Fifteen Years of Family Group Conferencing: Coordinators Talk About Their Experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand

Family Group Conferencing (FGC) as a solution-focused strategyin child welfare has now been a mandated practice in AotearoaNew Zealand since 1989. This qualitative study examines theexperiences of Care and Protection Coordinators who have beenconvening FGC since the early years of the legislation. Thestudy explores early perceptions of the legislation, what firstattracted them to the role and what keeps them in the job. Inparticular, the study explores the practice tensions that restwithin family-centred child protection models, and the waysin which FGC practice has developed in response to modern imperatives.     

Comparing Networks Across Space and Time, Size and Species

We describe and illustrate methodology for comparing networks from diverse settings. Our empirical base consists of 42 networks from four kinds of species (humans, nonhuman primates, nonprimate mammals, and birds) and covering distinct types of relations such as influence, grooming, and agonistic encounters. The general problem is to determine whether networks are similarly structured despite their surface differences. The methodology we propose is generally applicable to the characterization and comparison of network–level social structures across multiple settings, such as different organizations, communities, or social groups, and to the examination of sources of variability in network structure. We first fit a p^* model (Wasserman and Pattison 1996) to each network to obtain estimates for effects of six structural properties on the probability of the graph. We then calculate predicted tie probabilities for each network, using both its own parameter estimates and the estimates from every other network in the collection. Comparison is based on the similarity between sets of predicted tie probabilities. We then use correspondence analysis to represent the similarities among all 42 networks and interpret the resulting configuration using information about the species and relations involved. Results show that similarities among the networks are due more to the kind of relation than to the kind of animal.     

Social choice with analytic preferences

Arrow's axioms for social welfare functions are shown to be inconsistent when the set of alternatives is the nonnegative orthant in a multidimensional Euclidean space and preferences are assumed to be either the set of analytic classical economic preferences or the set of Euclidean spatial preferences. When either of these preference domains is combined with an agenda domain consisting of compact sets with nonempty interiors, strengthened versions of the Arrovian social choice correspondence axioms are shown to be consistent. To help establish the economic possibility theorem, an ordinal version of the Analytic Continuation Principle is developed. Received: 4 July 2000/Accepted: 2 April 2001     

Relationship Dissolution as a Life Stage Transition: Effects on Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors

In this paper, with the use of linear regressions to investigate how relationship dissolution affects sexual attitudes and behaviors, the authors address the stereotype that newly single people seek multiple sexual partners. Although the newly single people surveyed did obtain new sexual partners, the rate at which they acquired new partners did not support the stereotype. Specifically, men with custody of their children seemed oriented toward finding a steady partner. Additionally, men and women with low incomes reported relatively high rates of partner acquisition after relationship dissolution. The high rates reported by disadvantaged groups may be more directly related to familial instability accompanying poverty than to cultural characteristics associated with income or race. We argue that a life stage model with categorical stages in a rigid, anachronistic progression provides insufficient means to gain an understanding of newly single people.     

Becoming American/Becoming New Yorkers: Immigrant Incorporation in a Majority Minority City1

Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nation's 31.1 million foreign born residents still lived in six states — California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. According to the 2000 census, the two largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and New York, accounted for one third of all immigrants ( http://www.census.gov/Press‐Release/www/2002/demoprofiles.html ). While immigrants moved into many new areas during the 1990s, making the challenge of incorporating their children a national issue, their concentration in our largest cities remained pronounced.     

Real Men,Real Women,Real Lives? Gender issues in learning disabilities and challenging behaviour

This article seeks to define gender issues and explores the significance of these issues for challenging behaviour in the field of learning disability. It is argued that lack of awareness about these issues contributes to the development of challenging behaviour and to difficulties in identifying the needs expressed through these behaviours, whatever their origin. Specific areas examined include models of residential provision for adults, prioritisation of service activities, attribution processes (needs identification), and the sexuality of people with learning disabilities. In each area issues are raised and the implications for service practice defined.     

The Boston Area Diary Study and the Moral Citizenship of Care

This paper describes the theoretical foundations, empirical findings, and practical and philosophical implications of the Boston Area Diary Study (BADS), a study of the caring behavior of 44 participants over one calendar year. In particular, the paper presents an identification theory of care and discusses how it shaped the conceptualization, collection, and analysis of the data in a year-long diary study of daily voluntary assistance. The findings from the BADS (1) theoretically confirm the identification theory of care; (2) methodologically capture how individuals perceive and carry out caring behavior as a unity; and (3rpar; empirically document the existence of a moral citizenship in America that is substantially more vigorous than is implied by the usual indicators of civic and political citizenship.     

LEARNING ABOUT GRIEF FROM NORMAL FAMILIES: SIDS,STILLBIRTH, AND MISCARRIAGE*

Family therapists can learn a great deal that would be of utility to them in their clinical work from normal families grieving over the death of an infant. When a baby dies, families begin a long and difficult journey, a search for security and meaning in a world that for them has gone insane. The researcher discusses 10 probing, extremely difficult questions family members commonly pose in the aftermath of an infant death and offers guidelines that could be helpful to family therapists hoping to be of service to families in the process of healing and growing through this tragedy.