The Role of Social Support in the Transition From Foster Care to Emerging Adulthood

Many youth leave foster care with disrupted relationships with their family and others in their social networks. Previous research has documented the severe adversity that former foster youth face in the transition to young adulthood. Perhaps some difficulties are at least partially related to a lack of social support that results from frayed relationships. This article reviews the literature on social support, particularly as it relates to foster youth, for the purpose of examining the role that formal and informal supports play in the transition to adulthood. The implications of this literature for successful transitions for former foster youth are discussed, as well as ways child welfare workers can engage youth and their families, and help them develop supportive social networks.     

Of Roots and Wings: Letting Go of the College‐Bound Child

This article examines how parents experience the process of “letting go” of their college‐bound children. The focus of our analysis is on how the parents evaluate the meanings of their children's leaving home and adopt strategies to facilitate the process for both themselves and the departing child. Our analysis is based on interviews with thirty sets of parents. The interview materials allowed us to recognize and then parse the paradoxical task faced by parents of fostering “attached individuation” for both themselves and their children. We address four broad and persistent themes that emerged from our conversations with parents. First, we consider how parents manage the range of sometimes‐conflicting emotions generated by the letting go process. Second, we analyze the content of parents' worries as a good unobtrusive measure of how they understand the transition to college as a ritual marker in their children's lives. Third, we show how negotiations about geography—about proper distance from home—in choosing a college reflect efforts to impose a measure of gradualism into the letting go process. Fourth, we report on how parents theorize the impact of a child's departure on family relationships in general.     

Making Sense of New Orleans Flood Trauma Recovery: Ethics, Research Design, and Policy Considerations for Future Disasters

This article details the justification and plans of a research team for studying and helping evacuees of Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans to recover by encouraging experimental participants to disclose information about their related experiences in guided interview sessions. Team members' consideration and practice of ethical principles as researchers dealing with the potentially traumatized victims of a disaster are portrayed. Finally, related recommendations for researchers and policy makers are offered.     

The Tension between Mainstream Competence and Specialization in Adult Protection: An Evaluation of the Role of the Adult Protection Co-ordinator

With the implementation of No Secrets (Department of Health, 2000),the question of how far to specialize in adult protection hasbeen raised for social services departments. Related issuesinclude the extent of specialization within the vulnerable adultclient groups as well as between adult protection specialistsand other workers. This paper draws on an evaluation of therole of the adult protection co-ordinator across two local authoritysocial services departments (the case study) who share adultprotection policies, protocols and procedures but where thespecialist role has only partially been implemented and hasevolved in different ways. It identifies a number of criticalconsiderations for the local implementation of national policy,including the particular model for adult protection specialization,working relationships with district management and care management,decision making and accountability, adult protection case managementand the development of mainstream competence in adult protection.     

Immigrants' Language Skills: The Australian Experience in a Longitudinal Survey

This article is concerned with the determinants of English language proficiency (speaking, reading and writing) among immigrants. It presents a model of immigrant destination language proficiency based on economic incentives, exposure to the destination language, and efficiency in second language acquisition. A unique data set, the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia, is used to test the model. This survey had three waves, at about six months, eighteen months and three‐and‐a‐half years after immigration. The analyses are performed by wave, type of language skill and gender using probit analysis. Bivariate probit analysis is used across waves. The hypotheses are supported by the data. The bivariate probit analysis indicates a positive correlation in the unexplained component that declines with time between waves, suggesting a “regression to the mean” in the unobserved components of English language proficiency.     

Family Matters: (e)migration, familial networks and Irish women in Britain

The recent increase in transnational migration among women has lead to a reappraisal of theoretical explanations of migratory movement ( Castles and Miller, 2003 ; Fortier, 2000 ; Zulauf, 2001 ). This paper reviews a number of theoretical explanations of transnational migration and then applies these theories to a qualitative study of women who migrated from Ireland to Britain in the 1930s. I explore the women's reasons for leaving Ireland and their experiences as young economic migrants in Britain in the inter‐war years. Women have made up the majority of Irish migrants to Britain for much of the twentieth century yet the dominant stereotype of the Irish migrant has been the Mick or Paddy image ( Walter, 2001 ). Through an analysis of these twelve women's narratives of migration, I explore themes such as household strategies and familial networks. I am interested in the interwoven explanations of migration as both a form of escape ( O’Carroll, 1990 ) and a rational family strategy and, hence, the ways in which women's decision to migrate can be seen as a combination of both active agency and family obligation. Drawing on the work of Phizacklea (1999 ) as well as Walter (2001 ) and Gray (1996 , 1997 ), I will analyse the ways in which family connections may transcend migration and engage with the concept of ‘transnational family’ ( Chamberlain, 1995 ). In so doing, I raise questions about the complex nature of migration and the extent to which it could be described in terms of empowerment.     

The ecology of social networks in four urban neighborhoods

This paper re-examines the question of the social “fabric” of urban neighborhoods on the basis of residents' personal networks. Data were collected on the number, relative intimacy, and spatial distribution of social relationships among residents of two ethnically homogenous and two ethnically heterogenous neighborhoods in a medium-sized city in the midwestern United States. The analysis focused on spatial distributions and variables associated with differences in the average number or intimacy of neighborhood network ties. Herbert Gans had predicted that in heterogenous neighborhoods residential proximity would be a less important factor in social network formation than has previously been reported for socially homogeneous residential settings (especially Festinger et al. 1950). The results from this study indicated that the effects of proximity were more, rather than less, reflected in the spatial distribution of social relationships in the ethnically heterogenous neighborhoods. The face-block was identified as an important socio-spatial unit in all four neighborhoods.