Down Syndrome and Alzheimer’s Disease: Issues and Implications for Social Work Practice

Owing to recent medical advancements, people with Down Syndrome (DS) are now able to live considerably longer lives and thus experience a variety of complex issues as they age. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) frequently occurs in older adults who have DS, but few practice guidelines exist to inform social work practice with older adults who have this dual diagnosis. This commentary will highlight the connection between these two conditions within a neurobiological framework and discuss implications for practice based on the available literature on this intersection of ability status, cognitive status, and age.     

Characterizing Emotional Support Development: From Adolescent Best Friendships to Young Adult Romantic Relationships

This study examined development of emotional support competence within close friendships across adolescence. A sample of 184 adolescents (53% girls, 47% boys; 58% White, 29% Black, 14% other identity groups) participated in seven waves of multimethod assessments with their best friends and romantic partners from age 13 to 24. Latent change score models identified coupled predictions over time from emotional support competence to increasing friendship quality and decreasing support received from friends. Friend-rated emotional support competence in adolescence predicted supportiveness in adult romantic relationships, over and above supportiveness in adolescent romantic relationships. Teen friendships may set the stage for developing emotional support capacities that progress across time and relationships into adulthood.     

Inside the ‘efficacy gap’: Migration policy and the dynamics of encounter

In recent years, migration has become an important policy priority within and beyond the European Union. While the discourse that surrounds the contemporary migration policy agenda is one of the technocratic migration management, this overarching narrative conceals an underlying goal of prevention. Preventive efforts are increasingly geared towards stopping migratory movements before they have even begun. The effectiveness of such an approach remains contested and unclear. This article builds on the theoretical work of Czaika and de Haas (Population and Development Review, 2013, 39, 487) to explore the limits of prevention strategies designed to change minds, alter plans and redirect behaviours. It does so by drawing on insights from our own research into migration decision-making, alongside wider literature on individual sense-making, and connecting these to ongoing debates around policy effectiveness. In doing so, we show how the nature of localised encounters between ‘target’ populations and implemented policies can create potential sources of policy failure.     

Seeing a talking face matters: Infants' segmentation of continuous auditory-visual speech

Visual speech cues from a speaker's talking face aid speech segmentation in adults, but despite the importance of speech segmentation in language acquisition, little is known about the possible influence of visual speech on infants' speech segmentation. Here, to investigate whether there is facilitation of speech segmentation by visual information, two groups of English-learning 7-month-old infants were presented with continuous speech passages, one group with auditory-only (AO) speech and the other with auditory-visual (AV) speech. Additionally, the possible relation between infants' relative attention to the speaker's mouth versus eye regions and their segmentation performance was examined. Both the AO and the AV groups of infants successfully segmented words from the continuous speech stream, but segmentation performance persisted for longer for infants in the AV group. Interestingly, while AV group infants showed no significant relation between the relative amount of time spent fixating the speaker's mouth versus eyes and word segmentation, their attention to the mouth was greater than that of AO group infants, especially early in test trials. The results are discussed in relation to the possible pathways through which visual speech cues aid speech perception.     

Infant motor development predicts the dynamics of movement during sleep

The characteristics of infant sleep change over the first year. Generally, infants wake and move less at night as they grow older. However, acquisition of new motor skills leads to temporary increases in night waking and movement at night. Indeed, sleep-dependent movement at night is important for sensorimotor development. Nevertheless, little is known about how movement during sleep changes as infants accrue locomotor experience. The current study investigated whether infant sleep and movement during sleep were predicted by infants' walking experience. Seventy-eight infants wore an actigraph to measure physical activity during sleep. Parents reported when their infants first walked across a room >10 feet without stopping or falling. Infants in the midst of walking skill acquisition had worse sleep than an age-group estimate. Infants with more walk experience had more temporally sporadic movement during sleep and a steeper hourly increase in physical activity over the course of the night. Ongoing motor skill consolidation changes the characteristics of movement during sleep and may alter sleep state-dependent memory consolidation. We propose a model whereby changes in gross motor activity during night sleep reflect movement-dependent consolidation.     

Parental substance misuse and statutory child protection in England: Risk factors and outcomes

Parental substance misuse is a significant child welfare issue and associated with increased risk of child maltreatment. The aim of the present study was to understand what social care outcomes children who live with parental substance misuse have, and to assess factors associated with those social care outcomes over a two-year period. The paper reports on a retrospective longitudinal study of 299 children all living with parental substance misuse and referred to one local authority in England. Data were collected from children's social work case files about procedural social care outcomes and factors which may be associated with those outcomes. Using cluster analysis, a new typology of children's longitudinal trajectories through the children's social care system was developed, consisting of five distinct types. Analysis indicated that some children received too little intervention from children's social care despite ongoing concerns, while other children were potentially unnecessarily caught up in the social care system. Factors associated with children having the poorest outcomes were: caregiver instability resulting from substance misuse, parenting capacity and household instability. The study's findings indicate that some children who live with parental substance misuse are at significant risk of harm, but others are not and may be better supported through non-statutory services such as early help.     

Red Schools,Blue Schools? Republican and Democratic Student Groups at U.S. Colleges and Universities1

How prevalent are Republican and Democratic student groups, and why are some schools home to Republican and Democratic student groups while other schools are not? Some commentators and scholars suggest that Republican student groups may be less prevalent than Democratic student groups and, when present, will likely be found at “red schools” (rather than “blue schools”) in Republican-leaning areas of the country. However, other scholars argue that both Republican and Democratic student groups should be similar in their overall prevalence and located at a similar set of “engaged schools” (as opposed to “unengaged schools”). Analyzing our original database of Republican and Democratic student organizations across 1,953 four-year, not-for-profit U.S. colleges and universities, we first show that Republican student groups are nearly as common as Democratic student groups: Republican student groups can be found at 39% of campuses, while Democratic student groups are present on 40% of campuses. Employing binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then show that Republican and Democratic student groups tend to be located at the same types of schools, that is, larger, wealthier, public schools that offer political science majors. Our article holds significant implications for theorizing on student organization presence more generally.     

Within- and between-person associations among internalizing and externalizing problems during middle childhood

Internalizing and externalizing problems are likely to co-occur in childhood and are related to concurrent and prospective mental health outcomes. We examined the longitudinal relations among internalizing and externalizing problems during middle childhood utilizing the Random Intercept – Cross Lagged Panel Model. We investigated three research questions: (1) how overall levels of internalizing and externalizing problems are related, (2) whether internalizing and externalizing problems predict each other longitudinally, and (3) whether girls and boys show different longitudinal associations among internalizing and externalizing problems. Mother-reported internalizing and externalizing problems were used through first to sixth grade (N = 1364). Results showed positive random intercepts and positive within-time correlations of internalizing and externalizing problems. Further, internalizing problems predicted externalizing problems at the within-person level. Although previous research mostly has shown a significant effect from externalizing problems to internalizing problems, the current study shows that when within- and between-person variance are disentangled, internalizing problems also may predict externalizing problems.     

运用扎根理论分析大学生网络使用偏好及建议

本文运用扎根理论,从质上对大学生的网络使用好恶情况进行了分析。根据所搜集的数据,我们发现大学生对网络的使用情况与网络使用的积极特征——使用效率高、沟通便捷、信息收集与娱乐功能丰富等相关。当然,网络的负面影响如对身体的危害、安全隐患、可疑信息及费用等问题也不容忽视。基于此,对大学生进行媒体教育是非常必要的,可以通过开展具体的教育和培训,教给他们有效的网络使用学习模式,以帮助他们解决网络使用中的负面问题。