treatment of some male youth who have perpetrated sexual crimes. The prevalence of concerning body disapproval among this vulnerable population of youth makes further research on body disapproval treatment of the upmost importance.     

Cultural Studies in Black and White

Political intervention is deeply etched in the history and theory of Cultural Studies. The vehicle of intervention is typically understood as textual and the measure of success as ‘has it changed the world?’ This graphic and textual essay argues for and enacts thinking of and practising intervention more innovatively and more modestly: as equally extra-textual, and as a site for experimentation in the folds among theory, practice, and the quotidian. The author’s original black and white charcoal and pastel images are paired with text to explore the potential for an articulation of the visual and the textual to engage, convey, actualize, and produce concepts and insights of Cultural Studies. In evocative images and accessible language it enacts a new mode of engaging the theory and practice of Cultural Studies, specifically engaging concepts of articulation and assemblage, movement and things, questions of identity, the importance of affect, the power of transformation, youth cultures and resistance, The Black Lives Matter movement and matters of race, the struggles of women, the challenge of overcoming culturally engendered hatred of difference, and the difficulties of negotiating change in the precarious circumstances of contemporary culture.     

The Long‐Term Effects of Caregiving on Women's Health and Mortality

Caregivers experience numerous mental and physical health effects from the stress of providing care, but we know little about whether these problems persist in the long term and whether long‐term effects differ across caregiving contexts. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women, we examined the relationship between caregiving and long‐term patterns of depressive symptoms, functional limitations, and mortality. We also explored the health effects of caregiving in‐home versus out‐of‐home and by caregiver/care‐recipient relationship. Analyses show that in‐home spousal and parental caregiving predict increased depressive symptoms and functional limitations in the long term but are unassociated with mortality, whereas caregiving outside the home is unassociated with later depression and functional limitations but predicts a lower risk of mortality. This study highlights the usefulness of approaching stressful experiences such as caregiving from the life course perspective, viewing them as processes that unfold over time within specific contexts that may carry delayed or cumulative consequences.     

Spillover in the Home: The Effects of Family Conflict on Parents' Behavior

Conflict with a spouse or child may generate spillover, defined as short‐term affective changes in parents that affect their behavior with other family members. In a diverse sample of 86 parents, this 56‐day diary study examined daily bidirectional spillover between conflict in the marital or parent–child dyad and parents' irritable, frictional behavior with their child or spouse, respectively. Tests of daily associations between conflict and parent behavior revealed robust spillover effects according to parent as well as spouse and child reports. Parents' daily negative mood and child externalizing behavior contributed to several but not all of these associations. Daily spillover findings were largely unaffected by parents' neuroticism, suggesting that parents' day‐to‐day fluctuations in negative mood, not average levels of negative affectivity, promoted spillover. Significant direct effects of conflict on parent behavior even when controlling for negative mood, however, implicate additional cognitive or social processes as contributors to conflict spillover in families.