‘IF I FEEL LIKE THIS,HOW DOES THE CHILD FEEL?’ CHILD PROTECTION WORKERS,SUPERVISION, MANAGEMENT AND ORGANISATIONAL RESPONSES TO PARENTAL VIOLENCE

This study analysed workers’ experiences of supervision following interactions with hostile and intimidating parents. This analysis examined management and organisational responses to worker stress, and assessed the adequacy of support that workers received. An online survey was designed to collect data on workers’ experiences and free text responses were qualitatively analysed for references to the supervision they received in response to working with parents. 590 participants responded to the survey. 402 were qualified social workers, and 423 worked in child protection. Participants had experienced a range of violent behaviour from parents. The overwhelming theme in responses was the lack of support and supervision workers received, often in stressful and frightening circumstances. Approximately one quarter of participants only used organisational procedures, guidelines or protocols on dealing with hostile parents. Workers reported that mismanaged parental hostility affected their practice and the quality of protection that children received. The violence experienced had a significant negative impact on their personal and professional lives. Organisational responses in the form of supervision and education were often inadequate and resulted in children receiving reduced quality of protection. Recommendations for policy and practice change are discussed, with the aim of caring for workers and the children they protect.     

Two Decades of Stability and Change in Age at First Union Formation

The landscape of union formation has been shifting; Americans are now marrying at the highest ages on record and the majority of young adults have cohabited. Yet little attention has been paid to the timing of cohabitation relative to marriage. Using the National Survey of Families and Households and 4 cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth, the authors examined the timing of marriage, cohabitation, and unions over 20 years. As the median age at first marriage has climbed, the age at cohabitation has remained stable for men and women. The changes in the timing of union formation have been similar according to race/ethnicity. The marked delay in marriage among women and men with low educational attainment has resulted in a near‐convergence in the age at first marriage according to education. The authors conclude that the rise in cohabitation has offset changes in the levels and timing of marriage     

‘Now,We Have the Same Rights as Men to Keep Our Jobs’: Gendered Perceptions of Opportunity and Obstacles in a Mexican Workplace

Drawing on extensive qualitative data at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation, this case study investigates professional employees’ perceptions of changes to a prohibitive work policy requiring women to quit working upon marriage and having children. Employees believed the policy change meant working women were valued employees, but how this translated into opportunity highlighted distinct views of the types of positions professional women could occupy at the company, reinforcing sex‐segregated job allocation. Whereas women's narratives pointed to cultural resistance, men's narratives attributed the dearth of women in higher level positions to their lack of professionalism and commitment to work. The work policy change only guaranteed the right for women to work as the company modernized to fit the neoliberal demands of the global marketplace. Now women faced the challenge of turning that right into career advancement in a traditionally masculine‐defined company. I argue that even with the policy change, gendered discourses on women in professional occupations constructed and maintained gender inequities in the workplace. This study contributes to the scholarly discussion on gendered discourses within the context of global restructuring by showing how mechanisms at work maintain gender inequity in the workplace.     

Powerful Social Studies Teaching With Poetry and Primary Sources

Given the current marginalization of the social studies within elementary classrooms it is vital that elementary educators seek integrative techniques that promote the social studies. This article explores one such example of integration taught by the authors within an elementary classroom. The three-day lesson taught to fifth-grade students aimed to teach a justice-oriented conception of citizenship through the use of historical biographies, found poetry, and primary sources. By the end of the third day, the students had used both general literacy practices (e.g. shared reading, visual literacy, close reading) and disciplinary literacy (e.g. sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating), demonstrating that integration can be a powerful means to teach the social studies while also maintaining the integrity of the disciplines.     

Play streets: women,children and the problem of urban traffic, 1930–1970

This article explores women’s participation in campaigns for urban play streets in England c.1930–1970. Concentrating on activities in ‘traditional’ terraced streets, it argues that working-class street sociability was strongly connected to children’s play and that rising levels of traffic were beginning to threaten this before the Second World War, feeding growing anxieties over the high rate of road accidents to children. One response to this from the 1930s was a series of local experiments aimed at separating traffic from children (a radical alternative to the more usual response of keeping children away from traffic) through the creation of ‘play streets’, closed to traffic for much of the day. The idea was taken up by national government and became popular in post-war decades, often due to the efforts of local women to defend the public life of their communities. The growing controversy over the introduction and maintenance of play streets from the 1960s shows women struggling to maintain traditional street sociability against the gathering power of business interests and rising car ownership in the period.     

The effects of right-to-work legislation on union outcomes: Additional evidence

The authors reexamine the role of open shop legislation in affecting union outcomes. New indices of union success are employed which include election voting behavior, the size of newly certified units, and the rate of union decertification. Three competing hypotheses are empirically tested: (1) the free rider argument predicting lower membership levels in right-to-work (RTW) areas; (2) the saturationist hypothesis predicting a higher level of organizing activity in RTW areas as a result of large concentrations of unorganized workers; and, (3) the hypothesis that legislation is vitiated by distinct organizing behaviors in RTW and nonRTW areas. Empirical results, based on SMSA data from 35 states, tend to provide support for hypotheses (2) and (3). Recently, RTW areas have experienced more prounion outcomes, and the union returns to regional attributes (measured by Chow tests) are found to be distinct in the two areas.     

The Painful Truth: Interpretation of Facial Expressions of Pain in Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is more difficult to decode facial expressions of pain in older than in younger adults. The facial expressions of 10 younger and 10 older chronic pain patients undergoing a painful diagnostic test were viewed on videotape by untrained judges. Judges estimated the severity of pain being experienced by the patients. Ratings made of the older faces during painful moments described more pain, and appeared more accurate, than those made of younger faces. Judges also reported seeing more pain in posed, masked, and baseline facial expressions in the older adults. Age-related structural changes to the face were not responsible for this bias. This suggests that judges were predisposed to see pain in the faces of the older patients, and undermines the assumption that their ratings of pain in the painful moment segments were accurate.     

The Effect of Treatment Compliance in a Placebo-controlled Trial: Regression with Unpaired Data

The causal effect of a treatment is estimated at different levels of treatment compliance, in a placebo-controlled trial on the reduction of blood pressure. The structural nested mean model makes no direct assumptions on selected treatment compliance levels and placebo prognosis but relies on the randomization assumption and a parametric form for causal effects. It can be seen as a regression model for unpaired data, where pre- and post-randomization covariables are treated differently. The causal parameters are found as solutions to estimating equations involving estimated placebo response and treatment compliance based on base-line covariates for all subjects. Our example considers a linear effect of the percentage of prescribed dose taken on achieved diastolic blood pressure reduction. We propose an exploration of structural model checks. In the example, this reveals an interaction between the causal effect of active dose taken and the base-line body weight of the patient.     

Academic parenthood: Navigating structure and culture in an elite occupation

Many contemporary workers struggle to manage paid work and family responsibilities, leading scholars to explore mechanisms contributing to conflict between these two domains. Such examinations often center on pinpointing specific factors that explain variation in work-family conflict, but these studies have less to say about how some occupational contexts create overwhelming demands for workers. In this article, I advocate for an approach that details the cultural and structural components of specific occupations. Building on scholarship about demanding jobs, I use academic parenthood as an illustrative case to demonstrate how certain occupational contexts are organized in ways that introduce challenges for caregiving. I then analyze how culture and structure jointly influence family-friendly policies in the university setting, along with comparative experiences across discipline, gender, and race/ethnicity. Next, I describe how academic parents in the face of constraints, make choices, show agency, and demonstrate resistance. I conclude by identifying promising areas for future research.