Young Chinese Children's Authority Concepts

Using multilevel analyses, we examined the influence of domain (moral, conventional, and personal) and the familiarity of different authority figures (mother, teacher, person in charge, and stranger) in public, school, or home settings in 123 four to seven-year-old Chinese children ( M   =  5.6 years) in Hong Kong. Children affirmed authority more for moral and conventional than personal events, based primarily on punishment avoidance and conventional justifications. Children judged that they should obey mothers more than all other authorities and the person-in charge in the associated setting and the teacher more than strangers. At school, teachers were seen as having more authority over moral and conventional events than mothers whereas at home, mothers had more authority than teachers over all issues. With age, children increasingly evaluated mothers' authority as generalizable across contexts for the moral event; reflecting the importance of familiarity, mothers were seen as having more authority to extend her regulation outside the home, including for personal events, than teachers' authority outside the school.     

Linking children's social care data to information about their care proceedings to understand the use of care proceedings and their effects on parents,children and local authorities.

Care proceedings are the most powerful child protection intervention; local authorities make applications for over 20,000 children each year in England and Wales. The Department for Education holds two administrative databases of children who receive services, for children looked after and children in need. These databases do not record the use of care proceedings. Data linkage is a powerful tool for revealing patterns not visible from a single data set; the Outcomes for children before and after care proceedings reform study linked these administrative records with a research database of care proceedings to examine children's care and service journeys associated with care proceedings. The researchers also devised a simplified method for use by local authorities with their own records and tested this with North Yorkshire County Council. Analysis of the linked data reveals how care proceedings are used and the impact of care proceedings on care demand. It provides the basis for analysis of cohorts of children subject to proceedings and feedback to social workers, children's guardians, and the judges and lawyers on their decisions and children's outcomes.     

Rapid Climate Change and Society: Assessing Responses and Thresholds

Assessing the social risks associated with climate change requires an understanding of how humans will respond because it affects how well societies will adapt. In the case of rapid or dangerous climate change, of particular interest is the potential for these responses to cross thresholds beyond which they become maladaptive. To explore the possibility of such thresholds, a series of climate change scenarios were presented to U.K. participants whose subjective responses were recorded via interviews and surveyed using Q methodology. The results indicate an initially adaptive response to climate warming followed by a shift to maladaptation as the magnitude of change increases. Beyond this threshold, trust in collective action and institutions was diminished, negatively impacting adaptive capacity. Climate cooling invoked a qualitatively different response, although this may be a product of individuals being primed for warming because it has dominated public discourse. The climate change scenarios used in this research are severe by climatological standards. In reality, the observed responses might occur at a lower rate of change. Whatever the case, analysis of subjectivity has revealed potential for maladaptive human responses, constituting a dangerous or rapid climate threshold within the social sphere.     

Values,Perceived Risks and Benefits,and Acceptability of Nuclear Energy

We examined how personal values and perceptions of risks and benefits are associated with the acceptability of nuclear energy (NE). A theoretical model is tested in which beliefs about the risks and benefits of NE mediate the relationship between values and acceptability. The results showed that egoistic values are positively related to the perceived benefits and acceptability of NE. In contrast, altruistic and biospheric values were positively related to the perceived risks of NE. Although it has been argued that NE may help to combat climate change through lower CO₂ emissions, these environmental benefits were not acknowledged by people with strong biospheric values. Furthermore, results confirmed that the more risks respondents perceived, the less they were inclined to accept NE. In contrast, the more a person believed that NE has beneficial consequences, the more acceptable NE was. Finally, as expected, perceived risks and benefits were found to partly mediate the relationship between personal values and acceptability. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.     

Teachers as risk and resource factors in minority students’ school adjustment: an integrative review of qualitative research on acculturation

ABSTRACT

The present study is embedded in the contextual approach of acculturation research. It examines teachers’ attitudes and behaviors, teachers’ expectations as well as their teaching practices as risk and resource factors in minority students’ school adjustment. The study applies the method of content analysis and uses a deductively developed and inductively enriched system of categories. The results of the study provide an integrative review of qualitative research on the role teachers play in the acculturation process of minority youth and their adjustment outcomes in the school context.     

Assisting A Concerned Person to Motivate Someone Experiencing Cybersex Into Treatment

Cybersex and Internet pornography addiction are new problem areas confronting couples and families. A most significant experience inducing family members to reach out to a therapist or an Interventionist for help with their addicted member is the realization that the individual they are living with has become a stranger. This article focuses on the changes in the attitude, emotions, and behaviors of the addicted individual from compulsive Internet pornography use and cybersex. Identifying these changes for the family members validates their experience of now living with a stranger. This article then presents the three‐level empirically based, manual‐driven method of Invitational Intervention, A Relational Intervention Sequence for Engagement (ARISE) as an effective tool for helping families to get their loved ones into treatment.     

Orderly Departure from Vietnam: Cold War Anomaly or Humanitarian Innovation?

In May 1979, UNHCR and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam signeda Memorandum of Understanding establishing a program for legalemigration from Vietnam, known as the Orderly Departure Program,or ODP. The ODP was intended to make it possible for personswishing to leave Vietnam to do so in a safe and orderly manner,rather than having to join the ranks of the Vietnamese boatpeople. It is the only time UNHCR has extended its assistanceon a large scale to help persons to leave their country of origin.Well over half a million people emigrated from Vietnam underthe auspices of the program. The existence of the ODP made itpossible for the international community to reach consensuson how to tackle problems relating to Vietnamese refugees andasylum-seekers at two major conferences, once in 1979 and anotherin 1987. This article explores the origins of the program inthe context of the Cold War and the aftermath of the Americanwithdrawal from Vietnam, attitudes within UNHCR to the program,and the contribution the ODP made to resolving the Vietnameserefugee crisis.     

Regulatory Models and the Environment: Practice, Pitfalls, and Prospects

Computational models support environmental regulatory activities by providing the regulator an ability to evaluate available knowledge, assess alternative regulations, and provide a framework to assess compliance. But all models face inherent uncertainties because human and natural systems are always more complex and heterogeneous than can be captured in a model. Here, we provide a summary discussion of the activities, findings, and recommendations of the National Research Council's Committee on Regulatory Environmental Models, a committee funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to provide guidance on the use of computational models in the regulatory process. Modeling is a difficult enterprise even outside the potentially adversarial regulatory environment. The demands grow when the regulatory requirements for accountability, transparency, public accessibility, and technical rigor are added to the challenges. Moreover, models cannot be validated (declared true) but instead should be evaluated with regard to their suitability as tools to address a specific question. The committee concluded that these characteristics make evaluation of a regulatory model more complex than simply comparing measurement data with model results. The evaluation also must balance the need for a model to be accurate with the need for a model to be reproducible, transparent, and useful for the regulatory decision at hand. Meeting these needs requires model evaluation to be applied over the "life cycle" of a regulatory model with an approach that includes different forms of peer review, uncertainty analysis, and extrapolation methods than those for nonregulatory models.