Pathway planning with unaccompanied young people leaving care: Biographical narratives of past,present, and future.

This article presents findings from a qualitative study with Unaccompanied Young People (UYP) who have sought asylum alone in the UK without a parent or guardian. The findings explore how UYP create biographical narratives of their past, present, and future as they prepare to leave care, suggesting that UYP who have settled immigration status create coherent biographical narratives that reconcile the past with a positive imagined future. Themes of return and reciprocity emerged in their narratives as they developed aspirations to reunite with their families and return support received in the past by succeeding in education and careers. Unaccompanied young people who did not have settled status struggled to create biographical narratives and could not imagine the future or the past. These findings have significant implications for pathway planning with UYP, suggesting the need to recognise the interconnected nature of the past, present, and future as well as the role of families and education in future plans. Pathway planning for UYP with uncertain immigration status can be complex as young people struggle to maintain a biographical narrative. Further research is necessary to support young people and professionals with these challenges.     

When Is It Okay to Exclude a Member of the Ingroup? Children's and Adolescents’ Social Reasoning

Social exclusion of those who challenge group norms was investigated by asking children and adolescents, adolescents, age 9–13 years (N = 381), to evaluate exclusion of group members who deviated from group norms. Testing predictions from social reasoning developmental theories of group‐based exclusion, children and adolescents evaluated exclusion based on group norms involving allocation of resources and group traditions about dress code. Exclusion of deviant members was viewed as increasingly wrong with age, but also varied by the type of norm the deviant challenged. Participants who reported disliking a deviant member who wanted to distribute money unequally also found it acceptable to exclude them. Those who disliked deviants who went against norms about dress codes did not think exclusion was warranted. These findings are discussed in the context of children's social‐cognitive development regarding peer rejection as well as the role played by moral judgment and group dynamics.     

Participatory research meets validated outcome measures: Tensions in the co‐production of social care evaluation

Funding for care service research is increasingly subject to the satisfaction of two requirements: public involvement and adoption of validated outcome tools. This study identifies competing paradigms within these requirements and reveals significant challenges faced by researchers who seek to satisfy them. The focus here is on a study co‐produced between academic researchers and people with experience of adult social care services. It examines to what extent research studies can conduct high‐quality public involvement and genuine co‐production of knowledge, whilst attempting to produce quantifiable outcome scores. Findings add to debate around how to incorporate diverse perspectives in research, which may draw on incommensurate accounts of validity and reliability. Findings also highlight constructive attempts by academic and co‐researchers to make the combination of approaches work in the field. These small scale acts of researcher agency indicate some scope to combine the two approaches in future research studies. However, conclusions foreground the importance of broader awareness of how tensions and power imbalances related to this combination of approaches play out in social policy research practice.     

A Preliminary Investigation of Risks for Adverse Outcomes of Relationship Seeking on Social Network Sites (SNS): A Descriptive Study of Women Over 50 Seeking Relationships on MySpace in Hillsborough County,Florida

In contrast to younger populations, little attention has been paid to the increase in seniors using Internet-based venues to find relationships and the potential risk for adverse outcomes this poses. This study examined data collected via an online survey from 45 ethnically diverse women aged 50+ “seeking relationships” on MySpace. The majority of women reported a relationship with someone they met online (85%). They also reported experiencing adverse events including financial exploitation (40%), threats (55%), and physical harm (38%) by someone they met online at levels greater than traditional relationship seeking in the general population. Directions for future research are explored.     

The effect of respondent's kinship position on reported levels of integrational contact: USA and Japan

Intergenerational relationships are a topic of general concern to social scientists because of the importance of the family for individual's well-being, especially in times of crisis. Hence, a considerable amount of research on relationships between parents and their adult children has been published in a broad array of social science journals. Most of this research examines intergenerational relationships from the perspective of only one generation and implicitly assumes that we would get the same results if we were to examine the relationships from the point of view of other family members. In societies where there are strong norms regarding kin contact, this assumption is likely to be invalid. This research examines reported levels of face-to-face contact among kin in the USA and Japan, and tests whether these reports are systematically different for respondents in some kinship positions than in others. The results show that norms favoring patrilineal contact in Japan can produce reporting bias. In Japan, married daughters tend to underreport levels of contact with their parents. In the USA, children-in-law report lower levels of visiting.     

Inter-generational effects of disability benefits: evidence from Canadian social assistance programs

Individuals with disabilities face greater challenges in the labor market than able-bodied individuals, and a growing body of research is finding that their children also tend to have more developmental problems than the children of able-bodied parents. Can transfer payments help reduce this gap? In this paper, we present the first evidence on how parental disability benefits affect the well-being of children. Using changes in real benefits under ten disability benefit programs in Canada as an identification strategy and Statistics Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) as the data source on child outcomes, we find strong evidence that higher benefits lead to improvements in children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development, as measured by math scores in standardized tests, hyperactive symptoms, and emotional anxiety behavior. The effect is larger on children with a disabled mother than on those with a disabled father.     

Gesture in Instruction: Evidence from Live and Video Lessons

Previous studies have shown that teachers’ gestures are beneficial for student learning. In this research, we investigate whether teachers’ gestures have comparable effects in face-to-face live instruction and video-based instruction. We provided sixty-three 7–10 year old students with instruction about mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 3 + 4 + 5 = __ + 5). Students were assigned to one of four experimental conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design that varied (1) instruction medium (video vs. live), and (2) instruction modality (speech vs. speech + gesture). There was no main effect of medium: The same amount of learning occurred whether instruction was done live or on video. There was a main effect of modality: Speech instruction accompanied by gesture resulted in significantly more learning and transfer than instruction conveyed through speech only. Gesture’s effect on instruction was stronger for video instruction than live instruction. These findings suggest that there may be a limit to gesture’s role in communication that results in student learning.