Innovations in parenting support: an evaluation of the YMCA's ‘Parenting Teenagers’ initiative

This paper describes the evaluation of a three year Initiative run by the YMCA. The aim of the Initiative was to set up 30 different projects in YMCA centres in England, to provide help and support to the parents of teenagers. The Initiative was evaluated by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence. Funding was agreed for 29 projects, which included group‐based courses, ‘Dads and Lads’ projects, mediation schemes, transition evenings, and families and computing courses. A variety of outcomes from these projects are identified, both for parents, young people, project workers, and the YMCA as an organisation. Key issues and learning points from the Initiative are also identified. Finally, some general comments are made about strategies to provide support to the parents of teenagers. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Letting Go: A Mother's View

Parents whose son or daughter has a mental handicap face a difficult decision about when is the right time to 'let go'. Many are highly ambivalent, torn between their own wish to keep their son or daughter with them and their concern that he or she might need to leave home in order to develop greater independence. Making the break raises fundamental questions about relationships within the family and family members' needs for one another. This article explores these questions through the use of an interview with one mother, whose son had left home two years earlier. Some comments on the issues raised are also provided, including some recommendations for local practice.     

Strong consistency in nonlinear regression with multipucative error

Sufficient conditions are given to ensure the existence of a sequence of strongly consistent estimators of the true parameter for a nonlinear regression model naving random regressors and a multiplicative disturbance term. Special cases of this result include the least absolute value and the least squares estimation procedures.     

Management of conflict in organizations

Effective communication is the fundamental principle for managing organizations. Building effective communication should begin with improvements at the lowest level, one-to-one. Conflict in an organization is an indication of the most basic communication failure. Failure to talk with someone. Failure to notify someone of something before it becomes public. Failure to involve someone in a problem-solving process.     

Interactions of land-use history and current ecology in a recovering “urban wildland”

Despite the highly disrupted nature of abandoned industrial sites, they have significant human and ecological value. Ecological recovery at such sites is determined by complex interactions between natural factors and anthropogenic influences. Here we describe the land-use history and ecology of a former industrial wasteland. The spatial and temporal distribution of human disturbance at the study site included early farming, clay mining, brick making and landfilling, activities which have had profound and lasting ecological impacts resulting in a diverse but highly disrupted successional mosaic. Understanding the postdisturbance ecological recovery at this site has required a knowledge of natural factors such as slope, soil types and bedrock geology and hydrology, coupled with a detailed knowledge of the land-use history. Compared to recovery trajectories from many types of natural disturbance, ecological change at this site has been slower and more variable. Understanding ecological history has been crucial in projecting future changes as well as in making wise decisions about use and management practices for the site.     

Gendered Futures? Women,the ICT Workplace and Stories of the Future

This article investigates stories of the future in relation to women in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector through the development of a theoretical and methodological stance towards the future. Given concerns about the future of the ICT sector in terms of skills shortages and gender imbalances, an understanding of how female ICT professionals view this future is vital. Using data gathered from female ICT professionals in the UK, we look specifically at gendered stories about the future in relation to hybrid/bridger ICT workers, the practices of offshoring/global locating ICT work and the under‐representation of women in ICT. Such stories of the future are part of wider discourses on gender relations in late modern society, and so their examination becomes a conduit for problematizing contemporary discourse about gender, work, time and technology.     

The Multidimensionality of Presbycusis: Hearing Losses on the Content and Relational Dimensions of Speech

Presbycusis, the age associated decline in hearing and listening, has been traditionally conceptualized as the progressive inability to distinguish phonemes and hence to apprehend the content of spoken communication. Based on the distinction between the content and relational dimensions of communication, this study posed the possibility that presbycusis also involves a loss of listening ability along the relational dimension of communication. Using five measures of speech discrimination and listening, the study confirmed that aging is significantly associated with losses on the content and relational dimensions of listening. Furthermore, there are different rates of aging for these two dimensions. Whereas the loss on the content dimension is linearly related to age, the loss on the relational dimension is curvilinearly related to age with little decline in ability until a relatively drastic loss occurs in the early to mid-70s. These results indicate that the communicative impact of presbycusis is considerably greater for the old elderly than for the young elderly. Thus, this study constitutes initial evidence for a multidimensional conception of presbycusis.     

Managing Capital Market Reactions to Corporate Social Resposibility

Although overlooked to some degree by non-marketing disciplines, the discipline of marketing has contributed significantly to the body of knowledge on business strategy over the last two decades. This paper evaluates these contributions, examines how they complement dominant non-marketing theories of business strategy, and shows how marketing offers a generalized theory of competition that integrates the concepts of both marketing and non-marketing theories of business strategy.