Maintaining the Gains: What Worked in the Year after Brief Family Therapy

Brief family therapy, including single session therapy, is widely used to provide a timely and responsive service for children with emotional and behavioural problems. However, there is surprisingly little information about how these children and families fare in the longer term. The brief family therapy program described here was directed toward children with problems of moderate severity. Child Behaviour Checklists (CBCL) were completed by parents before, three months after, and twelve months after therapy; 110 parents also participated in semi‐structured telephone interviews twelve months after therapy. Parents' CBCL ratings showed a significant decrease in children's problems after therapy, which were maintained over the subsequent year, although some children continued to experience difficulties. Parents generally found brief therapy a helpful experience. Ways to strengthen the preventive possibilities of brief therapy work will be identified at both a practical and conceptual level.     

Interpersonal Influences on Students' Academic and Career Decisions: The Impact of Sexual Orientation

The authors investigated differences in interpersonal influences on career decision making between gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) and heterosexual college students. Contrary to hypotheses, GLB students reported having more career role models than did heterosexual students, and the amount of inspiration received from role models did not differ between the 2 groups. However, GLB students perceived they received less support and guidance from others in their academic and career decision making. As expected, GLB students were more likely to endorse the importance of a career role model's sexual orientation and support of people with their own sexual orientation. Career intervention and research implications are discussed.     

Moving college health research forward: Reconsidering our reliance on statistical significance testing

Understanding the unique health needs of college students and establishing best practices to address them depend, heavily, on the inherent quality and contribution of the research identifying these needs. College health-focused publications currently exemplify less than ideal statistical reporting practices. Specifically, college health practitioners and researchers continue to rely heavily upon null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) as the sole standard for effectiveness, validity, and/or replicability of scientific studies, even though NHST itself was not designed for such purposes. Herein we address the following questions: (a) What is NHST? (b) What are the inherent limitations of NHST? (c) What are recommended alternatives to NHST? and (d) How can editorial policies promote adopting NHST alternatives? Using college health data from the CORE 2011 Alcohol and Drug survey, we provide a heuristic example demonstrating how effect sizes do not suffer from the same limitations as NHST.     

Estimability,testability, and connectedness in the cell means model

This article discusses the conocepts of estimation of parameters and tests of linear hyp hypotheses in the fixed effects (ANOVA) model with some zero cell frequencies. The concept of connected experiments is generalized ot he cel1-means model and relatedtotheest imation of and test of hy pothe sesa bout the cell means. A simple test for connectedness is developed as a n atur alre sult of thea nalysis of the constrai nedcell means model. The a nalysis of unconnected experimentsisbriefly discussed. Examples are presented toillustrate the ideas.     

The rhetorical construction of efficiency: Restructuring and industrial democracy in Mondragón,Spain

This paper examines the tension between the struggle to survive in a competitive economy and efforts to create more democratic workplaces in the Basque worker cooperative complex in Mondragón, Spain. Data from archival research, participant observation, and interviews are used to outline the historical context of structural change and policy-making in the complex. Language used in internal policy discussions is analyzed to explore the way in which arguments about efficiency have shaped interpretations of structural change and these organizations' policy responses. It is argued that in these cooperatives, the concept of efficiency does not operate as a neutral, objective benchmark of organizational performance, but is socially and rhetorically constructed. The predominant approach to efficiency that is emerging in Mondragón aims to make the cooperatives more competitive, but also facilitates a gradual displacement of collectively established organizational objectives such as relative equality, job security, and favorable work conditions for ones that privilege institutional interests of profitability and stability. More importantly, it has helped usher in important changes in the policy-making process itself, limiting the range of legitimate participation and weakening broad-based control over the identification of appropriate objectives and means. The paper suggests that reframing an existing rhetorical strategy to highlight more clearly the link between efficiency and any given set of objectives would stimulate a broader discussion of policy issues and help balance more effectively the diverse interests at stake in Mondragón's restructuring.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1992 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.     

Minimizing heterosexism and homophobia: constructing meaning of out campus LGB life

This work investigates how American college students make meaning of the heterosexism and homophobia they encounter in their daily lives. Through interviews and a focus group with 23 out lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) college students, analysis yielded four themes: the overwhelming majority of students minimized incidences of heterosexism and homophobia; there was a desire on the part of many respondents to develop an identity apart from, rather than integrated with, sexual identity; the campus climate was generally portrayed as positive; and some participants expressed resistance, suggesting that heterosexism and homophobia can be countered.     

Racial-Ethnic Differences in U.S. Married Women’s and Men’s Housework

Married women continue to spend more time doing housework than men and economic resources influence women’s housework more strongly than men’s. To explain this, gender theorists point to how gender figures into identities, family interactions, and societal norms and opportunity structures. The extent of this configuration varies culturally and, in the United States, by race-ethnicity because of how race-ethnicity conditions access to resources and influences gender relations within marriages. Housework levels and gender differences may be lower in Black married couples compared to other couples because of Black women’s higher historical levels of employment and consequently long-standing need to balance work and family responsibilities. Race-ethnicity also likely conditions the symbolic meaning and thus association of economic resources and housework. We use pooled time diary data from the 2003 to 2007 American Time Use Study from 26,795 married women and men to investigate how and why race-ethnicity influences housework. Our results indicate Hispanic and Asian women do more cooking and cleaning compared with White and Black women and the inverse relationship between women’s earnings and housework is steeper for Hispanic women compared with other women. We find no evidence that married Black men devote more time to housework than White men, either core or occasional, unlike earlier studies.